Privacy Policy - Backword

1. Introduction

Backword is a single-player word puzzle game for iPhone developed by Gregory Epstein ("we," "us," or "our"). This policy explains what information the app handles, how it is used, and the limited circumstances in which it leaves your device.

Backword is designed around a simple principle: the app should not need to know anything personal about you in order to work. There are no accounts, no sign-in, and no servers operated by us. The game itself runs entirely on your iPhone. The exceptions are limited, anonymous diagnostics and product-usage telemetry described in Section 2 - used only to fix bugs and improve the game, never tied to your identity.

2. Information We Collect

Backword does not collect, request, or transmit any personally identifying information. Specifically, we do not ask for or receive your name, email address, phone number, mailing address, contacts, photos, camera or microphone access, precise or coarse location, health data, motion data, calendar, reminders, or device identifiers used for advertising. The app does not require a user account.

Information stored only on your device

The following lives inside the app's private storage sandbox on your iPhone and is used solely to make the game work:

• Game progress and history. Your in-progress daily puzzles and a log of the puzzles you have solved. Each completed entry records the difficulty (Easy, Medium, or Hard), the time you solved it (a timestamp from your device's clock), the five-letter target word for that puzzle, and a flag noting whether the puzzle was solved by you typing the answer or revealed via a paid Solution Peek. This information powers the Stats screen (current streak, total solved, perfect days).
• App preferences. Your selections for dark mode, the "Show Errors" toggle, and the "Keyboard Hints" toggle.
• Purchase state. A local record of which one-time in-app purchases you have unlocked, and - for daily "Solution Peek" purchases - the calendar date on which you unlocked each difficulty's peek. This local record is used to determine what the app should show you; the authoritative record of any purchase you make is held by Apple.
• Anonymous analytics identifier. A random UUID generated by the app on first launch and stored locally. This identifier is never linked to your name, email, Apple ID, or any other personal information - it exists only to let our aggregated dashboards distinguish "this device sent two events" from "two different devices each sent one event." The identifier is hashed on your device (SHA-256, with a salt) before any signal is sent off your device.
• Puzzle Creator drafts. If you use the optional Puzzle Creator feature, the letters you have typed into the in-progress board are saved locally so the draft survives closing the app, and synced across your Apple devices via iCloud (see the next subsection). Puzzle Creator content is never sent to Sentry, TelemetryDeck, or any other third party.

Information sent off your device (anonymous diagnostics)

The app sends two limited streams of data to third-party services to help us diagnose problems and understand how the game is used in aggregate. Neither stream identifies you personally.

• Crash, error, and performance diagnostics are sent to Sentry (sentry.io). These include stack traces; performance traces (the timing of in-app operations such as launching the app, navigating between screens, and generating a puzzle); JavaScript CPU profile samples taken during those operations (function names from our own code, used to identify what was running when the app was slow); the iOS version and device model (auto-collected by Sentry's SDK); and brief technical context attached at the point of error (for example, "this error happened in the in-app purchase flow"). They do not include your name, email, Apple ID, location, or content you have typed into the Puzzle Creator. We do not attach a user identifier to Sentry events.
• Anonymous gameplay telemetry is sent to TelemetryDeck (telemetrydeck.com) as discrete signals describing what happened in the app - for example: app opened, puzzle started, puzzle solved, paywall viewed, purchase completed, streak extended or broken. The signal payloads include game context (difficulty, time taken to solve, number of hint rows filled, product ID for purchases, streak length) and, for completed daily puzzles, the five-letter words that filled the solved board so we can analyze vocabulary patterns and calibrate puzzle difficulty. These signals are associated only with the anonymous hashed identifier described above - they are not connected to your name, Apple ID, or any other personal identifier, and they cannot be used to reach you or to follow you across other apps and websites.

The content of any puzzle you create yourself in the Puzzle Creator is never transmitted in either of these streams.

Information synced to your other Apple devices via iCloud

Backword uses Apple's iCloud Key-Value Storage to keep a small set of your locally-stored data in sync across the other iPhones and iPads signed into the same Apple ID. The data that syncs:

• App preferences (dark mode, the "Show Errors" toggle, the "Keyboard Hints" toggle)
• Game progress (in-progress daily puzzles and your completion history)
• Perfect-day confetti state (so the daily celebration fires once per calendar day across your devices, not once per device)
• Solution-peek unlock dates (so a paid same-day unlock on one device automatically applies on your other devices for that day)
• Puzzle Creator drafts (so an in-progress puzzle you are authoring on one device is available to continue on another)

We do not see, store, or transmit this data ourselves. Apple's iCloud framework handles the storage and synchronization. The data is protected by your Apple ID's standard iCloud security and is governed by Apple's privacy policy (apple.com/legal/privacy). If you are signed out of iCloud or have disabled iCloud sync for Backword in iOS Settings, this data stays on your device only.

The anonymous diagnostics described in the preceding subsection (Sentry crash reports and TelemetryDeck gameplay signals) do not travel through this iCloud sync - those streams go directly from your device to Sentry and TelemetryDeck as described above.

3. How We Use Information

The locally-stored information described in Section 2 is used only to run the game on your device: to show your stats, resume your in-progress puzzle, remember your preferences, gate features you have purchased, and keep your authoring draft alive between sessions. It is not used for advertising, profiling, marketing, or any purpose other than gameplay.

The anonymous diagnostics described in Section 2 are used to:

• Fix bugs, crashes, and performance problems. Crash, error, and performance reports tell us when and where the app breaks or stalls so we can ship updates that resolve real-world failures and improve responsiveness.
• Improve the game design. Aggregated gameplay signals tell us how puzzles are being used - which difficulties feel too easy or too hard, where players typically give up, which vocabulary patterns are common, and whether the in-app purchase flow is working correctly.

We do not use this information for advertising, profiling, marketing, or any purpose unrelated to fixing bugs and improving the game.

4. Sharing of Information

We do not sell, rent, share, or disclose your information to any third party for advertising, marketing, or any other commercial purpose.

The app transmits data off your device in four specific, limited ways:

• Anonymous crash, error, and performance reports are processed by Sentry on our behalf, per Sentry's privacy policy (sentry.io/privacy/).
• Anonymous gameplay telemetry is processed by TelemetryDeck on our behalf, per TelemetryDeck's privacy policy (telemetrydeck.com/privacy/).
• In-app purchases are processed by Apple through the App Store. Apple - not us - handles the payment, billing, and any associated personal or financial data per Apple's own privacy policy. We never see or store your payment details. From the App Store, we receive only an indication that a given product is or is not unlocked for your Apple ID.
• iCloud Key-Value Storage synchronizes the small set of preferences and game progress described in Section 2 across your other Apple devices signed into the same Apple ID. Apple - not us - handles the storage and synchronization per Apple's privacy policy (apple.com/legal/privacy). We never see or receive a copy of this data.

We do not share information with any other third party.

5. Third-Party Services

Backword is built with Expo and React Native and uses standard Apple and Expo platform components. The third parties the app interacts with at runtime are:

• Apple, via:
  • The App Store / StoreKit, to process in-app purchases (see Section 4).
  • iCloud Key-Value Storage, to sync the small set of preferences and game progress described in Section 2 across your Apple devices. We don't see or store this data - Apple handles it under Apple's own privacy policy (apple.com/legal/privacy).
  • iOS system services such as fonts, the keyboard, the share sheet, and (if you tap a link to our Terms or this Privacy Policy from the in-app paywall) the system browser. These are standard iOS facilities, not data-collection components added by us.
• Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.), for anonymous crash, error, and performance reporting. See sentry.io/privacy/.
• TelemetryDeck (TelemetryDeck UG), for anonymous gameplay analytics. See telemetrydeck.com/privacy/.

We do not embed advertising networks, social-media SDKs, or tracking technologies designed to follow you across other apps and websites.

The web fonts used by the app (Libre Franklin and Roboto Slab) are bundled inside the app binary, not fetched from the network at runtime.

6. Data Retention

Information described in the "stored only on your device" subsection of Section 2 lives on your iPhone. It remains there until you delete the relevant data through the app's settings, reset device-level storage, or uninstall Backword - at which point iOS removes the app's sandbox and the information is gone.

Anonymous crash, error, performance reports, and gameplay signals sent to Sentry and TelemetryDeck are retained by those services according to their own retention practices, which you can review in their privacy policies linked in Section 4. Because these signals are not tied to your name, email, Apple ID, or any other personal identifier, there is no record on those services that personally identifies you.

Records of in-app purchases are retained by Apple according to Apple's own retention practices.

We do not maintain any user database of our own.

7. Security

Information stored locally by Backword sits inside the app's private storage area on your iPhone, which iOS isolates from other apps using its standard sandboxing protections.

Data the app sends off your device (anonymous crash, error, performance reports, and gameplay signals) is transmitted over HTTPS using the encryption built into iOS's standard networking stack, so it is not exposed to interception in transit. On the third-party side, Sentry and TelemetryDeck are responsible for the security of their own infrastructure under their respective privacy policies.

No security model is perfect. We recommend keeping your device's operating system up to date and using a device passcode or biometric lock for additional protection.

8. Your Rights and Choices

You can:

• Toggle preferences at any time from the Settings dialog inside the app.
• Restore prior in-app purchases on a new device or after reinstalling, using the "Restore Purchases" link on the Backword paywall. This action queries Apple for the purchases associated with your Apple ID.
• Erase all Backword data on your device by deleting the app. iOS removes the app's storage when you uninstall, which also removes the anonymous analytics identifier.
• Manage subscriptions and purchases through your Apple ID's subscription and purchase-history settings. Backword has no subscriptions, only one-time purchases.

Because the anonymous diagnostics described in Section 2 are not tied to your identity, we cannot connect a stream of crash reports or gameplay signals back to a specific person. Requests to access, correct, export, or delete personal data we hold are therefore not applicable in the conventional sense - there is no personally identified record on our side to act on. If a privacy law in your jurisdiction (for example, the EU GDPR or the California CCPA) gives you rights that would otherwise be exercised against a data controller, those rights are effectively satisfied by the anonymous-by-design model described above. If you would nonetheless like a record of anonymous data sent from your device to be discarded, please contact us at the address in Section 11; while we cannot guarantee the ability to isolate signals from a specific device (because we cannot identify them), we will do our best to assist.

9. Children's Privacy

Backword is a general-audience word game. It does not knowingly collect any personally identifying information from anyone, including children under the age of 13 (or the equivalent age of digital consent in your jurisdiction). The anonymous diagnostics described in Section 2 do not include name, email, location, or contact information - so even if a child uses the app, no personal data about them is collected or transmitted.

If you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child has somehow provided information through the app that you would like reviewed, please contact us at the address in Section 11.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time - for example, if a future version of the app adds a feature that changes how data is handled. When we do, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this document and post the revised policy at the URL where you found this one. If a change materially expands what information the app handles or how it is used, we will make a reasonable effort to highlight the change in-app or in the App Store release notes.

11. Contact Information

If you have questions about this policy or about Backword's handling of information, please contact: