Privacy

Hemiscope is a set of eight daily puzzle games — Hemiscope, Vault, Odd One Out, Ladder, Pinpoint, Atlas, Timeline and No Idea — plus live races, Survival and tournaments in the Hemiscope iOS app, playable free at hemiscope.com and in the app. The short version: you can play everything without an account, and if you make one, it holds your name, your results, your stars and items, and your friends list, and you can delete it from inside the app.

The app and the website differ in how they handle ads and analytics, so they are described separately below. The website’s ads may be personalised; the app’s are only if you allow tracking when it asks.

The iOS app

On your device, always

Your in-progress games, completed daily results, stats and streaks, your chosen explorer, and your “don’t show this again” preferences are stored on your device using the system’s own app storage. Without an account, that is where they stay, and they are deleted with the app.

Play statistics

The app reports which puzzle, race or tournament was started, finished or shared, which screen was open, and whether an ad filled, to hemiscope.com. Each report carries a random install identifier and a random session identifier, both generated on your device and neither derived from anything about you or your phone. Without an account they belong to no one.

With an account, from version 1.8 the app also tells us which install is yours, so we can see your play alongside your account: to answer a question you send us, look into a problem, or see how the games are played. A Duel race does the same for the seven days it is kept. Earlier versions linked the two only through a race. No IP address is kept, only a two-letter country code. These records are deleted after 180 days. Turning off Play stats in the app’s Settings stops the reports.

Updates, surveys and feedback

The app’s Updates board asks hemiscope.com for our latest posts, with the random install identifier while Play stats is on (so a post meant for your device reaches it). Answers you send to a survey or a feedback card are kept with that identifier, and your handle if you are signed in. Collecting a gift records your account and install, so each gift is collected once. Nothing is sent until you tap Send or Collect.

Crash and error reports

If the app crashes or hits an error, it sends a report to Sentry, the service we use to find and fix bugs: what went wrong and where in our code, the app version, the iPhone model and iOS version, and the screens and taps just before it. Reports carry no name, email, account or IP address, and are deleted within 90 days.

Leaderboards

Everyone who plays in the app appears on the leaderboards, signed in or not. The first time the app opens, hemiscope.com gives it a leaderboard player: a random identifier of its own (never the install identifier above), a secret that only your phone keeps, and a generated name such as “explorer123456”. Your daily puzzle scores, Duel wins, longest Survival run and Expedition stamps are sent against it, by day, with the explorer you play as. If you sign in, it is linked to your account and shows your handle instead, and the scores you made before signing in stay with you. A signed-in account’s daily scores, which the app already saves to the account, appear on the leaderboards under its handle too, from whichever version of the app sent them. You can leave the global leaderboards at any time with “Show me on leaderboards” in Settings; your friends still see you.

Accounts — optional

Signing in is only needed to add friends, duel them, enter tournaments, and pick your own name on the leaderboard. The daily puzzles never ask for it, and nothing you have already played is lost if you never sign in.

Sign in with Apple is the only way in, and Apple decides what it passes on. We store what it sends: a subject identifier that is unique to this app, and an email address — which is Apple’s private relay address rather than your real one if you chose “Hide My Email”. We never see your Apple ID password, and the app never asks for one.

Once you have an account, we also store:

• Your profile — the handle you claim, the display name you set, your explorer, and the banner, card frame, title and medals you choose to show on your player card.
• Your stars and items — how many stars you have earned and spent, and the explorers, banners, frames, titles and emotes you own. Real-money purchases — Remove Ads and the star packs — go through Apple. We keep whether ads are off for your account; for each star pack, Apple’s transaction reference, which pack it was, and the price and currency Apple charged, so a purchase is credited exactly once; and any codes you have redeemed, so a code can’t be redeemed twice.
• Your stats — per game: games played, games won, current and best streak, and the last day you played.
• Your daily results — for each day and game: your score, whether you won, or whether you skipped it. This is what lets a friend see how your day went, which is the point of having friends in the app.
• Your friends list — who you have added, who has asked to add you, and who you have blocked.
• Reports you file — who you reported and the reason you typed. Reports are read only by us, and are never shown to the person reported.
• Duels you play — the room code, the seed the questions are dealt from, and how well each player answered each round. Duels are deleted seven days after they are created. A race invite you send a friend is kept for a day.
• Tournaments you enter — which tournaments you joined, the entry fee you paid, how well and how fast you answered each question, where you finished, and the stars and items you won. Other entrants see your player card and your score in the standings. Kept until you delete your account.
• A push token — only if you turn on tournament alerts or race invites: the identifier Apple gives this device for notifications, so we can tell it a tournament is about to start or a friend wants to race. Deleted when Apple tells us the device is gone, and with your account if you delete it. The daily reminder is a local notification: it is scheduled on your phone and nothing about it is sent to us.

Your handle is public. It is how friends find you, and it appears on the leaderboard and on an invite page at hemiscope.com, so pick one you don’t mind being seen. Your display name is shown to people you duel, to everyone in a tournament you enter, and to friends. Your email address is never shown to anyone.

Deleting your account

Open the account sheet in the app and tap Delete account. It removes the account itself and, with it, your profile, handle, stats, daily results, stars and items, tournament entries, push tokens, friendships and any reports you filed. It cannot be undone, and there is no copy kept. The link between your account and your install goes with it; the play statistics themselves are kept against the install only, and age out on their own after 180 days.

Advertising

The app shows Google AdMob banners on the screen you see once a puzzle is finished — never during play. AdMob receives your device’s IP address, general device and app information, and a coarse location derived from that IP address. Unless you allow tracking (below), AdMob never gets your device’s advertising identifier and can’t follow you across other companies’ apps and websites with it; it chooses ads from the app, the screen, your rough location and what its own policy allows. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google’s consent message (shown once) decides whether ads may be personalised. (Version 1.8 and earlier also ask Google for non-personalised ads only whenever tracking is off; later versions don’t.) From version 1.8, AppLovin may also bid, through AdMob, to fill a full-screen ad; it receives the same kind of information and follows the same consent and tracking choices. Google’s own handling of what it receives is covered by its policy for partner sites and apps.

The tracking prompt

Once, shortly after the app first opens, it asks with Apple’s standard App Tracking Transparency prompt whether you allow tracking. It is never shown during a game. If you allow it, AdMob may read your device’s advertising identifier (IDFA) and use it to show you personalised ads, chosen with what Google knows about your activity in other apps and websites. If you don’t, the identifier isn’t available to anything in the app, and ads are chosen without it, as described above. Either way the puzzles, stars and everything else work exactly the same. You can change your answer at any time under iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. The app’s own play statistics never use the advertising identifier.

Versions before 1.8 used the same prompt for a different purpose: they included TikTok’s Business SDK, which with your permission read the advertising identifier to measure our TikTok ads. Version 1.8 removes that SDK, and nothing in the app sends anything to TikTok.

Advertising measurement

From version 1.8 the app includes Google Analytics for Firebase, so that our own ads for Hemiscope on Google can be measured: it tells Google when the app is opened for the first time after it was installed, how often it is used, and what the ads shown in it earned. Reports carry a random identifier Firebase creates for this install, general device and app information, and a coarse location Google derives from your IP address; never your name, email or account. If you allowed tracking (above), they may also carry the advertising identifier, which lets Google match an install to the ad that led to it.

For our ads on AppLovin’s network, the app also includes Tenjin, a measurement service, which records the install, when the app is opened, the first daily puzzle you finish, what each ad shown to you earned, and any purchase (the product and its price), with a random identifier, general device information and your IP address, and the advertising identifier only if you allowed tracking. Turning off Play stats in the app’s Settings stops both Firebase’s and Tenjin’s reports.

Everything else the app fetches

Images: country flags from flagcdn.com, and the Ladder photographs from upload.wikimedia.org. These carry no identifier and no information about you or your game. As with loading any image on the internet, those servers see the request and your IP address.

Tapping a link to hemiscope.com — for photo credits, for example — opens your browser, at which point the website section below applies.

The website

The website has no accounts and no sign-in. Everything here is about the browser you are reading this in.

What we store on your device

The site keeps your in-progress guesses, completed daily-game state, aggregate stats (games played, win streak, guess and score distributions), and a flag for whether you’ve turned off each game’s intro — all in your browser’s localStorage. This record stays on your device; a finished puzzle’s score is also reported as an event, described under Analytics below. You can wipe it with the “Reset all data” button in the Stats panel, or by clearing site data in your browser.

Analytics

• Vercel Web Analytics — cookieless visitor counts. Does not identify individuals or set tracking cookies.
• Vercel Speed Insights — page-load and interactivity metrics from real visits. No personal data is collected.
• Google Analytics 4 — visit counts, and an event when you finish or share a puzzle (which game, the puzzle number and your score), under Google Analytics’ own random cookie identifier. We do not link visit data to any identity. Vercel Analytics receives the same finish events, without a cookie.
• Sentry — reports of errors on our pages and servers: what went wrong, the page, and the browser and device type. No name, email or IP address, deleted within 90 days.
• Our own play statistics — the same records described under the app above, under the same kind of random identifier, kept for the same 180 days. No IP address is kept, only a country code. Browsers that send “Do Not Track” are left out entirely.

The survey

After you finish a daily puzzle on a second day of play, the site may ask a short, optional survey: how often you play, what you play on, your favourite game, the other games you enjoy, how easy the site is to navigate, and anything you’d like to tell us. If you answer, we keep your answers with the device type (phone, tablet or desktop), its operating system and browser, your approximate location (country, region and city, worked out from your connection by our host, Vercel) and the same random identifier as the play statistics, so we can see answers beside what was played. Browsers that send “Do Not Track” answer without the identifier. No name, email or IP address is kept, and answers are deleted after a year. Your browser remembers that you answered, or asked us to wait, so it isn’t asked again.

Advertising

The website uses Google AdSense. Google and its partners may use cookies and identifiers to serve ads based on your prior visits to this site or others. You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings. We also run a Google Ads conversion tag to measure whether our own advertising works.

If you’d rather not be profiled for ads, turn personalised ads off in Google Ads Settings, use a tracker blocker — or play in the iOS app and decline its tracking prompt, and its ads never use your advertising identifier.

Cookies

Hemiscope itself sets no cookies. Google Analytics (_ga), the Google Ads conversion tag (_gcl_au) and Google AdSense set their own cookies under their own privacy practices. Vercel Analytics is cookieless.

The Alldle badge

The “Play on Alldle” badge in the footer is an image loaded from alldle.net, a directory of daily games that lists Hemiscope. Loading it means your browser asks alldle.net for it, which shows them your IP address and the page you are on, as any image from another site does. We send them nothing else.

Fonts

Type is set in Smooch Sans, Space Grotesk, Figtree and IBM Plex Mono. These are Google Fonts, but they are downloaded at build time and served from hemiscope.com — your browser makes no request to Google to load them.

What we never collect, anywhere

• No password — Apple handles signing in, and we never see a credential.
• No payment information — every puzzle is free, and purchases go through Apple, who never shows us a card.
• No contacts, photos, or device sensors, and no location from the device itself. Ad networks infer a coarse location from your IP address, as described above.
• No tracking you didn’t agree to. The advertising identifier is read only if you allow it in the tracking prompt: by AdMob (and, from 1.8, AppLovin through it) for personalised ads, and from 1.8 by Google Analytics for Firebase and Tenjin, to measure our own ads. Nothing of ours builds a profile of you. (The website’s ads can be personalised too — see its Advertising section.)

Children

Hemiscope is a general-audience game and does not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you are under 13, play the daily puzzles without an account — they work exactly the same. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us at the address below and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page if our practices change. It was rewritten when the app started showing ads, again when accounts, friends and duels arrived, again when TikTok ad measurement did, again for stars, tournaments and push alerts, again when TikTok ad measurement was removed, and again when the tracking prompt came back for AdMob’s personalised ads, and again when AppLovin, Google Analytics for Firebase and Tenjin were added — what it says above is exactly what the current release does.

Contact

Questions about this policy, requests to delete an account you can no longer sign in to, and reports about another player can all be sent to support@kyrogamestudios.com. Hemiscope is made by Kyro Game Studios.

Last updated 3 November 2026.