Last Updated: September 25, 2026
This policy covers one game: Bramble Knight, on iPhone, iPad and Android. Our other apps are covered by the general Illumination Development privacy policy, which does not apply here. That policy describes accounts, email addresses, reward balances and redemption records that this game does not have.
The short version
There is no account and nothing for sale. The game never learns who is playing. Every level cleared, coin earned, sword bought and seed planted is written to storage on the device and stays there. The coins in the game buy things in the game and are worth nothing anywhere else.
Every advertisement is non-personalized, for every player, in every country. The game does not ask for Apple's advertising identifier, and on Android the advertising-ID permission is stripped out of the app entirely.
There is one advertising network, Google AdMob, and no other. It is described in full below, along with the anonymous game telemetry, the crash reports and the update check the game sends.
What stays on the device
Everything you play. The game keeps its records in local storage on the device, in seven separate stores:
- Your run history — the most recent hundred finished runs.
- Lifetime totals: runs played, coins earned, creatures defeated and levels cleared, and whether you have seen the how-to-play card.
- Your best haul on each of the fifty levels, how far up the ladder you have cleared, and which levels you have finished without a scratch or with every coin found.
- Which badges you have earned.
- Your knight: the coins in your purse, the upgrades and gear you have bought, what you are wearing and holding, how your knight looks, and the day you last opened the armoury chest.
- Your grove — the seeds you have found and what is growing in each plot.
- Your sound setting.
None of it is transmitted anywhere. There is no leaderboard, no cloud save and no profile. If the device backs itself up to iCloud or to Google, that copy is governed by Apple's or Google's terms and your own backup settings, and we have no access to it.
Delete my data in Settings erases all seven stores permanently, clears the analytics identifiers described below, and deletes the anonymous account the game uses for telemetry, replacing it with a new one that has no connection to the old. Deleting the game does the same thing to the records on the device.
What the game does send
Four things leave the device besides advertising, and this is all of them. None is linked to a real-world identity, because the game never collects one.
An anonymous identifier
On first launch the game signs in anonymously to Google Firebase. This produces a random identifier — not a name, not an email address, not a phone number, and nothing you typed — which exists so that a player's crash reports and gameplay statistics have a stable key from one session to the next. There is no password, nothing to sign up for, and no way to use it to find out who anyone is. Delete my data deletes it.
Gameplay analytics
The game reports what happens in it to Google Analytics: a level starting and ending, with the coins earned, creatures defeated, hearts lost, how long it took and how it ended; a new best on a level; a level unlocked or a badge earned; an upgrade or a piece of gear bought with in-game coins, and gear put on; the coin-doubling offer being shown, taken and paid out; the armoury chest being opened; the privacy policy being opened; how long the game took to start; and which screen is open. Alongside those, Google Analytics collects its own app-instance identifier and coarse device information such as the model, the operating system version and the app version.
No free text ever reaches analytics, because the game has nowhere to type any. Every value reported is a number, a yes or no, or the name of a level, a badge or an item from the game's own fixed catalog. We use it to see which levels are too hard, which go unplayed and what the coins are spent on, and for nothing else.
Crash and diagnostic reports
If the game crashes or hits a handled error, Google Crashlytics sends a report: the stack trace, the app version, the device model and operating system, and the anonymous identifier above. This is how bugs get found. Crash reporting is switched off entirely in the debug builds we use during development.
A check for updates
The game can receive small fixes to its own code without a new store download, using a service called Shorebird. When the game starts it asks Shorebird's servers whether a fix is waiting. According to Shorebird's documentation, that request carries the game's identifier, its version and the number of the fix it already has, the device's platform and processor type, and a random install identifier Shorebird uses to count how many copies of the game are in use. It carries nothing about the player and nothing about how the game has been played. Like any request over the internet it reaches Shorebird from the device's IP address, and Shorebird's handling of it is governed by Shorebird's own privacy policy.
Advertising
The game is free and carries advertising, all of it from Google AdMob. There is no other advertising network in the app. There are three placements and that is the entire inventory:
- A banner on the menu screens — the title screen, the level ladder, the armoury, the knight's wardrobe, the grove, the stats page and Settings.
- One full-screen advertisement that only ever appears if you tap a button in Settings asking to see one.
- One short video you can choose to watch for extra in-game coins, offered in the two places described below.
There is never an advertisement during a level, and none on the playfield at all.
To serve these advertisements, the Google Mobile Ads SDK contacts Google and may collect device and advertising information — device signals, coarse device and app data, and the request, impression and click itself. Google's use of it is governed by Google's own privacy policy.
The optional advertisements, and what they give
The Settings entry reads "Watch an ad to help out". It gives you nothing — no coins, no gear and no advantage of any kind. It exists only for players who want to help, and declining it costs nothing.
The video for coins appears in exactly two places: after a level, as an offer to double the coins that run earned, and in the armoury, as a chest of coins that can be opened once a day. Both only ever add. The coins from a run are already in your purse before the offer is shown, so saying no never leaves you with less than you earned. The decline button is the same size as the accept button. A run that earned nothing gets no offer, the offer is made once per run, and an advertisement that fails to load counts as a no rather than asking again.
Nothing in the game is locked behind an advertisement. The only way to open the next level is to clear the one before it. The coins buy upgrades, weapons and armour inside the game; they cannot be bought, cashed out or exchanged for anything outside it.
There is nothing to buy: no in-app purchases of any kind are on sale, and no purchase screen is reachable.
Every advertisement is non-personalized
This is the part that differs from most free games, and it is deliberate. The app sets three things on every Google request before the first advertisement is ever asked for:
- Child-directed treatment, which tells Google to treat the audience as children and forbids personalization.
- A maximum content rating of "G", so the creatives shown are the ones Google rates suitable for general audiences.
- Non-personalized ads, set explicitly on every request as well, so that a configuration failure cannot quietly turn personalization back on.
On Android the advertising-ID permission is removed from the app. The Google Mobile Ads SDK declares it by default; this app strips it back out, so the advertising ID cannot be read at all rather than merely going unused.
There is no tracking prompt, and that is the point
On iPhone and iPad, most free games show Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt asking for permission to track you. Bramble Knight does not. The permission is not built into the app, there is no usage description for it in the app's configuration, and nothing in the game requests Apple's Identifier for Advertisers. Because it never asks, it never receives it, and there is nothing for anyone to decline.
If you go looking for this game under iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, you will not find an entry for it. That is correct and not a fault.
In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland
Google's consent message is shown before any advertisement is requested, gathering consent for the storing of and access to information on the device as Google's EU user consent policy requires. The request is flagged as coming from a user below the age of consent for data processing, so the choices offered are the reduced set appropriate to that.
You can change your answer at any time — Settings → Ad privacy options reopens the same choices. That entry appears only where a consent regime applies, which is why players elsewhere will not see it.
Consenting does not turn on personalized advertising here. It cannot: the child-directed setting above overrides it, and the game asks for non-personalized advertisements regardless of the answer. What you are actually deciding is whether information may be stored on and read from your device. Your decision is stored on your device by Google's consent SDK and is removed when the game is deleted.
What the game does not do
- No account, sign-in, username, profile or email address. It never asks who you are.
- No real-money rewards, no cash-out and no payouts. The coins in the game are worth nothing outside it.
- No in-app purchases, nothing for sale, and no way to spend money.
- No contact or support form. There is no way to send us text from inside the game.
- No text field of any kind, anywhere.
- No chat, no voice, no leaderboard and no user-generated content.
- No multiplayer of any kind, and no way to reach another person through the game.
- No location, and no location permission is requested.
- No access to contacts, photos, camera, microphone, health or motion data.
- No advertising identifier requested on iPhone or iPad, and none readable on Android.
- No personalized advertising, for anyone, anywhere.
- No advertising network other than Google AdMob.
- We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, in the specific senses the CCPA and CPRA give those terms.
Children
Bramble Knight is rated 9+ on the App Store, because defeating cartoon creatures with a sword and a bow is the heart of the game. It is not in Apple's Kids Category, and we would rather say so than claim a badge it does not carry.
It is built to the child-directed standard anyway, because young children are among the players it is made for, and that is the protection that actually matters. Every advertising request is flagged child-directed and capped at the "G" content rating, no advertising identifier is requested or readable, no advertisement is ever personalized, nothing in the game is locked behind an advertisement, there is nothing to buy, and there is no way for a player to type anything or to reach a stranger.
The general Illumination Development policy states that our services are not intended for children under 13. That statement is about our reward apps and does not apply to this game, which is why this page exists.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, and the game collects no personal information from anyone. If you believe a child has somehow provided us with personal information through this game, write to privacy@illuminationdevelopment.com and we will delete it.
Your rights
Under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the CCPA and CPRA, and comparable laws elsewhere, you have rights to access, correct, port and delete the personal information a company holds about you. We hold no name, email address or other real-world identifier from this game, so most of those rights have nothing here to be exercised against — and you can exercise the deletion right yourself, immediately and without asking us, using Delete my data in Settings.
Two things sit outside that. Information held by Google from serving advertisements, running analytics and receiving crash reports, and by Shorebird from the update check, which is subject to Google's privacy policy and Shorebird's and the controls described above. And anything you have sent us by email, which you can have deleted by writing to privacy@illuminationdevelopment.com.
A note about this web page
The game does not display this page — tapping Privacy Policy in Settings opens it in the device's browser, and this website, unlike the game, does use Google Analytics to see which pages people find useful. That is described in the general policy, and it applies to your visit to this page, not to your use of the game.
Changes to this policy
If any of this stops being true, this page changes before the version that changes it reaches either store, and the App Store privacy label and Google Play Data safety form change with it. Revisions are posted here with an updated date.
Contact
Email: privacy@illuminationdevelopment.com
You can also reach us through our contact and support page.