Last Updated: September 30, 2026
This policy covers one game: Broadside, 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 voyage sailed, doubloon earned, upgrade bought and coat of paint chosen is written to storage on the device and stays there. The doubloons 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 permissions are 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 gameplay 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 six separate stores:
- Your voyage history — the most recent hundred finished voyages.
- Lifetime totals: voyages sailed, doubloons earned, creatures sunk and voyages won, and whether you have seen the how-to-play card.
- Your progress on the sea chart: your best haul and stars on each of the twenty-five voyages, how far along the chart you have cleared, which voyages' goals you have met and where you found every doubloon, and your best round-the-world trip.
- Which medals you have earned.
- Your ship: the doubloons in your purse, the Shipwright upgrades you have bought, the paint you own and the paint on your hull, sails and flag, and the day you last opened the Shipwright's treasure chest.
- Your settings: sound effects, music, vibration, left-handed controls, "Broadside to the rescue" and how rough you want the seas.
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 six stores permanently, so the game starts again from the first voyage with an empty purse, no medals and its default settings. It also resets the analytics identifier described below, so later usage counts start afresh with no connection to the old ones. There is no account to delete, because the game never had one. Gameplay statistics and crash reports already sent to Google stay with Google until they expire; they carry no name, email address or account. Deleting the game does the same thing to the records on the device.
What the game does send
Three 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. There is no sign-in of any kind, anonymous or otherwise, and no user identifier is attached to anything the game sends.
On iPhone and iPad, the first two do not happen at all: the iOS game has no analytics or crash-reporting service configured, so neither ever starts there, and the only thing it sends besides advertising is the update check. The gameplay analytics and crash reports below are sent by the Android game only.
Gameplay analytics (Android)
The game reports what happens in it to Google Analytics for Firebase: how long the game took to start; a voyage starting and ending, with the doubloons earned, creatures sunk, hearts lost, how long it took, how it ended and whether it was won; a new best on a voyage; a voyage unlocked or a medal earned; the how-to-play card being closed; an upgrade or a coat of paint bought with in-game doubloons; the doubling offer being shown, taken and paid out; the Shipwright's chest being opened; the privacy policy being opened; and which screen is open. The only label attached to the player is which kind of build they are running. 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 voyage, a medal or an item from the game's own fixed catalog. We use it to see which voyages are too hard, which go unplayed and what the doubloons are spent on, and for nothing else.
It is set up for children, like the advertising. Analytics is told never to collect the advertising ID, and consent for advertising storage, advertising user data and ad personalization is off from the moment the game starts. Google signals and ad personalization are switched off for the game's analytics property. Analytics runs only in the release build; the builds we use during development report nothing.
Crash and diagnostic reports (Android)
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 which kind of build it is. No user identifier is attached. This is how bugs get found. Crash reporting is switched off entirely in the 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.
The store's rating prompt
After you clear a new voyage the game may ask the App Store or Google Play to show its own rating prompt. Apple and Google decide whether it appears, and the game is never told whether it did or what you chose.
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 four placements and that is the entire inventory:
- A banner on the menu screens — the title screen, the sea chart, the Shipwright, the Logbook and Settings.
- A full-screen advertisement at the break after a voyage that reached its boss, shown as you leave the voyage summary. It is described below.
- 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 doubloons, offered in the two places described below.
There is never an advertisement during a voyage, and none on the sea 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 advertisement between voyages
When a voyage reaches its boss — whether you sink the boss or the boss sinks you — leaving the summary afterwards may show one full-screen advertisement. It is never shown during play, never over the summary itself and never when the game opens. It is shown at most once every 90 seconds, counting any video you chose to watch; never after the first voyage each time the game is opened; and never straight after a summary where you have just watched a video for doubloons. A round-the-world run counts as one voyage, so there is none between its legs. It gives nothing and takes nothing away.
The optional advertisements, and what they give
The Settings entry reads "Watch an ad to help out". It gives you nothing — no doubloons, no upgrades and no advantage of any kind. It exists only for players who want to help, and declining it costs nothing.
The video for doubloons appears in exactly two places: on the voyage summary, as an offer to double the doubloons that voyage earned, and in the Shipwright, as a treasure chest of doubloons that can be opened once a day. Both only ever add. The doubloons from a voyage are already in your purse before the offer is shown, so saying no never leaves you with less than you earned. A voyage that earned nothing gets no offer, and the offer is made once per voyage. If the video fails to load on the summary, that counts as a no rather than asking again; if it fails at the chest, the chest simply stays shut for you to try later.
Nothing in the game is locked behind an advertisement. The only way to open the next voyage is to clear the one before it. The doubloons buy upgrades and paint 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 permissions are removed from the app. The Google Mobile Ads SDK declares them by default; this app strips both 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. Broadside 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 user identifier, sign-in or anonymous account attached to its analytics or crash reports.
- No real-money rewards, no cash-out and no payouts. The doubloons 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
Broadside is rated 9+, because firing cannonballs at cartoon sea creatures 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, analytics is barred from advertising use and carries no user identifier, 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 our website 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.