Privacy Policy

The short version

You play without giving us your real name, email or phone number. Your account is a number, a player name and an avatar.
No ads. No tracking. There are no advertising, analytics or crash-reporting companies inside the app.
We never sell your data and never share it with anyone for advertising.
We don't ask for your location, contacts, photos, camera or microphone.
There's no chat. Nobody in ViralVote can send you a message.
Your birth month and year never leave your phone.
You can delete your account at any time, in the app or on the web.

1. Who we are

ViralVote is a game made and run by Ravid Rinek, an individual in Israel. In this policy, "we" and "us" mean Ravid Rinek. We decide how your information is used, so under data protection law we are the "controller" (in Israel, the "database controller").

Questions about your privacy, or requests about your data: support@viralvoteapp.com. You can write in English or Hebrew.

This policy covers the ViralVote app on Android and iPhone, and this website.

2. What we collect, and why

You don't have to give us any of this by law. But without the basics (an account and your races) the game can't work.

Your account

What	Why
An account number we create when you first open the app	To keep your progress
Your player name. We give you one; you can pick your own	So other players can see who they're racing
Your avatar, built from pieces we provide	Your look in the game
A recovery code we create for your account	So you can get your account back on a new phone. Anyone who has your code can restore your account, so keep it private
Sign-in keys, kept in your phone's secure storage and on our server	To keep you signed in without a password

Playing the game

What	Why
The races you play: when, against whom, your answers, your points and your place	To run races, score them and show your history
How long you take to answer, in milliseconds	To catch bots and speed-tapping. It looks at how fast and how evenly you tap, never at which answer you picked
A trust score worked out from how you answer, and a weight for each opinion vote (from your trust score, how old your account is, how much you play and how recent the vote is; never from which answer you picked, your age or your interests)	So the crowd pick that scores opinion questions reflects real picks, not speed-tapping. No one, including you, is shown these numbers, and they never change your points or your place
Your opinion votes, in races, surveys and Bonus Rounds	To work out the crowd pick. Nobody else sees how you voted
Your rank points, levels, streak, coins, power-ups, items, trophies and league results	To give you what you earned and show your progress
How good we think you are at each topic, worked out from whether your answers were right and how hard the questions were (not from how fast you answered)	To pick your race's level, its questions and its computer-run opponents. Nothing else: never ads, never prices
Which questions you've seen, missed and beaten	So questions don't repeat too soon, and a missed one can come back
Topics you tell us you like (optional)	To suggest leagues to you. Nothing else
Where you stood in each league each day and after each race, and who was just above you	For your "rival" line, "you passed Dana" moments and your recaps
Your group in each league round and when you raced in it	To seat you in a group and show you its table
Your bell: a list inside the game of what happened in your leagues and your own progress. Each item keeps what happened, which league or race, the account numbers of the players it's about (never their names) and when you saw it	So you can catch up in one tap. Nobody is told whether you looked
After a Discover race, whether that league suited you (if you say)	To decide which leagues Discover offers next
Your ratings of a race or a question (thumbs up or down, and what was wrong, if you say)	To fix or remove bad questions. Nobody else in the game sees them
Simple usage events, such as "a race finished" or "the bell was opened", linked to your account and kept in our own database	To see what works and what doesn't. No outside analytics company is involved

Being straight about it: the answer timing, the trust score and the vote weight exist to keep cheating out, and the topic estimate exists to give you races you can win. They are the only things we work out about how you play. None is used for advertising, and none is shared with anyone.

Friends leagues

What	Why
The friends leagues you make or join, the name you give a league, and who let each member in	To run the league, and so we can act on a report about a name
Requests to join a league you sent or received	So the league's owner can say yes or no
Whether you have the app open, and one "last seen" time that is replaced each time you open it	So members of your friends leagues can see you're around and race you. We keep no list of when you were online
Players you've blocked	So you're never matched with them and don't see their name

Things you send us

A TV show request, if you ask us to add a show. We keep it without your account number attached.
Reports about a player or something in the game, and what we did about them.
Emails you send to support.

Technical information

Your IP address is used only in memory while we handle a request, for example to block too many requests from one place. We don't store it and don't write it to our logs.
Server logs record which request was made, how long it took and whether it failed, without your IP address.
No crash reports. There is no crash-reporting tool in the app.

Installing from one of our links (Android)

If you install ViralVote from a link on our website, Google Play hands the app a short note from that link: the league invite code, if the link had one, and labels saying which campaign the link came from (for example, "invite" or "whatsapp"). The app reads it once, on first launch. After you've passed the age question, it fills in the invite for you and records the campaign labels in one usage event. The note has nothing about you in it. Links on iPhone don't carry this note.

What we never collect

No advertising ID and no device ID of any kind.
No location, precise or approximate.
No contacts, calendar, photos, camera, microphone, files, texts or list of your other apps.
No browsing history, and no tracking you across other apps or websites.
No advertising, analytics or crash-reporting companies inside the app.
No messages: there is no chat, no comments and no text on invites or requests.
No real name, email or phone number, unless you email us.

The one outside library in the Android app that talks to anything is Google's Play Age Signals, which lets Google Play tell the app whether your Google account belongs to a minor, so we can apply the right protections. We don't send Google anything about how you play. The iPhone app has no outside libraries of this kind.

3. Why we're allowed to use it

To run the game you asked to play (our agreement with you, the Terms of Service): your account, races, leagues, items, the bell.
Our legitimate interests, balanced against yours: catching cheats, weighting votes, keeping the service secure, handling reports, and learning from usage events how to make the game better.
Your choice, for optional things like the topics you like or a rating. You can just skip them.
The law, when it requires us to keep or hand over something.

We don't sell your information and never will. We don't share it with anyone for advertising, marketing or profiling.

What other players see

Your player name, avatar and points are seen by the players in your races and on the league tables you're in. That's the only thing about you that people you haven't met can see, which is why we give you a made-up name to start with.
The player just below you on a table sees your name and your lead as their "rival". It's your row on the same table, shown in one more place.
Official leagues run in rounds, in groups of up to 50 racers. Many seats are house players: racers we run, not people. When a round ends, players who finished near you can see your name and points on their results screen.
Members of a friends league with you can open your player card (name, avatar, rank, race record, the leagues you share, your trophies), see whether you're online and when you were last on, and see items in their bell about what you did in that league. The owner of a league you asked to join sees your request.
If you block someone, or they block you, these things are hidden between you.

Companies that help us run ViralVote

Our hosting provider, which runs our servers and database.
Our email provider, for the support inbox.
Google (Firebase Hosting), which hosts this website (see section 11).

They may use your information only to provide their service to us.

Others who see something

Picture hosts. Many pictures in the game load straight from public image sites such as Wikimedia Commons and The Movie Database (TMDB). When your phone loads one, that site sees your IP address, as it would if you opened the picture in a browser. We send them nothing about you.
Google and Apple run the app stores you download from. Google Play answers the age check described above.
When the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety, we may disclose information to the authorities.
If ViralVote moves to a company that Ravid Rinek sets up, or is sold, your information moves with it under this policy. We'll tell you first.

5. How long we keep it

A scheduled job deletes data on this timetable. We may delete sooner; we never keep it longer.

What	How long
Your account: player name, avatar, recovery code, rank points, levels, coins, power-ups, items, streak, trophies and results, topics you like, your topic estimate and question history, your trust score, your friends leagues, the players you blocked	Until you delete your account
Sign-in keys on our server	30 days after you last use them, or straight away when you sign out
Your answers in races and how long you took to answer	90 days
Your opinion votes and their weights	90 days
The answers behind your topic estimate	90 days
Where you stood in each league each day	90 days
The record of races you played (who raced, places, points)	13 months
League tables and your group in each league round	13 months after the round ends
Other players' places and points on your results screens	30 days after the round ends
Items in your bell	30 days (a league's results item: 14 days)
Your "last seen" time	One time only, replaced each time you open the app
Whether you have the app open right now	Not stored
Requests to join a league	30 days after they're answered
Your ratings of races and questions	13 months
Whether a Discover league suited you	Until you delete your account
Usage events	90 days
Reports and what we did about them	2 years after the report is closed
TV show requests (no account attached)	30 days
Server logs	30 days
Emails to support	2 years after our last reply. An email asking us to delete your account is deleted within 30 days after we've done it; we keep only a note of the date
On your phone: your birth month and year	Until your first race starts

Question statistics. We keep counts about questions, such as how often each one is answered correctly and the weighted total behind each opinion answer, for as long as the question exists. They contain no account number and can't be traced to anyone, so they are not about you and are not deleted with your data.

6. Deleting your account

In the app: Profile → Support & Legal → Delete account. It happens straight away.

Without the app: see viralvoteapp.com/delete-account.

Deleting your account erases your player name, avatar, recovery code, sign-in keys, answers and votes, trust score, points, levels, coins, items, streak, trophies and results, topics, topic estimate and question history, ratings, usage events, bell, league places and friends leagues.

A few things stay, because they're part of other people's games or because we need them:

Races you played stay in the other players' history, with "Deleted player" instead of your name and picture, until they're deleted at 13 months. They are still linked to each other by an internal number, so we keep treating them as personal data under this policy.
Other players' results screens keep your points (no name) for up to 30 days after a round ends.
A friends league you made doesn't close. It passes to another member and keeps its name. If the name includes your own name, rename it first.
If we upheld a report about you, we keep that record for 2 years, to stop people coming back after a ban.
Question statistics, which aren't about you (section 5).

Your friends aren't told you left. You simply stop being in their leagues.

7. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

show you what we hold about you, and send you a copy;
correct it;
delete it (section 6), all of it or just some of it;
stop or limit how we use it, or object to a use based on our legitimate interests.

Email support@viralvoteapp.com. We reply within 30 days, sooner where your local law requires it. Because accounts have no email or name attached, we may ask you for your recovery code to be sure the account is yours.

We don't make decisions about you by computer alone that have legal or similarly serious effects. A person reviews any suspension or ban, and you can ask us to look again (see the Community Standards).

A friendship in a league is one fact about two people. If you ask for a copy of your data, we won't tell you anything about another player that the game doesn't already show you.

You can also complain to a data protection authority: in Israel, the Privacy Protection Authority; in the EU, the authority in your country. We'd like the chance to fix it first.

8. Teens and children

You must be 13 or older to play. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If we learn we have, we delete it.

We ask for your birth month and year before you play. The check happens on your phone and the answer is never sent to us. If you're 13 or over, your phone keeps the month and year until your first race starts (so you can go back and fix them), then deletes them. They're never in your phone's backups. After that, nothing about your age is stored anywhere. If the answer is under 13, the account made when you opened the app is deleted, the app stops, and the only thing left on the phone is a marker saying the phone is blocked, with no date, age or ID attached.

For everyone under 18, these protections are always on:

No advertising of any kind. We show no ads at all.
No selling or sharing of your information.
No profiling for ads, prices or anything outside the game.
No chat and no messages. Nobody can send you a sentence.
Nobody can search for you by name. People can join your friends league only with a code you share, and only if you say yes.
No phone notifications. The bell is a list inside the game; nothing from it reaches your phone when the game is closed, and it never tells you that you haven't played.

Parents and guardians: email support@viralvoteapp.com to ask what we hold about your child or to have it deleted. We'll act on it.

9. Security

Everything between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
Sign-in keys on your phone are kept in its secure storage (Android Keystore or the iPhone Keychain).
Only the people who run ViralVote can access our database.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we'll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

10. Where your information is stored

We run ViralVote from Israel. The European Commission recognises Israel as protecting personal data adequately. Our servers are run by a cloud hosting provider, and your information may be stored in the European Union or the United States. Whenever it goes to a country that doesn't have that recognition, we use the safeguards the law requires, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

11. This website

This website uses no cookies, no analytics and no trackers. Its fonts are stored on the site itself, and it makes no calls to other companies. It is hosted by Google's Firebase Hosting, which logs visitors' IP addresses to deliver the pages and keep them secure, as described in Firebase's privacy page and Google's privacy policy.

An invite link opens our join page. The page reads the invite code inside your browser and never sends it to us. If you tap the Google Play button, the code and the campaign labels go to Google Play inside that link, so the app can fill in the invite after you install it (section 2).

12. Changes to this policy

If we make a big change, we'll tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top shows when this policy last changed.

13. Contact

Ravid Rinek, ViralVote · support@viralvoteapp.com