Effective date: June 2025 · Contact: omerblecher@gmail.com
State the States is an educational geography game designed for a general audience, including children aged 8 and up. Players learn U.S. geography by dragging state tokens onto an interactive map of the United States. This policy explains what (very little) data the app stores and how it is handled.
📵No Personal Information Collected
We do not collect, transmit, store on any server, or share any personal information from any user — including children. The app has no accounts, no login, no user profiles, and no way to identify who is playing.
Gameplay is fully offline. An internet connection is only used to load ads; no personal data is transmitted as part of that process.
📱What Is Stored On Your Device
A small amount of data is saved locally on your device using Android's SharedPreferences. This data never leaves your device:
- Best scores — your lowest (best) golf score for each game mode, stored so the home screen can display your personal best.
- Audio preference — whether sound effects are muted or on.
- Tutorial seen flag — a single true/false value so the first-launch tutorial does not repeat on subsequent launches.
- Session snapshot — a temporary save of an in-progress game (mode, score, elapsed time, states placed) so you can resume if the app is closed mid-game. Cleared automatically when a game is completed or abandoned.
None of this data is linked to a person, a device identifier, or any account.
📢Advertising
State the States displays non-personalized, child-directed ads through Google AdMob and its mediation partners (Unity Ads, ironSource, InMobi). All advertising is configured in strict compliance with COPPA and the Google Play Families Policy:
- Child-directed treatment is always enabled —
tagForChildDirectedTreatment = trueis set on AdMob and on every mediation SDK before any ad is requested. - Maximum content rating G/PG — ads are capped at the lowest available content rating and will never show mature, violent, or age-inappropriate content.
- No personalized advertising — the Android Advertising ID (
AD_ID) permission is blocked at the manifest level. Ads are served without any user profiling or behavioral targeting. - Placement — ads appear as a banner on the home screen and as a brief interstitial on game completion screens. Ads never interrupt active gameplay.
- Rewarded ads — players may optionally watch a rewarded ad to refill hint tokens. This is always voluntary and never required to progress.
Google's privacy policy for AdMob applies to ad serving: policies.google.com/privacy.
📊Analytics & Crash Reporting
State the States does not use Firebase Analytics, Google Analytics, or any third-party analytics SDK. No usage data, session data, or event data is transmitted to any server.
Basic crash and stability information is available to the developer through Android Vitals in Google Play Console. This is a built-in platform service that does not require any SDK in the app and does not collect personal information.
👶Children's Privacy (COPPA)
State the States is designed to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Google Play Families Policy.
- No personal information is knowingly collected from children under 13.
- No persistent device identifiers are used.
- No social features, chat, or user-generated content.
- No links to external websites from within the gameplay area.
- No in-app purchases requiring parental consent.
If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided any personal information through this app, please contact us at omerblecher@gmail.com and we will address it promptly. (In practice, this is not possible given the app's design, but we take the concern seriously.)
🗑️Deleting Your Data
All data is stored locally on your device. You can remove it at any time by:
- Android Settings → Apps → State the States → Storage → Clear Data
- Or simply uninstalling the app
There is no server-side data associated with your use of the app, so no remote deletion request is necessary.
🔄Changes to This Policy
If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this URL with a revised effective date. We will not reduce your privacy protections without prominent notice.