HOTWIRE Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 October 2026

Who we are

HOTWIRE is made and published by Prashant Shaw, trading as Livelyyou, in India. In data-protection terms we are the controller for this app, and you can reach us at the address at the bottom of this page.

The short version

HOTWIRE has no accounts and no sign-in, and never asks for your email, phone number or real name. Your saved game lives on your device and nowhere else. That includes the player name you can give yourself and the photo you can choose for your avatar: neither is sent to us or to anyone.

Two things do leave the device. The app sends anonymous usage statistics (which levels get played, how they end, how coins are earned and spent) so we can see what to fix; you can switch that off in Settings. And the app shows ads, for which Google’s advertising system collects data of its own. Each has a section below.

What stays on your device

Your saved game is stored locally on your phone:

• Level progress, stars, and completion history
• Coins and gems, and anything bought with them
• Your player level, achievements, badges and daily missions
• Chests, free rewards and the rest of the daily rewards
• Daily Run streak and history
• What you have chosen to wear: trails, outfits, tile styles, avatars and board frames
• Your player name and your avatar photo, if you set them (see “Your name and photo” below)
• Settings (sound, haptics, reduced motion, reminders)

We never receive a copy of it. You can erase all of it at any time from Settings → Delete local data, and uninstalling the app removes it too. Because the save itself never leaves the device, we cannot recover it for you.

Usage analytics

HOTWIRE uses Google Analytics for Firebase to count how the game is used. Google processes this for us.

What is sent. A record of things that happen in the game, with no name and no account attached:

• That the app was opened, how long a session lasted, and which screen you were on (for example “level select” or “settings”)
• A level being started and how it ended: which level, win or burn, stars, how far you got
• The first-time lessons being started, and whether they were finished or skipped (and on which of the two boards)
• Coins and gems earned and spent, and what they were spent on
• Which optional ad offer you tapped, whether an ad was available, and whether you reached the day’s limit on optional ads
• That an ad was shown between boards
• The Daily Run being played, and your streak length
• A free reward or a day of the login calendar being claimed, a wire being cut in the daily pick and what kind of prize it was, and a chest being won or opened (which kind, and how it was opened)
• Reaching a new player level, claiming a daily mission (which one), finishing all three, and earning an achievement (which one)
• Earning an ad-free day, when that offer is available
• Running out of lives, and whether you waited, watched an ad or spent coins
• Being offered reminders and what you chose, and that a reminder was tapped (which kind, never what it said)
• Two rough labels about your progress (a band for how many levels you have cleared, such as “15 to 49”, and the hardest difficulty you have cleared a level on) and, while we are comparing two settings for ads or rewards, which of the two this installation was given

What comes with it. Google’s software attaches a random identifier made for this one installation of the app (it is not your name, account or phone number, and it changes if you reinstall or reset it), your device model and Android version, language, the app version, and the country and region your connection appears to come from. Your IP address is used to work out that region and is not stored with the record. Where you have allowed advertising identifiers (see Advertising below), your device’s advertising ID may be included.

What is never sent. Your saved game itself, your player name, your avatar photo, anything else you type, your contacts, files or precise location.

What it is used for. Counting how many people play each day, seeing where players get stuck or leave, and checking that the coin economy and the ads are balanced. Because the app’s ads also come from Google, Google may use this data together with its advertising services, within the limits of the ad choices described below.

How long it is kept. Records tied to the random identifier are deleted automatically after at most 14 months. Totals that no longer relate to any single installation (“4,200 people cleared level 12”) are kept.

Your controls.

• Settings → Share anonymous usage data switches it off. Nothing further is sent while it is off.
• If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, nothing is sent at all unless you agree to storage on your device in the consent prompt, and you can change that answer from Settings → Ad consent.
• Settings → Delete local data erases what the analytics software holds on your device and replaces the random identifier with a new one, so nothing sent afterwards can be connected to what was sent before.

Google’s description of how it handles this data: policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Your name and photo

You can give yourself a player name and choose a picture for your avatar. Both are optional, and the game works the same without them.

• The name is whatever you type, up to a few words. Until you type one the game makes up a callsign for you from a random number.
• The photo is one picture you pick with Android’s own photo picker. The app is handed that single picture and nothing else: it does not ask for permission to read your photos and cannot browse them. It keeps a small trimmed copy inside the app’s own storage and does not keep the original.

Both stay on your device. They are not sent to us, to Google or to anyone else, and they are not part of the usage statistics above. Settings → Delete local data erases them, and so does uninstalling the app. The app does not use your camera or your microphone.

Advertising

HOTWIRE shows ads supplied by Google AdMob, and offers optional rewarded ads you can choose to watch in exchange for something in the game: an extra life, coins, a daily reward, a chest opened sooner, or a short boost.

To serve and measure those ads, Google may collect and process:

• Your device’s advertising ID
• IP address and approximate (non-precise) location derived from it
• Device information: model, operating system version, language, screen
• Ad interactions: which ads were shown, viewed, or tapped

Google acts as an independent data controller for this. Their handling of it is described here:

• Google Privacy Policy: policies.google.com/privacy
• How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services: policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

Your controls. If you are in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or a US state with an applicable privacy law, you are asked for your choice the first time you play, and you can change it at any time from Settings → Ad consent. On any device, you can reset or delete your advertising ID, or turn off ad personalisation entirely, from your Android system settings: look for Ads, under Privacy or under Google, depending on your Android version.

Network connections

Besides ads and the usage analytics above, the app makes exactly two kinds of request, and neither one sends anything about you.

A connectivity check. It periodically fetches a small response from www.gstatic.com (Google) or cloudflare-dns.com (Cloudflare). This does two things: it tells the game whether it is online, and the timestamp in the reply gives it a trustworthy clock, which is what keeps the life timer and the Daily Run honest against a device clock that has been changed.

A settings file from us. It fetches https://livelyyou.fit/games/hotwire/ad-config.json, a small public file that controls how often ads are shown. This lets us make the game less ad-heavy without shipping an update. It is a plain download of a fixed file: no identifier, no account, nothing about your device or your play is included in the request, and nothing is sent back.

Those services, and our own web host, will see your IP address, as they would for any web request. We store nothing from them.

Notifications

If you turn on reminders, they are scheduled by your phone, on your phone. The app simply asks Android to raise a notification at a certain time. Nothing is sent from us to you: there is no server behind it, no push service, and no notification token. The app cannot receive a push message even in principle, because the permission that would allow it is removed from the build. Turning reminders off in Settings cancels all of them.

Rating the app

Now and then, right after you finish a level well, the app may ask the Google Play app on your phone to show its standard “rate this app” dialog. The dialog belongs to Google Play. If you leave a rating or review there, it goes to Google Play under Google’s privacy policy and appears on the store listing like any other Play review. HOTWIRE is never told whether you rated it or what you wrote, and is not even told whether the dialog appeared. The only thing the app remembers is when it last asked, on your device, so that it does not ask again too soon.

What we do not do

To be explicit, HOTWIRE contains:

• No crash or performance reporting
• No accounts, logins, email collection, or cloud saves
• No in-app purchases
• No push messaging
• No social media SDKs, and no sharing of anything without your action
• No access to your contacts, files, microphone, camera or precise location, and no access to your photo library: a picture you choose for your avatar is handed to the app by Android’s own picker, one picture at a time

Exactly two pieces of third-party software in the app collect any data, and both are Google’s: the Mobile Ads SDK and Google Analytics for Firebase, each described above. The rest of what the app is built from (the game engine, renderer, storage, notification scheduling and the rating prompt) collects nothing and talks to no one; the rating prompt only hands off to the Google Play app already on your phone.

Sharing your results

The share button on the Daily Run’s result makes a picture of your run: the board’s shape lit by how much of it you cleared (never the route you took), your stars, lead and streak, and a link to the game. The picture is drawn on your phone, kept in the app’s own cache there, and handed to your phone’s own share sheet. The tier-complete screen’s share button hands over a block of text in the same way. What happens next is entirely up to you and the app you pick. Nothing is shared unless you press the button, nothing about you is in either (no name, no photo, no identifier), and we never receive a copy.

Children

HOTWIRE is a general-audience puzzle game. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided personal information through this app, contact us at the address below and we will act on it.

Your rights

We hold nothing with your name on it. The usage statistics are tied only to a random identifier that lives on your device, which we cannot look up from a name, an email or a phone number, so the practical way to exercise deletion is the one that works without us: Settings → Delete local data resets that identifier, and Settings → Share anonymous usage data stops anything further being sent. Records already sent cannot be picked out on request, because nothing in them says whose they are: not to us, and after a reset not to your own device either. They expire on the schedule given under “Usage analytics”. Data held by Google in connection with ads is subject to Google’s own policy and controls, linked above, and to the ad-consent settings described there.

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland. Usage analytics run only with your consent, given through the prompt described above and withdrawable at any time from Settings → Ad consent or by switching usage data off in Settings. Where personalised ads are shown, the legal basis is likewise your consent; withdrawing it does not stop the game working, you simply see non-personalised ads instead. Where ads are non-personalised, the basis is our legitimate interest in funding a free game and in preventing ad fraud. You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or object to processing, and the right to data portability. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority.

If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law. We do not sell your personal information for money. Showing personalised ads does count as “sharing” for cross-context behavioural advertising under some of these laws. You can opt out by declining personalisation at the prompt, or later from Settings → Ad consent, or by turning off ad personalisation in your Android system settings.

Where your data goes. Google processes ad data and usage analytics on servers outside your country, including in the United States, under the safeguards set out in Google’s own privacy policy linked above. We run no servers of our own that receive anything from the app.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this address with a new date at the top. Material changes affecting how ads work will also be reflected in the app’s consent prompt.

Contact

Questions about this policy: livelyyou.fit@gmail.com