Sortline — Privacy Policy
Sortline is a single-player puzzle game published by DBS Games. It has no accounts, no sign-in, no chat, no friend list and no user profiles.
Sortline is free to play. It is paid for by advertising and by optional in-app purchases. Both involve Google, and both are described below. Nothing in the game has to be bought: every level and every booster can be reached by playing.
What Sortline stores on your device
Your progress lives in a file in the app's own storage directory: levels completed, stars, coins, booster counts, your settings, your advertising-consent choice, your daily-reward streak, a record of which in-app products you have bought and the Google Play order identifiers for them, and a random identifier the game generates on your device the first time it runs so it can tell one save apart from another.
That random identifier is not your name, your account or your advertising ID. It is never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to go.
That file never leaves the device. Sortline has no server of its own to send it to, and it is deleted when you uninstall the game. It is stored in the app-specific directory Android reserves for Sortline. On Android 11 and newer the system prevents other apps from reading it. On the older versions Sortline still supports, an app that you had granted broad storage access to could in principle read it; it holds game progress and settings, and nothing that identifies you personally.
Advertising
Sortline shows ads supplied by Google AdMob. There are two kinds, and they behave differently:
- Rewarded video — always optional. You are offered a reward, you choose whether to watch,
- and nothing is taken from you if you decline. Sortline never plays one on its own.
- Interstitial — a full-screen ad between levels. It never interrupts a level in progress,
- never appears before level 4, never appears in the opening minutes of your first session, and
- is limited to a few per session.
To select and measure those ads, Google receives your device's advertising ID, along with the coarse technical information an ad request carries — device type, operating-system version, approximate location derived from your IP address, and whether an ad was shown, viewed or clicked. Sortline itself never sees or stores that identifier.
Google's handling of this data is described in Google's Privacy Policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy) and How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services (https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites).
Your choice about personalised ads
Where the law requires it — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — Sortline shows Google's consent form the first time you open the game, before any ad is requested and before the advertising ID is read. Your answer is remembered.
- If you consent, ads may be personalised.
- If you decline, ads are non-personalised: they are still shown, but they are not selected
- using a profile of you.
- Until you answer, Sortline treats you as having declined.
You can change your mind at any time. Settings → Privacy options reopens the same form. That entry point appears only where a consent choice applies to you.
You can also reset or delete the advertising ID itself in Android's own settings, under Settings → Privacy → Ads, which applies to every app on your device rather than only this one.
Paying to remove ads
The shop offers Remove Ads, a one-off purchase that permanently stops the full-screen ads that appear between levels. Buying it means the app stops requesting those ads at all.
It deliberately does not disable the optional rewarded videos, because those are never shown unless you choose to watch one in exchange for a booster — removing them would take away a way to earn something, not an interruption. Buying Remove Ads does not change what the advertising identifier is used for while a rewarded video is watched; that is described above, and applies only when you choose to watch one.
Purchases
Sortline's shop sells six optional items. Three are coin packs, one is a pack of boosters, one is a starter pack offered at most twice, and one removes full-screen ads permanently. Everything they contain can also be earned by playing; nothing is exclusive to paying.
Sortline never sees your payment details. Every purchase is taken by Google Play, which handles the payment entirely. Sortline never receives, and never stores, your card number, bank details, name, billing address or email address. Google's handling of that information is covered by the Google Privacy Policy.
What Sortline is told, and keeps on your device only, is:
- which product you bought, so the coins, boosters or ad-free entitlement can be given to
- you; and
- the order identifier Google Play issues for the transaction, so that the same purchase
- can never be granted twice — if a purchase is delivered again after a crash or a lost
- connection, the stored identifier is what recognises it as already honoured.
That record is kept in the app's own private storage alongside the rest of your save. It is not transmitted anywhere, and uninstalling the app deletes it. Because Remove Ads and the starter pack are permanent, Restore Purchases in the shop asks Google Play what this account already owns and reinstates it — that is how a purchase survives a reinstall or a new device.
Sortline contains no loot boxes and no paid randomised rewards. Every product states exactly what it contains before you buy it, and the price shown is the price Google Play charges, in your own currency.
Refunds are handled by Google Play, under Google Play's refund policy, not by DBS Games. You can request one through the Google Play Store or at play.google.com.
Analytics
Sortline sends no analytics anywhere.
The game does record gameplay events internally — levels started and finished, boosters used, ads offered — but in version 1.0.0 there is nowhere for them to go. No analytics or crash-reporting library is included in the build, no reporting destination is configured, and the events are held in a small fixed-size buffer in memory that discards the oldest as it fills. They are never written to a file and never leave the device, and they are gone when you close the game.
If that ever changes, this policy will be updated before the version that changes it is published.
Permissions
Sortline requests:
- INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE — to load ads and to ask Google whether a consent
- form applies to you. The game itself is fully playable offline; only advertising needs a
- connection.
- AD_ID — the permission Android requires of any app whose SDKs read the advertising ID.
- VIBRATE — the short taps you feel when pieces land, and only if you leave haptics on in
- Settings.
- POST_NOTIFICATIONS — to remind you that your daily reward is ready, and only if you allow
- it. The reminders are scheduled and shown by your device. Declining disables the reminders and
- nothing else.
The Google advertising and billing libraries add a few more to the manifest, and they are listed here because a permission the app holds should not be a surprise to anyone who reads it:
- ACCESS_ADSERVICES_AD_ID, ACCESS_ADSERVICES_ATTRIBUTION, ACCESS_ADSERVICES_TOPICS —
- Android's Privacy Sandbox interfaces, declared by the ad library. They concern the same
- advertising identifier and ad measurement described above and nothing else.
- WAKE_LOCK and FOREGROUND_SERVICE — declared by the scheduling library the ad SDK
- depends on. Sortline starts no foreground service and holds no wake lock of its own.
- com.android.vending.BILLING — declared by Google Play's billing library. It is what lets
- the app ask Google Play to take a payment and to tell it what you already own. It gives the
- app no access to your payment details, which Google Play handles and never shares.
None of these shows a prompt, and none grants access to anything about you beyond what this policy already describes.
Sortline does not request location, contacts, camera, microphone, storage or phone state.
Children
Sortline is suitable for all ages and is not directed at children. It contains no chat and no user-generated content. It does contain advertising and optional purchases, which is why it is not enrolled in a families programme and why the game is not marked as directed at children. Sortline does not knowingly collect personal information from children.
Sortline offers in-app purchases, so it is worth saying plainly how spending is controlled: every purchase is taken by Google Play and is subject to whatever authentication and parental controls are set on that Google account and device. Sortline cannot take a payment by itself and never sees payment details. Google Play's family controls and purchase-approval settings, and its refund process, are the route for a purchase made by a child.
Your rights
DBS Games holds no data about you on any server, so there is nothing held by us for you to request, correct or have deleted. Uninstalling the app removes everything Sortline has stored.
If you are in a region with a statutory right of access, correction, deletion or portability — the EEA, the UK, California or elsewhere — you may still exercise it by writing to dbsgamesstudio@gmail.com. The honest answer in almost every case will be that we hold nothing about you, and we will say so.
For the advertising data Google receives, your rights are exercised through Google: withdraw consent using Settings → Privacy options in the game, and reset or delete your advertising ID in Android's settings. Google's privacy policy explains how to make a request directly to Google.
Changes to this policy
If a future version collects anything this document does not describe, the document will be updated and the "last updated" date above changed before that version is published.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about anything the game does with your data:
DBS Games — dbsgamesstudio@gmail.com
We read every message sent to that address. It is also the support address shown on the app's Google Play listing.