Privacy policy
Ballot Box does not collect any data about you. It has no account system, no servers, and no code that sends anything anywhere. Your career is saved as one small file on your own phone, and that is the only place it exists.
Who we are
Ballot Box is made and published by Vibalyze OÜ. Because the app collects no personal data, we are not the controller of any personal data through it. You can reach us at vibalyze@zohomail.eu.
What we collect
Nothing. The app contains no analytics service, no advertising libraries, no crash reporting service, no in-app purchase libraries and no social or sign-in integrations. It does not ask for your email address, your contacts, your location, your photos, your microphone or your camera. It does not read your advertising identifier or any other device identifier.
The app has no networking code of its own. On Android its manifest does
not request the INTERNET permission. The only system features it uses are
the one that tells it where its own private storage folder is, so it can
write your save file there, and the system’s own “rate this
app” prompt, described below.
What the app stores on your device
One file, run.json, inside the app’s own documents
folder. It is unusually small, because of how the game is built: the game is
deterministic, so instead of saving the state of your career it saves the
instructions for rebuilding it, and replays them when you come back.
The whole file is:
- a seed — one number the game uses to decide what happens
- the name you typed for your candidate
- the difficulty you picked
- the list of choices you tapped, in order
- two small numbers the game uses to check the file still matches its own version of the writing
That is all of it. There are no statistics in the file, no timestamps, no device information and no identifiers. It is plain readable JSON and you can open it with any text editor. None of it is transmitted.
The name you type is treated as a character name, not as your name. It is never sent anywhere and never shown to anyone else, because there is nobody else in the app.
A second, even smaller file, review.json, records only when
the game last offered the rating prompt, so that it does not ask too often.
It holds dates and counts and nothing about you.
The game’s content — every event, every line of writing — ships inside the app as a bundled file. Nothing is downloaded at runtime, so there is no request to a content server and nothing to log.
Device backups
Because the save lives in the app’s documents folder, it is picked up by your phone’s normal backup: Android Auto Backup on Android, and device or iCloud backup on iOS. That is deliberate, so reinstalling the app does not delete a career in progress. Those backups are handled by Apple and Google under their own privacy policies and your own backup settings. We cannot see them, and we have no way to read your save.
The rating prompt
After a good ending, the game may ask the operating system to show its standard “rate this app” sheet, at most a few times ever. That sheet is drawn and run by Apple or Google, not by us. If you leave a rating or review, it goes to the store under the store’s own privacy policy, and we only ever see what the store publishes.
Accounts, online play, leaderboards
There are none. There is no login, no friends list, no chat, no cloud save and no online leaderboard. The other characters in the game — your rivals, the whips, the journalists, the voters — are invented by the game. They are not other people and they are never presented as other people. The entire game works with the phone in aeroplane mode.
If online features are ever added, this page will be updated before they ship and the store listing’s privacy answers will be redone to match.
Advertising, purchases and politics
The app contains no advertising and no in-app purchases. There is no ad network in the build, so there is no ad profiling, no App Tracking Transparency prompt and nothing to opt out of. Nothing in the game can be bought, and no outcome can be paid for.
The choices you make in the game — which party you join, how you vote on its bills — stay in your save file. They are not a survey, they are not analysed, and they are never used to infer or record your real political opinions. We could not do that if we wanted to: the data never leaves your phone.
Deleting your data
Uninstalling Ballot Box deletes the app’s documents folder, and with it the save file. There is nothing left on a server, because there is no server.
Two things to know:
- Your phone’s backup may still hold a copy of the save after you uninstall. Clearing that is done in your device’s backup settings, not in the game.
- Starting a new career replaces the existing one. There is one save, and beginning again overwrites it.
Children
Ballot Box is intended for players aged 12 and over and is not directed at young children, but little of that matters here: the app collects no personal data from anyone, of any age. There are no ads, no purchases, no chat, no user profiles and no way for one player to see another player’s content. Nothing a child types into the game leaves the device.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, because we do not collect personal information at all. If you believe something in the app contradicts this, please write to the address below and we will fix it.
Your rights
Data protection law, including the GDPR, gives you rights to access, correct, export and delete personal data held about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to hand over or erase. Your save file is yours, on your device, and you can read it with any text editor.
Changes to this policy
If the app starts doing something this page does not describe — analytics, ads, purchases, cloud save — this page is updated first, with a new date at the top, and the store privacy forms are updated with it. We will not quietly add collection under an old policy.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or anything on this page: vibalyze@zohomail.eu.