Ballpark is a daily guess-the-price game. It was built to collect nothing. There is no account to create, no ads, no analytics, and no way for us to know who is playing. Your progress is saved on the device.
The app saves a small record in the device's local app storage: which puzzles you have played, the guesses you made and how far off they were, your current streak, and whether the archive subscription is active. That is all of it. This record contains no name, no email, no age, no photos, and no identifiers. It is not readable by us or by anyone else, and it is deleted when the app is uninstalled.
There is no advertising in Ballpark. The app ships with no ad SDK of any kind: no banners, no interstitials, and no rewarded video. Nothing in the app is sponsored, and no third party receives an ad request or any other signal when you play.
Because there is no ad SDK, the app does not request the device advertising identifier, and that permission is absent from the app entirely rather than merely left unused.
On iPhone the game can post two numbers from a finished daily round to Apple Game Center leaderboards: your average miss for the day and your streak. This uses the Apple ID already signed in on the device. We never ask for a password, and we never create an account.
Apple's handling of Game Center data is covered by Apple's privacy policy. There is no Game Center on the web version, and there are no game services on Android.
There is one. Today's five lots are free, forever, with no account and no prompt. A single auto-renewing subscription unlocks the archive: every past daily puzzle, playable at any time. There is no currency, no consumable, and nothing else to buy.
The purchase is handled by Apple's own StoreKit, on the device. There is no third-party billing provider in the app, so nothing about you is sent to us or to anyone else: we never receive a name, an email address, a card number, an Apple Account, or a purchase identifier. We cannot tell who subscribed, or how many people did, beyond the anonymous sales totals Apple reports to every developer.
Whether the subscription is active is answered by Apple's receipt on the device, and the answer is cached in the same local storage as your results so the archive still opens with no network. Restoring a purchase on another device asks Apple, not us. A subscription is managed and cancelled in the device's own Settings, under your Apple Account, not in this app.
There are no purchases at all in the web version, which is today's puzzle only.
Ballpark is intended for a general audience. We have designed it so that COPPA's core concern does not arise: the app does not collect personal information from anyone, of any age. There is no chat, no user-generated content, no camera or microphone access, no location access, and no way to contact another player. There is no advertising, so no third-party ad network receives anything about any user, of any age.
The one feature that reaches outside the device is Apple Game Center, described above. It is optional, it carries no way to reach another player, and a parent can switch it off in the device's Settings app. We do not receive anything from it.
There is one subscription, described above. It is charged by Apple, so the device's existing protections apply: Ask to Buy sends the request to a parent for approval, and in-app purchases can be switched off entirely under Screen Time in the Settings app. The part of the game a child is most likely to be handed — today's five lots — is the free part, and it is a complete game on its own.
There are also no external links, no web browsing, and no social media integrations inside the game.
On iPhone the app uses network access for two things, both of them Apple's own services: posting a Game Center result, and asking the App Store about the subscription. The game itself plays fully offline, and does so with no functionality missing — today's five lots are dealt from the date on the device, with no server involved, and a subscription already bought keeps the archive open with no network at all. Fonts, lots and this policy are all bundled inside the app, so nothing is fetched from a third-party server when it launches or while it is played. It does not request the advertising ID, location, contacts, camera, microphone, storage, or any other sensitive permission.
Sharing a result uses the device's own share sheet, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you pick a destination yourself.
Ballpark is also playable in a browser at ballpark.californiadepartmentoflove.com. That site is static and has no analytics, no cookies and no sign-in. It is served by our hosting provider, Vercel, which keeps ordinary server request logs — the same kind every web server keeps. We do not use those logs to identify anyone and they are not combined with anything from the game.
We hold no data, so there is nothing for us to retain or delete. The on-device record is removed when you uninstall the app or clear its storage in your device settings. A result already posted to a Game Center leaderboard is held by Apple; Apple's own tools control it.
Privacy laws such as the GDPR, the UK GDPR, and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, or delete personal information a company holds about you. We do not hold any personal information about you, so there is nothing to produce or erase. If you believe otherwise, contact us and we will look into it.
We may update this policy as the game evolves. We will revise the date at the top when we do.
Questions or requests about your privacy: privacy@thebook.ltd
Ballpark is published by Kyle Priess. It contains no ads, and one auto-renewing subscription that unlocks the archive of past puzzles.