Privacy Policy

1. Who this policy is from

This policy is published by The FastLane Games (“we”, “us”, “our”), an independent mobile game studio. It explains what we do with personal information when you play one of our games, contact our support team, or browse this website.

Wherever this policy says personal information, we mean any information that relates to an identified or identifiable person. That includes obvious things like an email address, and less obvious things like a device advertising identifier that can be tied back to a single phone.

We are the data controller for the information described here, which means we decide why and how it is processed. If you do not agree with how this policy works, please stop using our games and this site, because much of what we describe below is necessary in order to run them at all.

Our games and this site may link out to services we do not operate, such as an app store listing or an advertiser’s page. Those services have their own privacy policies, and this one does not apply to them.

2. Information we collect

We group the information we handle into three buckets: what you give us, what is collected automatically while a game runs, and what reaches us from other companies.

2.1 Information you give us

• Support enquiries. If you email us or use an in-game help form, we receive your message, your email address, and whatever details you choose to include (often a screenshot, a device model, or a purchase receipt).
• Optional account or sign-in details. If you choose to link a platform account (for example Apple, Google Play, or a similar sign-in service) to back up progress or use leaderboards, we receive a player identifier and, depending on your settings, a display name and avatar. We never receive your password.
• Anything you type that other people can see. If a game includes names, chat or shared content, what you enter there is visible to others by design. Please do not put personal details into a public name or message.
• Marketing sign-ups, surveys and competitions. If you opt in to hear from us or take part in a survey or giveaway, we keep the contact details and answers you provide for that purpose.

2.2 Information collected automatically

• Device and app data. Device model, operating system version, screen and language settings, region, app version, and the store the app came from.
• Identifiers. An internal player ID we generate, plus platform identifiers such as your device advertising identifier (IDFA on iOS, Advertising ID on Android) where you have allowed it, and identifiers used to keep a session working.
• Network data. Your IP address, which also tells us your approximate country or region. We do not use GPS and we do not collect precise location.
• Gameplay data. Levels started and finished, scores, progress, in-game currency balances, settings you change, and which features you use.
• Stability and performance data. Crash logs, error reports, load times and frame-rate samples, so we can find and fix what is broken.
• Advertising interactions. Which ads were shown, whether one was watched, skipped or tapped, and whether it led to an install. This is reported to us in aggregate or against an advertising identifier.
• Website usage. On thefastlanegames.com we collect only what the web server needs to deliver pages and stay secure. This site does not set advertising or tracking cookies.

2.3 Information from other companies

• App stores and payment processors. Apple and Google confirm that a purchase succeeded and send us a transaction identifier so we can deliver the item and handle refunds. They handle the payment itself, so we never see your full card number or bank details.
• Attribution and measurement partners. If you installed a game after seeing an ad, our measurement partner tells us which campaign it came from, so we know what to spend on and what to stop.
• Advertising networks. Ad partners give us reports on how our ads and the ads inside our games performed.
• Platform sign-in services. If you connect a platform account, that platform passes us the limited profile fields you agreed to share.

3. Children and younger players

Some of our games are suitable for children and some are not; each app’s store listing shows its age rating, and you should treat that rating as part of this policy.

Where a game is directed at children, or where we otherwise know a player is a child, we do not use their information for personalised advertising and we do not knowingly build profiles about them. Any advertising shown in those games is contextual, meaning it is based on the game itself, not on the player.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child in a way that requires a parent’s consent without obtaining it. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child has given us information they should not have, email privacy@thefastlanegames.com and we will delete it and close any associated account. Parents can also disable in-app purchases through the parental controls built into iOS and Android.

4. How we use your information

The table below sets out what we use information for, and, for players in the UK and the European Economic Area, the legal basis we rely on to do it.

If we ever want to use your information for something genuinely new that is not described here, we will update this policy and, where the law requires it, ask you first.

5. Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information for money. We do share it with the following categories of recipient, and only as far as each one needs in order to do its job:

• Infrastructure and hosting providers that store our data and run our servers and this website.
• Crash reporting and analytics providers that help us see what broke and how our games are actually played.
• Advertising networks and mediation platforms that supply the ads shown in our free games and report on how they performed.
• Attribution and measurement partners that tell us which marketing campaign an install came from.
• Customer support tooling that stores and organises the messages you send us.
• App stores and payment processors (Apple and Google), which take payment and confirm purchases and refunds.
• Professional advisers such as accountants, auditors and lawyers, under duties of confidentiality.
• Authorities and legal parties where we are required by law to disclose information, or where we need to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
• A buyer or successor if the studio, or part of it, is ever sold, merged or reorganised. Your information would transfer with the business and stay subject to protections at least as strong as these.

Our service providers act on our instructions under written contracts. Advertising and measurement partners may act as independent controllers of the data they collect through their own tools. Where that is the case, their own privacy policies govern what they do with it.

6. Our partner categories

The specific companies we work with change over time as we launch, retire and re-tool games, so publishing a fixed list here would go stale and mislead you. Instead, this is the set of categories we use. You can ask us for the current, named list at any time by emailing privacy@thefastlanegames.com. We will send it within 30 days.

7. Where we process it

We are a small studio with a global player base, and the companies listed above operate internationally. Your information may therefore be processed in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, the United States, and other countries where our service providers run infrastructure.

Data protection law in those countries is not always equivalent to the law where you live. When we move personal information out of the UK or the EEA, we rely on an appropriate safeguard. That is usually an adequacy decision covering the destination country, or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses in our contract with the recipient, together with additional technical measures such as encryption where they are warranted.

You can ask us for a copy of the safeguard that applies to a particular transfer by writing to privacy@thefastlanegames.com.

8. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only for as long as it is doing a job, and then we delete it or strip it of anything that identifies you.

• Game and progress data is kept while you keep playing. If a linked account is inactive for three years, we delete or anonymise it.
• Support conversations are kept for two years after the ticket closes, so we have context if you write back about the same problem.
• Crash and diagnostic logs are kept for up to 12 months.
• Advertising and attribution records are kept for up to 24 months, and usually far less.
• Purchase and tax records are kept for as long as accounting and tax law requires, typically six to seven years.
• Marketing consent records are kept while you are subscribed, plus a minimal record of your opt-out afterwards so we do not contact you again by mistake.

We may keep information for longer if we need it to resolve a dispute, investigate abuse, or comply with a legal obligation.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights over your personal information. Players in the UK and the EEA have all of them.

• Access. Ask what we hold about you and get a copy of it.
• Correction. Have information that is wrong or incomplete fixed.
• Deletion. Ask us to erase your information where we no longer have a good reason to keep it. Deleting game data usually means losing your progress, and we cannot undo that.
• Objection. Object to processing we carry out on the basis of a legitimate interest, including profiling for advertising.
• Restriction. Ask us to pause processing while a dispute about accuracy or lawfulness is sorted out.
• Portability. Receive information you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format, or have us send it to another provider.
• Withdraw consent. Where processing rests on your consent, withdraw it at any time. That does not affect anything we did lawfully beforehand.

To use any of these rights, email privacy@thefastlanegames.com and tell us which game you play. We may need to ask for information that lets us match your request to the right records. For a player without an account, that is usually the player ID shown in the game’s settings screen. We answer within one month, and we will tell you if a complex request needs longer. These rights are free to use, and we will not treat you differently for using them.

10. Your controls and opt-outs

You do not have to contact us to change most of these. They are in your hands:

• Personalised advertising. On iOS, use Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. On Android, use Settings → Privacy → Ads to delete or opt out of your advertising ID. Where our games ask for advertising consent, you can change that answer in the game’s privacy settings at any time.
• Marketing emails. Use the unsubscribe link in any email we send, or write to us. Service messages about a purchase or a support ticket are not marketing and will still reach you.
• Push notifications. Turn them off for the app in your device settings, or in the game’s own options.
• Analytics. Where a game offers an optional analytics toggle, you can switch it off in the privacy settings without affecting your progress.
• Purchases. Use the parental controls or purchase restrictions built into iOS and Android to limit or block in-app purchases.

Turning off personalised advertising does not remove ads from a free game. It means the ads you see are chosen from the game’s context rather than from a profile about you.

11. Cookies and identifiers

This website. thefastlanegames.com is a static site. It does not set advertising or analytics cookies, and it does not embed social media trackers. Your browser and our host record standard request logs, including your IP address, for security and reliability, and those logs are deleted on a short rolling schedule.

Our games. Mobile apps do not use browser cookies, but they do use equivalent technologies: the advertising identifier your device provides, identifiers generated by our analytics and ad software development kits, and locally stored data such as your save file and settings. Where these are not strictly necessary to run the game, we ask for your permission before switching them on in regions that require it, and you can withdraw that permission in the game’s privacy settings.

If a game ever displays a web page inside it, such as a support article, the cookie behaviour of that page is described where it appears.

12. How we protect information

We use technical and organisational measures appropriate to a studio of our size: traffic encrypted in transit with TLS, encryption at rest on our hosting provider, access limited to the people who need it and protected by multi-factor authentication, separate environments for development and production, and dependency and vulnerability monitoring on the software we ship.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach happens that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority and, where the law requires it, you, without undue delay.

13. Contact and complaints

Questions about this policy, or about anything we do with your information, go to our privacy inbox. A person reads it.

We would always rather hear a complaint directly, so we get a chance to fix it. You do not have to come to us first, though. If you are in the UK you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. If you are in the EEA you can complain to the data protection authority in the country where you live or work. Players elsewhere can contact their local privacy regulator.

14. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our games, our partners or the law change. The current version always lives at this address, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed.

If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will give you notice before it takes effect, through a message in the affected game, an email if you have given us your address, or a notice on this site. We will also ask for fresh consent where the law requires it.

Addendum: California privacy rights

This section applies to residents of California and supplements everything above. It uses the meanings given in the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act.

Categories we collect

In the past 12 months we have collected the following categories of personal information, all from the sources and for the purposes described in sections 2 and 4:

• Identifiers: internal player IDs, device advertising identifiers, IP addresses, and email addresses where you contact us or subscribe.
• Commercial information: records of in-app purchases and refunds.
• Internet or network activity: gameplay events, feature usage, crash reports, and interactions with advertising.
• Coarse geolocation: the country or region inferred from your IP address. We do not collect precise geolocation.
• Inferences: limited assumptions about the kinds of games or offers that may interest you, used for advertising where you have permitted it.

We do not collect sensitive personal information as that term is defined by the CCPA, and we do not use or disclose personal information for purposes beyond those disclosed here.

Selling and sharing

We do not sell personal information for money. However, using advertising partners to show you personalised ads can count as “selling” or “sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising” under California law. To the extent it does, the categories involved are identifiers, internet activity and inferences, shared with advertising networks, attribution partners and mediation platforms.

You can opt out at any time by disabling app tracking in your device settings, by turning off personalised advertising in the game’s privacy settings, or by emailing privacy@thefastlanegames.com with the subject line “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information”. We honour Global Privacy Control signals sent by your browser on this website. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

Your California rights

• Right to know the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected, the sources, the purposes, and the categories of third party we disclosed it to.
• Right to delete personal information we hold about you, subject to the exceptions in the statute.
• Right to correct inaccurate personal information.
• Right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information.
• Right to limit the use of sensitive personal information, which in practice we do not collect.
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising any of these rights. We will not degrade your game or charge you more.

How to make a request

Email privacy@thefastlanegames.com and tell us which right you want to use and which game you play. Because we do not require accounts, we verify requests by matching the details you give us, usually the in-game player ID plus the email address on any purchase receipt, against our records. If we cannot verify a request to a reasonable degree of certainty we will tell you why rather than hand your data to the wrong person.

An authorised agent may make a request for you if they provide written permission signed by you, and we may still contact you directly to confirm it. We respond within 45 days and will tell you if we need the further 45 days the statute allows.