Privacy

Hemiscope is a set of eight daily puzzle games — Hemiscope, Vault, Odd One Out, Ladder, Pinpoint, Atlas, Timeline and No Idea — plus live races, Survival and tournaments in the Hemiscope iOS app, playable free at hemiscope.com and in the app. The short version: you can play everything without an account, and if you make one, it holds your name, your results, your stars and items, and your friends list, and you can delete it from inside the app.

The app and the website differ in how they handle ads and analytics, so they are described separately below. The website’s ads may be personalised; the app’s are non-personalised, and are switched off entirely in the current release.

The iOS app

On your device, always

Your in-progress games, completed daily results, stats and streaks, your chosen explorer, and your “don’t show this again” preferences are stored on your device using the system’s own app storage. Without an account, that is where they stay, and they are deleted with the app.

Anonymous play statistics

The app reports which puzzle, race or tournament was started, finished or shared, which screen was open, and whether an ad filled, to hemiscope.com. Each report carries a random install identifier and a random session identifier — both generated on your device, neither derived from anything about you or your phone, and neither linked to your account if you have one. A report says whether the app is signed in, yes or no, but never to which account. No IP address is kept, only a two-letter country code. These records are deleted after 180 days.

Leaderboards

Everyone who plays in the app appears on the leaderboards, signed in or not. The first time the app opens, hemiscope.com gives it a leaderboard player: a random identifier of its own (never the install identifier above), a secret that only your phone keeps, and a generated name such as “explorer123456”. Your daily puzzle scores, Duel wins, longest Survival run and Expedition stamps are sent against it, by day, with the explorer you play as. If you sign in, it is linked to your account and shows your handle instead, and the scores you made before signing in stay with you. A signed-in account’s daily scores, which the app already saves to the account, appear on the leaderboards under its handle too, from whichever version of the app sent them. You can leave the global leaderboards at any time with “Show me on leaderboards” in Settings; your friends still see you.

Accounts — optional

Signing in is only needed to add friends, duel them, enter tournaments, and pick your own name on the leaderboard. The daily puzzles never ask for it, and nothing you have already played is lost if you never sign in.

Sign in with Apple is the only way in, and Apple decides what it passes on. We store what it sends: a subject identifier that is unique to this app, and an email address — which is Apple’s private relay address rather than your real one if you chose “Hide My Email”. We never see your Apple ID password, and the app never asks for one.

Once you have an account, we also store:

• Your profile — the handle you claim, the display name you set, your explorer, and the banner, card frame, title and medals you choose to show on your player card.
• Your stars and items — how many stars you have earned and spent, and the explorers, banners, frames, titles and emotes you own. The one real-money purchase, Remove Ads, goes through Apple; we keep only whether ads are off for your account, and any codes you have redeemed, so a code can’t be redeemed twice.
• Your stats — per game: games played, games won, current and best streak, and the last day you played.
• Your daily results — for each day and game: your score, whether you won, or whether you skipped it. This is what lets a friend see how your day went, which is the point of having friends in the app.
• Your friends list — who you have added, who has asked to add you, and who you have blocked.
• Reports you file — who you reported and the reason you typed. Reports are read only by us, and are never shown to the person reported.
• Duels you play — the room code, the seed the questions are dealt from, and how well each player answered each round. Duels are deleted seven days after they are created. A race invite you send a friend is kept for a day.
• Tournaments you enter — which tournaments you joined, the entry fee you paid, how well and how fast you answered each question, where you finished, and the stars and items you won. Other entrants see your player card and your score in the standings. Kept until you delete your account.
• A push token — only if you turn on tournament alerts or race invites: the identifier Apple gives this device for notifications, so we can tell it a tournament is about to start or a friend wants to race. Deleted when Apple tells us the device is gone, and with your account if you delete it. The daily reminder is a local notification: it is scheduled on your phone and nothing about it is sent to us.

Your handle is public. It is how friends find you, and it appears on the leaderboard and on an invite page at hemiscope.com, so pick one you don’t mind being seen. Your display name is shown to people you duel, to everyone in a tournament you enter, and to friends. Your email address is never shown to anyone.

Deleting your account

Open the account sheet in the app and tap Delete account. It removes the account itself and, with it, your profile, handle, stats, daily results, stars and items, tournament entries, push tokens, friendships and any reports you filed. It cannot be undone, and there is no copy kept. Anonymous play statistics are not part of your account and are not linked to it, so they are unaffected; they age out on their own after 180 days.

Advertising

The app shows Google AdMob banners on the screen you see once a puzzle is finished — never during play. AdMob receives your device’s IP address, general device and app information, and a coarse location derived from that IP address, and every request is sent with Google’s “no personalised ads” flag set — ads chosen from the context rather than from a profile of you. Google’s own handling of what it receives is covered by its policy for partner sites and apps.

Measuring our own advertising

We advertise Hemiscope on TikTok, and to know whether that works the app includes TikTok’s Business SDK. The first time you open the app it asks, with Apple’s standard App Tracking Transparency prompt, whether you allow tracking. If you allow it, the SDK reads your device’s advertising identifier (IDFA) and TikTok can match this install to an ad you saw. If you don’t, no identifier is read; TikTok then only learns, through Apple’s SKAdNetwork, that an ad led to an install, without knowing which device.

Either way the SDK reports a short list of moments to TikTok: the app was installed and opened, an account was created or signed in, a first puzzle or first race was finished, a medal was earned, and stars were spent in the shop. Each report carries general device and app information and your IP address. It never carries your name, your email address, your puzzle answers, or anything about your friends. Turning off Anonymous play stats in the app’s Settings stops every one of these reports except the install itself. It takes full effect the next time the app opens: until then the SDK, which is already running, goes on asking TikTok for its configuration each time you return to the app, and that request carries your device’s identifiers and IP address along with general device and app information. Declining the tracking prompt, or turning it off later under iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, keeps the advertising identifier out of all of them. TikTok’s handling of what it receives is covered by its privacy policy for TikTok for Business.

Everything else the app fetches

Images: country flags from flagcdn.com, and the Ladder photographs from upload.wikimedia.org. These carry no identifier and no information about you or your game. As with loading any image on the internet, those servers see the request and your IP address.

Tapping a link to hemiscope.com — for photo credits, for example — opens your browser, at which point the website section below applies.

The website

The website has no accounts and no sign-in. Everything here is about the browser you are reading this in.

What we store on your device

The site keeps your in-progress guesses, completed daily-game state, aggregate stats (games played, win streak, guess and score distributions), and a flag for whether you’ve turned off each game’s intro — all in your browser’s localStorage. Nothing in this list ever leaves your device. You can wipe it with the “Reset all data” button in the Stats panel, or by clearing site data in your browser.

Analytics

• Vercel Web Analytics — cookieless visitor counts. Does not identify individuals or set tracking cookies.
• Vercel Speed Insights — page-load and interactivity metrics from real visits. No personal data is collected.
• Google Analytics 4 — aggregate visit counts. May set its own cookies. We do not link visit data to any identity.
• Our own play statistics — the same records described under the app above, under the same kind of random identifier, kept for the same 180 days. No IP address is kept, only a country code. Browsers that send “Do Not Track” are left out entirely.

Advertising

The website uses Google AdSense. Google and its partners may use cookies and identifiers to serve ads based on your prior visits to this site or others. You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings. We also run a Google Ads conversion tag to measure whether our own advertising works.

If you’d rather not be profiled for ads, install a tracker blocker — or play in the iOS app, whose ads are non-personalised whenever they are on at all.

Cookies

Hemiscope itself sets no cookies. Google Analytics, Google AdSense and Vercel Analytics may set their own cookies (or cookieless identifiers) under their own privacy practices.

Fonts

Type is set in Smooch Sans, Space Grotesk, Figtree and IBM Plex Mono. These are Google Fonts, but they are downloaded at build time and served from hemiscope.com — your browser makes no request to Google to load them.

What we never collect, anywhere

• No password — Apple handles signing in, and we never see a credential.
• No payment information — every puzzle is free, and the one purchase goes through Apple, who never shows us a card.
• No contacts, photos, or device sensors, and no location from the device itself. Ad networks infer a coarse location from your IP address, as described above.
• No tracking you didn’t agree to. The advertising identifier is read only if you allow it in the tracking prompt, only by TikTok’s SDK, and only to tell whether our own ads work. Nothing here builds a profile of you.

Children

Hemiscope is a general-audience game and does not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you are under 13, play the daily puzzles without an account — they work exactly the same. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us at the address below and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page if our practices change. It was rewritten when the app started showing ads, again when accounts, friends and duels arrived, again when TikTok ad measurement did, and again for stars, tournaments and push alerts — what it says above is exactly what the current release does.

Contact

Questions about this policy, requests to delete an account you can no longer sign in to, and reports about another player can all be sent to support@kyrogamestudios.com. Hemiscope is made by Kyro Game Studios.

Last updated 14 October 2026.