Huddle
Privacy policy
The short version. Huddle has no accounts and no servers. Your games, names, crews and photos stay on the phones of the people you play with. The only thing that can ever leave your phone for the internet is a crash report, and only if you have said yes to sending them. There are no ads, no analytics and no tracking, and nothing is sold.
Who is responsible
Huddle is made by Lars Ådne Heimdal, a private person in Norway, who is the data controller under the GDPR. Write to contact@huddleparty.app with any question about your data.
What stays on your phone
Everything you make in Huddle is stored on your own phone and nowhere else:
- The name and colour you play under, and your settings.
- A random key that lets the phones you play with recognise your phone again. It is not linked to your phone number, your Google or Apple account, or anything else about you.
- Your crews: who is in them, the games you have played, scores, house rules, and photos you add to a crew's album.
- A connection log that helps work out why a phone lost its connection. It names no players and stays on the phone unless you copy it out yourself.
Deleting the app deletes all of it. If you move to a new phone with "Move to new phone", your data goes straight from the old phone to the new one over an encrypted link, and the old phone then forgets it.
What the other phones see
Huddle's phones talk directly to each other, over Bluetooth or a local Wi-Fi network, encrypted. Nothing goes through the internet or through us.
- In a room, the other players see your name, your colour and what you do in the game. Secret things, like your cards, are only shown to you.
- While you host a room, your phone sends your name over Bluetooth so that nearby phones can list "Kari's room", the way a Wi-Fi network shows its name.
- In a crew, the members' phones keep the crew's history and album, and share it with each other when they meet.
- A guest in a browser joins over a Wi-Fi network the host's phone makes. The page comes from the host's phone, not from the internet.
Crash reports
If Huddle crashes, it can send a crash report so that the bug can be fixed. This is off until you turn it on, with the switch on the Me page. In test versions of the app it is on from the start, and testers can turn it off on the same page.
| What is sent | What went wrong in the code, the app's version, the phone's model and system version, and a random installation ID made up for crash reports. Not your name, your crews, your games or anything you have typed. |
|---|---|
| Who receives it | Google's Firebase Crashlytics, which processes it on our behalf. Like any connection over the internet, Google also sees your phone's IP address when the report is sent. |
| Why | To find and fix crashes. Legal basis: your consent (GDPR article 6(1)(a)). Turning the switch off withdraws it, and reports waiting on the phone are then thrown away. |
| How long | Crashlytics keeps crash reports for 90 days. |
| Where | Google may process the data outside the EEA, under the EU's standard contractual clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. |
Reports wait on the phone and are only sent when it is online. Huddle never waits for the internet to play.
Show on TV
When the host shows a game on a TV with Google Cast, the TV downloads the TV page from tv.huddleparty.app, which is hosted by Cloudflare. Cloudflare sees the TV's IP address, as it would for any web page. The page has no cookies, no analytics and stores nothing. The game itself goes from the host's phone to the TV over your own Wi-Fi, and only what everyone can see on the table is sent.
Permissions the app asks for
| Bluetooth and nearby devices | To find and connect to the other phones. |
|---|---|
| Location (Android 12 and older) | Older Android versions require it to search for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices. Huddle never reads where you are. |
| Camera | To scan a room's QR code. The picture is read on the phone and never stored or sent. |
| NFC | So a phone can join a room by tapping the host's phone. |
| Vibration | To buzz when it is your turn. |
No ads, no tracking
Huddle has no ads, no analytics, no advertising ID and no third-party tracking, and no data about you is sold or shared. If that ever changes, this policy will say so first, and the app will tell you.
Children
Huddle is made for families, and children play it. We do not ask anyone's age, and we collect nothing from anyone, children included, beyond the optional crash reports above, which contain nothing that identifies the player.
This website
huddleparty.app is hosted by Cloudflare. It has no cookies and no analytics. Cloudflare sees your IP address when you visit, to deliver the page and protect against attacks.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to access, correct and delete your personal data, and to withdraw consent. Since we have no account or record of you, almost everything is in your own hands: it is on your phone, and deleting the app deletes it. Crash reports cannot be linked to you by name; if you want them deleted, write to us with the time of the crash and your phone's model, and we will do what we can.
You can complain to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, or the authority where you live.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version is put here with a new date. A change that collects anything new will be asked for in the app first.