Little Lanterns
Privacy policy
Effective
Little Lanterns is a wordless Android math game for children about 4 to 8, made and published by me, Jay Fowler.
The game works entirely offline. It collects nothing, shares nothing, and stores progress only on your device. There are no ads, analytics, accounts or purchases.
What the app does not collect
Little Lanterns does not collect personal information from children or adults. It does not ask for names, email addresses or dates of birth, and does not access contacts, location, photos, the camera or microphone. It does not collect advertising identifiers or send play activity, usage or crash reports to me or to anyone else.
The app has no Internet permission. No information is sent from the app to a server, shared or sold. There are no advertising or analytics services inside the game.
Progress stays on your device
The app saves each child’s puzzle progress and lantern sky, the color of lantern each child plays as, and settings in its private storage on your device. This lets the game remember where each child left off and adjust its puzzles as they play. A child is known only by their lantern’s color and picture: the app never asks for a name or any other detail. I cannot see these saves.
They remain until you clear them or uninstall the app. The app does not upload, sync or export them, and it opts out of Android cloud backup and device-to-device transfer, so they are not copied to a new device.
- To clear progress: on the home screen, hold the small moon for three seconds to open For grown-ups. Scroll to Start over and press and hold for about two and a half seconds. This clears the playing child’s puzzle progress and lantern sky; settings and the other children are kept.
- To remove a child: in For grown-ups, under Children, press and hold to remove that child’s lantern. This clears their puzzle progress and lantern sky; the other children keep theirs.
- To clear everything: uninstall Little Lanterns, or clear its storage in Android Settings.
The optional child lock
A grown-up can turn on a child lock that uses Android screen pinning to keep Little Lanterns on screen. It is off by default and needs Android 11 or newer with a screen lock set on the device.
The only device permission the app asks for is Android’s biometric permission (USE_BIOMETRIC). When a grown-up uses the protected exit or turns the lock off, Android itself checks the fingerprint, face or screen lock, and the app is told only whether the check passed. It never sees, collects or stores fingerprints, faces, PINs, patterns or passwords.
Whether leaving a pinned app asks for a PIN depends on the device’s screen-pinning settings. The grown-ups’ screen says so when that setting is off.
Children’s privacy
Little Lanterns is made for children, including children under 13, and its approach is to collect no personal information at all. It has no chat, uploads, public profiles or advertising.
The US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the child-data protections of the EU General Data Protection Regulation protect children’s personal information. The game does not ask a child or parent to consent to collecting personal data, because it collects none. Parents can remove the saves on the device as described above without contacting me.
Changes to this policy
If the game or its privacy practices change, I will update this page and its effective date, and keep the privacy information inside the app consistent with it. Any future collection of personal information would come with notice, and any consent the law requires, before it begins.
Contact
For privacy questions, email games@jay-fowler.com. If you write, your address and message are used only to reply. Please don’t send personal information about a child, and you can ask me to delete our correspondence.
This policy covers the Android app. Visiting this website or sending email happens outside the app.