Privacy Policy for Malmheim

Effective 2 September 2026

Applies to the Android app se.chinchecksoftware.malmheim, published on Google Play by ChinCheck Software.

At a glance

We collect your email address, a display name you choose, your GPS position, and your game progress.
Your exact position is readable by any other signed-in player, with no name attached. It expires within 6 hours and is then deleted automatically. The app itself shows other players only as a count of how many are nearby.
Crash and error reports go to Google Crashlytics, tagged with your account ID. The app has no setting to turn this off.
There is no advertising SDK and no third-party tracker in the app. Google Analytics is not installed, and the crash reporting above is the only diagnostic data we send.
We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising or profiling.
You can delete your account and everything attached to it from inside the app: Profile → Delete account.

1Who we are

ChinCheck Software is the controller of the personal data described here. Write to chinchecksoftware@gmail.com with any question about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights in section 8.

2What the app collects

Account

Email address. Held in your Firebase Authentication record so you can sign back in. It is never written into the game database.
Password. Only if you sign up with email. Firebase stores a hash of it. We never see the password itself.
Google account details. Only if you sign in with Google. We receive your email address and the name on your Google account.
Account ID. A random string Firebase assigns you. It identifies you everywhere else in the game, and it is not derived from anything about you.

Profile

Display name, 3 to 24 characters, chosen by you and editable at any time. It starts as the part of your email address before the @, or the name on your Google account.
Friend code, 8 characters, which you can share so another player can send you a friend request. You can change it.

Location

Malmheim places its content at real-world coordinates, so it cannot work without your position. The app requests the Android location permission and asks the device for a precise fix.

Your own position — latitude, longitude and a geohash — is stored against your account and is readable only by you.
A second copy is published for other players. It carries no display name and no email address, only your account ID. Every copy is written with an expiry timestamp no more than 6 hours ahead, and Google's servers delete it once that passes — normally within 24 hours of expiry — whether or not you open the app again.
Any signed-in player can read that copy, including the exact coordinates. The app itself never draws another player's position — it shows only a count of how many players are nearby. That is how this app chooses to display the data, not a restriction on the data itself, so treat your live position as shared with other players rather than private from them. It is never shared with your name attached.
Your position is sent with gameplay actions — collecting a node, engaging a monster — so the server can check that you are actually within range of what you are acting on.

Location while the app is in the background. If you start a raid, the app keeps measuring the distance you travel after you leave the screen, using an Android foreground service. Android displays a permanent notification for the whole time this runs. It stops when the raid ends or when you cancel it. Nothing else in the game reads your location in the background.

Crash and error reports

Every build that talks to our live servers reports crashes to Google Crashlytics. That covers every version published on Google Play, and the app has no setting to turn it off.

A report can contain:

the stack trace of a crash, an Android "app not responding" event, or a handled error — at most 50 handled errors per run of the app, with repeats dropped;
recent internal log lines kept as breadcrumbs. These are written for diagnosis rather than for display, and some of them contain your account ID;
the name of the screen you had open, and whether you were signed in;
your account ID, attached to every report, so that a fault can be matched to the saved game it happened in;
your device model, Android version, app version and a Firebase installation ID, all collected by Crashlytics itself;
app session events, collected by the Firebase Sessions library that Crashlytics installs alongside itself.

We use these reports to find and fix faults, and for nothing else.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store a push token, an Android platform marker, and a Firebase installation ID for each device you sign in on. They exist so we can send you game notifications — a building finishing, a friend request arriving — and are used for nothing else.

Game data

Your inventory and equipment, level and experience, recipes and unlocks, your camp and its buildings, quests, combat and raid state, which nodes and monsters you have already used, loot waiting to be picked up, items you have sold, your inventory grid layout, and your friends list, friend requests and blocks.

Device integrity

Release builds attest through the Google Play Integrity API, via Firebase App Check, so the server can tell a genuine install from a tampered one. Google receives device and app signals to make that assessment. We receive only the resulting pass-or-fail token.

3What the app does not collect

No advertising SDK and no advertising identifier.
No Google Analytics for Firebase, and no third-party analytics, attribution or tracking SDK. The crash reporting described above is the only diagnostic data the app sends.
No contacts, photos, files, microphone or camera.
No payment details. Malmheim has no purchases and no billing integration.

4Who your data is shared with

Google, acting as our processor, runs every server the app talks to:

Service	What it handles
Firebase Authentication	Your email address and password hash
Cloud Firestore	Profile, position, game data — stored in the `eur3` multi-region, which replicates across Google data centres in Belgium and the Netherlands
Cloud Functions	Gameplay logic — `europe-west1` (Belgium)
Firebase Crashlytics	Crash, ANR and error reports, with your account ID attached
Firebase Cloud Messaging	Push notifications
Firebase App Check and Play Integrity	Checking that a request comes from a genuine install
Google Maps SDK for Android	Drawing the map. Google receives the map area you are looking at.

Google's handling of this data is described at firebase.google.com/support/privacy. Some of it is processed outside the EU and EEA, under the safeguards Google documents there.

What other players can see

Anyone signed in can read your live position, without your name — see section 2.
Your friends can additionally see your display name, your level, how far you have progressed against the game's bosses, and the average item level of your equipment.
Your camp's coordinates are shown to your friends only if you switch camp sharing on. It is off unless you turn it on, and switching it back off removes the coordinates from what they can read.
The Hall of Fame shows your display name to every player only if you choose to publish it there. That is off by default, you can turn it back off, and the name shown is a copy taken at the moment you published it — renaming yourself later does not change it.

Nobody else receives your data. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it with advertisers, data brokers or analytics vendors.

5Why we are allowed to process it

To perform our contract with you (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)) — your account, your game data and your position. The game does not function without them.
Your consent (Article 6(1)(a)) — the Android location permission and the notification permission. You can withdraw either at any time in Android Settings. Withdrawing location stops the game working; withdrawing notifications does not.
Our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — crash and error reporting, to keep the app working; and App Check and the server-side security rules, to stop cheating and abuse.

6How long we keep it

Data	Kept for
The shared copy of your position	Expires within 6 hours, then deleted automatically — normally within 24 hours of expiring
Records of nodes and monsters you have used, and loot awaiting pickup	Until they expire, then deleted automatically
Account, profile, position, game data, friends, device tokens	Until you delete your account
Crash and error reports	Held by Google under Firebase's own retention rules for Crashlytics, and not deleted by deleting your account — see section 7
Hall of Fame entry	Kept permanently, without your name, once you delete your account — see section 7

7Deleting your account and your data

In the app. Open Profile, choose Delete account, and type DELETE to confirm. Deletion runs immediately and cannot be undone.

Without installing the app. Email chinchecksoftware@gmail.com from the address on the account and ask us to delete it. We will act within 30 days.

What is deleted: your Firebase Authentication record, including your email address and password hash; your profile and display name; your stored position and the copy other players can read; your whole game state, including inventory, equipment, level, recipes, unlocks, camp, quests, collected nodes, defeated monsters, loot containers and sold items; the profile card your friends read; your friends list, friend requests and blocks; your friend code; and the push tokens for every device you signed in on.

What survives, and why:

Crash reports already sent. Deleting your account does not reach reports Crashlytics has already received, and those carry your account ID. Ask us by email if you want them removed as well, and we will delete them.
Your Hall of Fame rank. If you finished the game and hold a numbered rank, that rank and its date stay, and your name is removed from the row. What remains cannot identify you. We keep it because deleting the row would leave a hole in a dense sequence of ranks, which would tell every other player that whoever held that number had left.

8Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or hand it over in a portable form. You can also object to the crash reporting described in section 2, which we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests. Email chinchecksoftware@gmail.com and we will answer within 30 days.

If you think we have handled your data wrongly you can complain to the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection — Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, imy.se — or to the data protection authority in your own country.

9Children

Malmheim is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, email chinchecksoftware@gmail.com and we will delete it.

10Security

Your game data is readable only by your own signed-in account. That is enforced by security rules running on Google's servers, not by the app on your phone.
The deliberate exceptions are the ones named in section 4: your live position, which any signed-in player can read without your name, and the profile card your friends can read.
Passwords are hashed by Firebase Authentication. Neither we nor the app ever see them.
On release builds the server checks a Play Integrity attestation before accepting a gameplay request.

11Changes to this policy

The date at the top changes whenever this policy changes. We will not start collecting a new category of data, or share your data with someone new, without updating this page first.