Privacy Policy — Ghostly

Last updated: 4 September 2026

Ghostly works without an account and collects nothing unless you sign in. There are no ads, no analytics SDKs, no crash-reporting SDKs, and we never sell or share data with anyone.

Without an account

Your ghost lives entirely on your phone. Settings, his look and his stats are kept in Android's private per-app storage, unreadable by other apps and deleted when you uninstall. Nothing about him leaves your phone.

Signed out, the app makes only one kind of request, and only ever to download: it asks our server for updated behaviour content — the writing behind his reactions, his voice, and the occasional event of the day. Those requests send no account, no device identifier and nothing about you. The only thing they carry is the app's version and your Android version, so we can serve content an older app can still read.

Like any web server, ours records the IP address a request came from in its operational logs. That is a side effect of running a server, not something we collect about you: the logs are used to keep the service working and to spot abuse, they are not linked to any account, and they are not used for advertising, profiling or analytics.

If you sign in with Google (optional)

Signing in lets your ghost follow you to a new phone and keeps his token balance honest. We then store, on our server:

• Account: the stable Google account id, your email address and display name, as provided by Google Sign-In.
• Your pets: species, name, appearance, personality settings, and their stats (hunger, energy, happiness, anger, sleeping).
• Interaction history: when you fed, petted, played with, spooked or napped him. This is what lets him "remember" you.
• Device: a per-app device identifier and the phone model, so a second device can restore the same pet.

We do not collect your location, contacts, files, the contents of your screen, which apps you use, or what you type. The app cannot see any of those.

Google's part in this

Two things in Ghostly are Google's services rather than ours, and Google's own privacy policy governs them:

• Sign in with Google, if you choose to use it. Google tells us who you are; we verify that with Google and keep what is listed above.
• Updates from the Play Store. The app asks Play whether a newer version exists and, if you accept, downloads it in the background. We are not told who asked.

Deleting your data

Open Ghostly → Settings → Delete my account and server data. This immediately and permanently removes your account, your pets, their stats and history from our server. The ghost on your phone stays. You can also request deletion by email — see how to delete your account.

Retention and security

Your account data is kept until you delete it. There is no automatic expiry: we would rather your ghost still be there after a year away than quietly lose him. Deleting your account removes it all at once, permanently, and there is no separate copy kept behind.

Everything is stored on a server we operate ourselves, reached only over HTTPS, and is never used for advertising or profiling. Nobody else has a copy: no analytics provider, no advertising network, no third-party backend.

Children

Ghostly is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. Signed out, the app collects nothing from anyone. Signed in, it collects what is described above, whoever you are.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be posted at this address with a new date at the top.

Contact

Questions about this policy: cvs.devs01@gmail.com