Privacy Policy — Pip's Reading Rocket

Effective date: 2026-08-15 · Developer: Gizmotron LLC

Pip's Reading Rocket is a reading game for children. We built it the way we would want a game built for our own kids: no accounts, no tracking, nothing to sign up for — and this page explains, in plain words, the small number of things the app can do that involve the internet.

The short version

• No accounts, no sign-in, no advertising analytics, no tracking across apps.
• All words, pictures, and sounds are on the device — the game itself plays offline.
• If the app crashes, it may send us a crash report — the technical details of what went wrong, so we can fix it. No names, no messages, and nothing about what your child was doing in the game.
• The app may offer optional reward videos (short ads a child can choose to watch to open extra word packs for a little while). These come from Kidoz, an ad provider built for children's apps.
• Grown-ups can make one optional purchase that unlocks all word packs forever. Buying happens through Google Play, behind a grown-ups-only gate.
• We — Gizmotron LLC — run no servers of our own, and the only thing we ever receive is an anonymous crash report when something breaks.

Reward videos (ads), provided by Kidoz

If a word pack is locked, the app may offer to unlock it for a short time after watching a video. Watching is always a choice, always announced ("the video is an ad"), and never interrupts play — the app shows no banner ads and no surprise ads.

The videos come from Kidoz, an advertising provider certified for children's apps (PRIVO COPPA Safe Harbor). Kidoz shows contextual ads only — ads picked for the app, not for the person watching:

• Kidoz does not receive names, emails, or accounts (the app has none).
• Kidoz does not use the device's advertising ID — the app is built so that permission does not even exist in it — and does not track children across apps.
• To show and count ads, Kidoz receives basic technical information: a temporary session identifier, a coarse, country-level location (from the network connection — never precise location; the app never asks for location permission), and ad-delivery statistics (whether an ad loaded and played). This is collected for showing ads and is not shared onward or used for tracking. How long Kidoz keeps this is governed by Kidoz's own policy, reviewed under its PRIVO certification — see the Kidoz privacy policy at kidoz.net for their retention details.

The one purchase, handled by Google Play

The app offers a single optional purchase that unlocks all word packs permanently. The purchase itself is handled entirely by Google Play on the device — the app never sees or stores payment details, card numbers, or your Google account. All the app keeps is a small unlock record on the device saying the purchase was made, so the packs stay open. Refunds work the normal Google Play way; if Google Play reports the purchase was refunded, the packs simply re-lock.

Grown-ups only: the buying screen sits behind a parental gate — a quick task designed for adult readers — so a child cannot make a purchase by tapping around.

Crash reports (when something goes wrong)

Software breaks. When this app crashes — or hits a specific problem we have asked it to tell us about, like a purchase that failed to save — it sends a crash report so we can find and fix the bug. This is the only reason the app ever sends anything to us, and it is used for nothing else: not advertising, not analytics, not profiles, and never to contact anyone.

Crash reports are handled for us by Sentry, a crash-reporting service. A report contains:

• What went wrong — the technical error and the list of code steps that led to it.
• Basic device facts — device model, Android version, and the app version.
• A random installation number — a string of random characters the app makes up for itself the first time it runs. It lets us tell "this bug hit three different devices" apart from "one device hit it three times". It is not the device's advertising ID and not any account. Nothing else uses it, it is tied to no person, and it disappears when the app is uninstalled.

Just as importantly, here is what a crash report does not contain:

• No names, emails, or accounts — the app has none to send.
• No pictures of the screen. The app is built without the screen-recording and screenshot features this kind of service can offer, so there is nothing to switch on by mistake.
• No IP address or location. The app is configured not to send one, and the service is configured not to store or derive one.
• Nothing your child typed or practised — not the words, not the answers, not the score.

How long it is kept: crash reports are deleted on Sentry's standard retention schedule (on the order of 90 days for error events), after which they are gone. We keep no separate copy.

Turning it off: because the report contains no personal information, there is nothing to opt out of or request deletion of — but if you would rather we never receive one, uninstalling the app stops it completely.

What stays on the device

Game progress (high score, best streak, a saved run), settings (language, sound, art theme, word difficulty), and the unlock records above are stored only on the device, in the app's private storage. They are not readable by other apps and are deleted when the app is uninstalled. If Android's system backup is enabled by the device owner, this progress may be included in the device's own Google backup under the device owner's Google account, governed by Google's backup terms — the app itself uploads nothing.

Children's privacy

The app is designed for children as part of a family audience. The app itself collects no personal information from anyone, children included. The third parties involved are Kidoz (ads, as described above — certified under a COPPA Safe Harbor program), Google Play (purchases), and Sentry (crash reports, as described above).

The random installation number in a crash report is a persistent identifier, and we want to be precise about it: under the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act it is collected solely to support the internal operations of the app — keeping the app working and fixing what breaks — and for no other purpose. It is never used to contact anyone, to build a profile, or to advertise. That is the only reason the app is permitted to collect it without asking a parent first, and we hold it to exactly that use.

Because there are no accounts and we hold no data that identifies anyone, there is nothing for a parent to request access to or deletion of from us; for questions about Kidoz's ad data, Kidoz's policy applies, for purchase records, Google Play's, and crash reports age out on the retention schedule above.

Changes

If a future version changes any of the above, this policy will be updated first and the change will be declared in the app's Google Play Data safety form before release. That is how the crash-reporting section above came to be: it was written and published before any release could send a report.

Contact

The operator of this app, and the party responsible for the practices described in this policy, is:

Company: Gizmotron LLC

• Mailing Address: Gizmotron LLC, 429 Norbury Drive, Rockwall, TX 75032, USA
• Telephone: +1 (916) 218-5939
• Questions about this policy, parental rights requests, and COPPA or EU/UK rights requests: contact@gizmotronsoftware.com

We are the only operator collecting information through this app. Kidoz (reward videos) and Google (purchases, crash reporting) act under their own policies, linked in the sections above.