Jawless Fish Races privacy policy

The short version: Jawless Fish Races does not ask for a name, an email, an age or anything else about your kid. There are no accounts, no ads, no purchases, no analytics and no chat. Racing on your own never goes online. Racing friends connects to a small server we run, and that server only passes the race between the kids in it. It does not save the race, and it does not keep a record of who played.

This page is just for Jawless Fish Races, made by FiveFour Games with Jawless Fish, on every platform it comes out on (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS), including test builds. Our main privacy policy covers our other games and this website. Where the two differ about this game, this page is the one that counts.

Who we are

FiveFour Games makes the game and runs the race server. Jawless Fish, the plushie company, produces it with us. The game never sends anything to Jawless Fish, and we do not pass anything on to them, because there is nothing to pass on.

What stays on the device

Everything the game remembers is saved on the device it is played on: best times and finishing places for each topic, coins, which fish colours are unlocked, the race name your kid picked, and settings like sound and music. We never see any of it. Deleting the game deletes all of it.

The game never asks for a name. Race names are put together from a list we wrote, like "Sparkly Pebble", and a new save starts with a random one. Nobody types one in.

Solo races

Racing the computer fish (Speedy Saca, Bambi and Pip) works with no internet at all. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Friend races

Friend races are the only part of the game that goes online. One kid makes a race and gets a short race code. Their friends type that code in to join. There are no public rooms and no matchmaking, so the only kids in a race are the ones who were given the code. The kid who made the race can remove anyone from the waiting room before it starts.

To make a friend race work, the game sends our race server:

The race name, sent as two numbers that point into the game's word lists, not as text. Nothing a kid types ever leaves the device.
The fish colour they are racing with.
The topic and level (for example, Subtraction on Medium) and the game's version number, so everyone gets the same questions.
When each answer happened and whether it was right. Not which answer was picked, and not the question. That is all the other games need to move your fish.
The race code, and a short random code the server hands back so a kid who loses connection can drop back into the same race.
Clock checks, so every screen agrees on when the race started.

The other kids in the same race see the race name, the fish colour, the fish swimming, whether they are still connected, and where they finished. That is it. There is no chat, no pictures, no voice and no way to send anything else.

What the race server keeps

A race lives in the server's memory while the room is open. It is never written to disk. When the room closes, it is gone. A room closes when everyone leaves, two minutes after the last kid disconnects, or after it has sat unused for a while (30 minutes in the waiting room, 15 on the results screen).

IP addresses. Any device that connects to anything on the internet shares its IP address, so our server sees one while a kid is connected. We only use it to stop people guessing race codes: the server counts wrong codes per address in memory and forgets the count after 10 minutes. IP addresses are not written to logs or saved anywhere.

Server logs. The server notes when a room is made and when a race starts, with the race code, topic, level and how many kids are in it. Nothing in those logs points to a player or a device. We use them to keep the server running.

Connections to the race server are encrypted. The server runs on Amazon Web Services in the United States. Amazon hosts the machine, and does not get any game data from us beyond what passes through the computer it rents us.

Ghost races

The race server has early support for "ghost" races, where a race is saved under a code so a friend can race it later. That is not in the game yet. If it ships, a saved ghost would hold the race name (as numbers from the list), the fish colour, the topic and level, and the answer timings, and would be deleted after 30 days. We will update this page before any version with ghost races goes out.

What we never collect

Names, email addresses, ages, birthdays or photos
Location
Contacts, friend lists or device identifiers
Advertising IDs
Analytics, telemetry or crash reports
Anything typed, said or drawn

The game has no ads, no in-app purchases and no links out to the web. It has no third-party code that collects data: no ad networks, no analytics tools, no social media kits. On Android, the only permission it asks for is internet access, which is for friend races.

Children's privacy

Jawless Fish Races is made for kids, and we built it so it does not need to know anything about them. We do not collect personal information from children. The only thing friend races touch that the law could treat as personal is the IP address, and we only use that in the moment to keep the server working and keep strangers from guessing their way into a race. We never use it to identify or track anyone, and we never share it.

If you would rather your kid only race the computer fish, they can just skip the Friends button, or you can play with the device offline. Every other part of the game works the same.

For parents: your rights

We do not hold anything about your kid, so there is nothing for us to show you, hand over or delete. Their saves live on their device, and deleting the game or its data removes them. If you have a question, or you think we have somehow ended up with your child's information, email us and we will sort it out and delete it straight away.

The stores

Steam (Valve), Google Play (Google) and the App Store (Apple) handle downloads and run their own privacy policies. We do not control what they collect and we do not get any of it.

Changes

If the game starts sending anything new, keeping anything longer, or adds features like ghost races, leaderboards or accounts, we will update this page and the date at the top before that version is released.

Contact

FiveFour Games
Email: contact@fivefour.games
Website: fivefour.games