Privacy Policy: NEON HOLD

Effective date: August 8, 2026

NEON HOLD is made by Jan Rohweder, trading as Marketing Bear. This policy explains, in plain language, exactly what leaves your phone, why, and how to get rid of it.

The short version: the game is fully playable without sending us anything. If you choose to join the global grid, we store a small public scoreboard row and nothing else. There is no tracking, no advertising, and no analytics.

Contact: nova@neonhold.com

1. Playing alone sends us nothing

Your runs, personal best, streak, revive balance, achievements and settings live in your device's own storage. The game is fully playable this way. Every mode, every level, every purchase you have made, all of it works with the network off and with the grid switched off.

Delete the app and that local data goes with it.

2. The global grid is opt in

The global grid is the shared leaderboard, plus friends and invites. It is off until you turn it on. Nothing is sent to our servers before you opt in, and turning it off again stops the sending.

When you do opt in, this is the complete list of what we hold:

Three notes on that list, because they are the parts people are usually surprised by.

The per install player id is not you. It is a random identifier created on your device. It is not your Apple ID, not your phone's advertising identifier, not your device serial. We cannot use it to find you anywhere else, and nobody has ever handed it to us from another app, because no such sharing exists.

The country flag is a setting, not a location. It starts from your device's region setting, which is the country you picked when you set up your phone. You can change it in the app at any time. We never ask for or receive GPS, precise location, or anything derived from your network position.

Your display name may become your Game Center alias. If you sign in to Apple's Game Center, the app adopts your Game Center alias as your grid display name, so the board shows a real identity instead of the generated NEON_0000 placeholder. That alias then becomes public on the grid. If you would rather it did not, do not sign in to Game Center, or change your display name in the app.

Pick a display name you are happy to see in public. It is shown to every other player.

3. Friends

If you add another player as a friend, we store the link between your public player id and theirs, in both directions, along with the time it was made. That is the whole record.

You can find other players by searching their name or handle. Search only ever returns players who are on the grid and discoverable, never anyone who has not opted in. You can remove a friend at any time, which deletes the link on both sides. There is a ceiling of 200 friends per player, which exists to keep the service cheap to run rather than for any privacy reason.

4. Invites are a code, not an address

Inviting somebody is one screen: the app shows you an eight character code and a link, and hands them to the iOS share sheet. You choose where that goes, in whatever app you already use to talk to that person.

Here is the whole of it.

1. The app asks our server for your invite code. The server knows your player record and nothing about whoever you are about to send it to.
2. You hand that code to the iOS share sheet and pick an app and a person. This part happens entirely on your phone. iOS never tells us which app you chose or who received it.
3. Your friend types the code into their copy of the game. At that moment the server learns that two players are now friends, and that is all it learns.

We are not part of step 2, and we cannot be. There is no address book access, no contact picker, no email field anywhere in the app, and nothing here has ever asked for one.

So the honest version of this section is short: we hold no address for your friend, because we are never given one. There is no send, no suppression list, no unsubscribe, and nothing to unsubscribe from. NEON HOLD sends no email to anybody, ever.

What we do hold is the code itself, which is a random string tied to your player record, plus a count of how many times it has been redeemed. When somebody redeems it, both of you appear on each other's friends list, and that is the only thing that happens.

An invite can be redeemed once per player, for life, and rewards are capped at 10 a week per player. Both limits exist to stop reward farming, not to profile anybody.

If you received an invite you did not want, it came from the person who sent it, in their own messaging app. We did not send it, we do not know it happened, and there is nothing on our side to remove.

5. Notifications are local only

The reminders about your expiring free revive, your streak, and your rank are scheduled by the app on your own device, by iOS, using state that is already on the phone.

There is no push server and no device token. We do not register your device with Apple Push Notification service, we never receive a push token, and we cannot send you a notification. If your phone is off, nothing is queued anywhere. You can turn the reminders off in iOS Settings, and the app will simply stop scheduling them.

6. No tracking, no ads, no analytics

We want to be specific rather than vague here, because "we respect your privacy" is worth nothing on its own.

• No advertising. There are no ads in the app and no ad network SDK in the binary.
• No analytics. There is no Firebase, no Amplitude, no Mixpanel, no Sentry, no crash reporter of our own, no session recording, no heatmaps, no funnels. We do not know which screens you visit or how long you play.
• No tracking across apps or websites. We do not use the advertising identifier, we do not ask for App Tracking Transparency permission, and we do not build profiles.
• No IP addresses retained. Our server sits behind Cloudflare, which necessarily sees the IP address of any request in order to route it, the same as every website you visit. Cloudflare's request logging and log forwarding are deliberately switched off for our service, so no IP address is written to any store we hold or can read.
• No selling or sharing. We have never sold, rented, traded or shared personal information, and we have no plans to. There is no advertising business here to feed.

7. The only companies involved

One service provider processes data on our behalf, bound by its contract with us to act only on our instructions.

Nobody else receives your data. There used to be a second row here, for the company that delivered invite emails. The email feature was removed, so that processor was removed with it, and our server now holds no credentials for any third party at all.

Separately, and not as our service providers: Apple runs the App Store, so it handles your purchases directly, and we never see your payment details, card, or billing address. If you sign in to Game Center, Apple operates that leaderboard under Apple's own privacy policy. Those are your relationships with Apple, not data we pass on.

8. How long we keep things, and how to delete everything

Your grid row, friend links and invite code are kept for as long as you keep using the grid, because they are the service. There is no archive, no backup copy hoarded for analysis, and no dataset of former players.

Short lived operational records expire on their own: the counters that enforce rate limits last only as long as their window, and the weekly invite counter expires after 14 days.

To delete everything, use the DELETE MY GRID DATA control in the app. It removes your player record, your event history, your friend links in both directions, every invite code you have ever held, and your rate limit counters. Local data on your device is cleared by deleting the app.

Or write to nova@neonhold.com and we will do it for you. We will ask for something that ties the request to the account, usually your handle, since we hold no email address for you and cannot otherwise tell who is asking.

There are no exceptions and nothing survives it. An earlier version of this policy carved out one, for the list of addresses that had asked never to be emailed. That list no longer exists because the emails no longer exist.

9. Children

NEON HOLD is rated 4+, which means the content is suitable for everyone. Here is what that means for data, plainly.

The game is designed to be played by a child with nothing sent to us at all: the grid is off until somebody switches it on. If it is switched on, the only thing that becomes public is a display name, a flag and a score. We collect no birthday, no email address, no photo, no contacts, no location and no behavioural profile, from anyone. There is no advertising and no tracking, so there is nothing here that could target a child.

Two things worth a parent's attention. First, the display name is public, so it should not be a real name or anything identifying, and a Game Center alias will be adopted as that name if the child chooses to sign in. Game Center is optional and the app never signs anybody in on its own. Second, inviting a friend hands a code to the iOS share sheet, which means the child picks an app and a person themselves, exactly as they would sharing anything else.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children in a way that would require verifiable parental consent under COPPA, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, or GDPR Article 8. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has put something identifying into the app, write to nova@neonhold.com and we will delete it. No proof of purchase, no forms, no argument.

10. Your rights

If you are in the UK, the EU or the EEA (UK GDPR and EU GDPR) you have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its processing, and receive it in a portable form. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.

Our lawful bases:

There is no row here for email, marketing or profiling, because we do none of them. We send no email of any kind, we run no advertising, and we build no profile of anybody.

If you are in California (CCPA and CPRA) you have the right to know what we collect and why, to delete it, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross context behavioural advertising. We never have. There are no financial incentives tied to your data. In the last 12 months, the categories we collected are the identifiers and the game content listed in section 2, from you and your device only, for the purposes described here.

Wherever you live, you can exercise all of this yourself with the delete control in the app, or by writing to nova@neonhold.com. We answer within 30 days, and we do not charge for it.

11. Where data is processed

Cloudflare runs our code close to whoever is asking, so processing may happen outside your country, including in the United States. Transfers out of the UK, the EU and the EEA rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses in Cloudflare's data processing terms.

12. Changes

If we change what we do, we will change this policy first, update the effective date at the top, and ship the new text inside the app. If a change is significant, and especially if it would ever widen what we collect, we will ask you again rather than assume the old opt in still covers it.

Operator: Jan Rohweder, trading as Marketing Bear
Contact: nova@neonhold.com

© 2026 Jan Rohweder, Marketing Bear. All rights reserved.