Privacy policy
Nothing leaves the room
Applies to the Circle of Joy app for Android and iOS. Last updated 5 October 2026.
What the app collects
Nothing. Circle of Joy has no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting service and nothing that tracks you. It does not ask for your name, your email address, your location, your contacts or anything else, and it does not read them without asking.
What the app sends
Nothing about you. Every question, word, puzzle, passage, font and page the app needs ships inside it, and it works in a hall with no signal.
New questions. When the app opens and the phone has internet, it asks our website, circleofjoyapp.com, whether there are new or corrected questions, and downloads them if there are. The request carries nothing about you, your room or the people in it — no name, no account, no identifier. Like any website, our web host sees the phone's internet address while it answers and may keep it in its standard server logs for a short time; we do not use it. Downloaded questions are checked against our signature before the app uses them. Without internet, the app keeps the questions it has.
While you play, the app makes no network request — not to us, not to anyone.
The only other thing that leaves the phone is a report you choose to send us: see Reports you send us below. It leaves the phone only when someone presses Send.
How the room works, then
One phone runs the room. The other people in the room connect to that phone directly, over your own Wi-Fi network or the phone's hotspot, and play in their browser. Nothing on that link goes any further than the phone hosting the room.
- When someone joins they type a name and may add a photo. Both live on the host's phone for as long as the room is open, and are gone when it closes.
- Scores exist for the length of a game and are shown only to the room.
- If someone reports a mistake in a question, that report — the question, the reason, a note if they wrote one, and the name they joined with — is saved on the host's phone, where the host sees who sent it. It goes no further unless the host sends it on to us, and the name never does.
Reports you send us
You can tell us about a mistake in a question, or about anything else, from inside the app or with the form on this website. Only then, and only what you see in the form, reaches us:
- What you wrote, and the kind of report you chose.
- For a mistake: the question it is about and the game and language it was in. That is our own content, not anything about you.
- Which app it came from (Android or iPhone) and the app's version number.
- Your email address, only if you type one. It is optional. We use it to answer you, or to tell you when a mistake you reported has been corrected — nothing else, and we never share it.
We never receive anyone's name from the app, and nothing about the other people in the room. Reports are kept on our own server at circleofjoyapp.com, used only to fix the app and answer you, and deleted a year after the matter is closed. To have yours deleted sooner, write to support@circleofjoyapp.com.
Permissions
On iPhone the app asks for local network access, because that is what letting other phones in the room reach it requires.
On Android it asks, when you open a room, for permission to show a notification — the note in your notification shade that the room is open while the phone is in your pocket — and, on Android 16 and later, for local network access, for the same reason as on iPhone. Saying no to the notification does not stop the room working.
It uses these for nothing else, and asks for no other permission on either platform.
Payment
Hosting a room is a subscription, bought through Google Play or the Apple App Store. We never see your payment details; the store handles the purchase and holds them. Manage or cancel it in the store's own subscription settings.
Children
The games include a level for children. The app collects nothing from anyone, children included, and shows no advertising. A report box asks for an email only as an option, and a report is sent only when the person hosting — normally an adult — presses Send.
Changes
If any of this ever changes, this page will change first and the date above will move.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or about the app: write to us.