Headscapades
Privacy

There is no server to hold anything.

Headscapades has no accounts, no sign-in, and no back end. Your decks, your scores, and your photos live on your phone — and, if you use iCloud, in your own iCloud account.

The short version
  • Headscapades collects nothing. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no third-party SDK in the app.
  • Everything you make is stored on your device. Your own decks, high scores, and card photos can also sync through your own iCloud account, which is private to you.
  • Sharing a deck is offline: a QR code, a text code, or a direct phone-to-phone transfer.
  • This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and makes no outbound requests. A deck link carries the deck inside it, so there is nothing here to fetch and nothing here to log.

What is stored

On your device

The app keeps the following in its own storage:

  • Your decks — name, description, colour, icon, high scores, and the cards themselves (words or photos).
  • Settings — Deck Builder entitlement, round length, sounds, vibration, hidden decks, motion controls, and which deck you played last.

None of it is transmitted anywhere by the app. The included decks that ship with Headscapades are part of the app itself and are not stored or reported on.

In your iCloud

If you are signed in to iCloud, some of that storage is mirrored into your private iCloud database using Apple's CloudKit. Specifically:

  • Word decks sync automatically — a word deck is only a couple of kilobytes.
  • Photo decks stay on the device that made them until you open the deck and tap Upload, because a photo deck can be megabytes of your iCloud storage, and a half-finished deck of your friends' faces should not leave the phone just because you opened the editor. Once uploaded, a photo deck stays in iCloud until you delete the deck, and syncs automatically from then on.
  • High scores sync with the deck they belong to, one per deck per round length.

What is never stored

No name, no email address, no account, no password, no contacts, no location, no device identifier, no advertising identifier, no usage analytics, no crash reporting, and no diagnostics. The app contains no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, and no third-party code that phones home.

Sharing a deck

There are three ways to hand a deck to someone, and we cannot see any of them.

  • A text code or a QR code. The deck is compressed into the code itself. It is not a lookup key: nothing is uploaded, and nothing has to be fetched to read it. Whoever you send it to can read it, so treat a deck code the way you would treat the words in it.
  • A link in Messages. The same code, wrapped in a link that opens the app. It travels through whatever app you send it in — Messages, Mail, anything else — under that service's own privacy terms, not ours.
  • Nearby, phone to phone. The two devices connect directly over Apple's peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, the same radio AirDrop uses. There is no router, no access point, and no internet involved. The receiving phone advertises a random handle such as "OTTER 42" — never your device name, and a new one each time — and the sender picks it from a list. The deck is sent straight across that connection and nowhere else.

Permissions the app asks for

Two, each asked for only at the moment you use the feature that needs it, and each refusable without breaking the game.

Camera

"Headscapades uses the camera to scan deck QR codes and to take photos for your own decks."

Used in two places: scanning a QR code to import a deck, and taking a picture for a photo card. When scanning, the camera feed is examined for QR codes on the device and is never recorded or saved. When taking a card photo, the picture is stored in your deck, as described above. Nothing from the camera is transmitted.

Local Network

"Headscapades uses your local network to hand decks to nearby phones. Nothing leaves the room and no internet connection is needed."

Required by iOS for the nearby transfer feature, which discovers and connects to the phone next to you directly. It is used only while you have a sharing screen open, and only to find and talk to another copy of Headscapades. It is not used to scan your network for anything else.

Your data, and only your data

There is no request to file, because there is no one holding anything to request it from. Everything is in your hands already:

  • Delete a deck in the app and it is gone — the deck, its card photos and its high scores — from the device and, if it had synced, from your iCloud and your other devices.
  • Delete the app and everything it stored on that device goes with it.
  • Remove what is in iCloud from the device's own Settings, under your Apple Account, in the iCloud storage list. That is Apple's control, not ours, and it works whether or not the app is still installed.

A deck you have already sent to someone else is theirs, on their phone. Like a photo you texted, it cannot be recalled.