Privacy policy
Last updated: 15 November 2026
The short version. To play, you sign in with Apple or Google. From that sign-in we keep one thing: the identifier Apple or Google gives us for you. We do not know your email address, your name or where you are. Everything else we store is your game: the footballer you create and what happens to it. We use no analytics, no advertising and no tracking, and we sell nothing. You can delete your account in the app at any time, and that deletes everything.
This policy covers the Tikivela app and this website, tikivela.com.
Who is responsible
Craftshift, Letterhout, 1507 EG Zaandam, the Netherlands, makes Tikivela and is responsible for your data (the "controller" under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR). In this policy, "we" means Craftshift.
For any question about your data, write to support@craftshift.com.
What we store
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your sign-in identifier: the identifier Apple or Google gives us for you, which of the two it came from, and when your account was created. | So that you get the same account and the same footballer every time you sign in. |
| Your sessions: when you sign in, the app gets a random key that keeps you signed in. We store only a hash of that key (a one-way fingerprint that cannot be turned back into the key) and when it expires. | So that the app can talk to our server without you signing in again every time. |
| What you choose for your footballer: nationality, starting position and preferred shirt number. | Your nationality decides your national team and the kind of name your footballer gets. The rest is how you want to play. |
| What the game makes for your footballer: a name drawn at random from common names of your chosen country, a cartoon face, an age, attributes such as pace and passing, and hidden talents. | This is your footballer. None of it is about you as a person. You never type a name. |
| What you earn by playing: the matches your footballer played and how they went, such as the score, your rating, goals, assists, shots, passes and tackles, how much of the match you played yourself, your footballer's totals and how its attributes grow. | To show your footballer's statistics and match history, to run the leaderboards and the national teams' ranking, and for your footballer's growth. |
During a match the app sends our server your taps and nothing else. The server uses them to play the match.
Your connection reaches our server through Cloudflare (see below), which passes your IP address on with it. Our server uses it for one thing: to limit how often one address can try to sign in. It keeps the address in memory only, for a few minutes after the last attempt, and never writes it to its database or its logs.
What we never collect
- Your email address. Apple or Google may include it in what they send us when you sign in. We keep only your identifier from it and ignore the rest.
- Your real name, birth date, phone number, photos or contacts.
- Your location.
- Advertising identifiers.
- Analytics, usage tracking or crash reporting from other companies. The app contains none.
- Anything that follows you across other apps or websites.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising.
Tikivela has no chat and no messages, and nobody can write anything that other players see.
What other players can see
Football is played in public. Every player can watch any match live, and the national teams' ranking, their players and the leaderboards are open to every player. Other players can therefore see your footballer: its generated name, face, nationality, age, position, shirt number and attributes, its statistics and how its matches went. They do not see your sign-in identifier, and nothing they can see says who you are.
Your footballer's hidden talents are never shown to anyone, you included. You find them by playing.
One account per device
This is not switched on yet, and until it is, nothing described in this section is collected or stored. We will switch it on before the game opens to everyone. This is what it will do.
To keep the game fair, each iPhone will be able to have only one Tikivela account at a time. For this the app will use two Apple services:
- App Attest lets our server check that it is talking to the real Tikivela app on a real Apple device, not a copy or a script. For this our server will keep the public half of a key that your iPhone makes for the app, with Apple's receipt for it. The key says which installation of the app is talking, not who you are.
- DeviceCheck lets us keep two bits (two yes-or-no values) per device at Apple. Apple also records when we last changed them. We will use the bits to remember that a device already has an account, or that its account was deleted and the device has to wait. They survive deleting and reinstalling the app.
Neither service gives us any personal data. Apple does not tell us who owns the device, and the two bits do not say who you are.
Once this is on, when you delete your account the same device can create a new account again after a wait of at least 7 days. Apple records only the month we changed the bits, so the wait ends 8 days after the end of the month you deleted in; the app shows you the date before you delete.
Signing in with Apple or Google
When you sign in, you deal with Apple or Google directly, under their own privacy policies. They send our server a signed message saying who you are to this app. Our server checks that the message really comes from Apple or Google and was meant for Tikivela, and keeps only your identifier from it. With Sign in with Apple, that identifier is one Apple makes for our apps alone: apps from other companies see a different one. With Google, it is the identifier Google uses for your Google account.
Apple shows app makers combined figures, such as download numbers, and crash reports from people who agreed in their iPhone settings to share them with developers. These do not tell us who you are, and we do not connect them with any account.
Where your data is processed
- Our server, our database and its backups are in Frankfurt, Germany, in data centres of DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean hosts them for us and may not use the data for anything else. The copies of the database that we keep with DigitalOcean outside the server are encrypted before they leave it, and can only be opened with a key that is kept on no server.
- Cloudflare sits in front of our server and this website to protect them from attacks and to deliver this website. Every connection passes through it, so Cloudflare sees your IP address and the technical details of each request. Cloudflare runs a worldwide network, so a connection may pass through a data centre outside the European Union. Such transfers are covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and Cloudflare's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
This website sets no cookies, loads nothing from other websites and contains no scripts. It does not know who you are.
Why we are allowed to do this
Under the GDPR we rely on two grounds:
- To give you the game you asked for (Article 6(1)(b), performance of a contract): your account, your sessions, your footballer and your matches.
- Our legitimate interest in a safe and fair game (Article 6(1)(f)): protecting the server through Cloudflare, limiting how often one address can try to sign in, one account per device once it is switched on, and keeping backups so that nobody's footballer is lost if something breaks.
How long we keep it
- Your sign-in identifier and your game data: until you delete your account.
- Your footballer: until you retire it or delete your account. Retiring deletes it at once, and you start a new 16-year-old on the same account.
- A session: it stops working 90 days after you signed in, or at once when you sign out. Signing out deletes it. An expired session is deleted the next time you sign in, or with your account.
- Backups: we back up our database every night and keep each backup for 14 days at most; then it is deleted. Data you delete therefore disappears from the backups within 14 days. We use backups only to restore the game after a failure. So that restoring one cannot bring a deleted account back, we keep the internal number of each deleted account (a plain number, not your Apple or Google identifier, and nothing else) for 23 days at most (15 days on the server, and up to 8 more in its backups), and delete those accounts again after any restore.
- Once one account per device is switched on: the two DeviceCheck bits stay at Apple for as long as Apple keeps them, and the key of an installation is deleted when it has not been used for a long time. Neither holds personal data.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account in the app at any time: open Settings and choose Delete account. This deletes your sign-in identifier, all your sessions, your footballer and everything else we hold that is linked to your account, at once and for good. It cannot be undone.
The results of the matches you played in stay, because they belong to the national teams and their ranking, but nothing in them is linked to you any more: your part in them is deleted with your footballer.
Removing Tikivela from "Sign in with Apple" in your Apple account settings, or from your Google account, stops you signing in but does not delete your Tikivela account. Delete it in the app first.
If you cannot use the app any more, write to support@craftshift.com. We do not know your email address or name, so we will need to agree with you on a way to show that the account is yours before we delete it.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- get a copy of the data we hold about you;
- have wrong data corrected;
- have your data deleted;
- have its use restricted;
- receive your data in a common, machine-readable format;
- object to our use of it based on legitimate interest.
Write to support@craftshift.com and we will answer within one month. You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority, in particular the one in the country where you live or work.
Children
Tikivela is made to be safe for players of any age. It has no chat, no messages, nothing that players write, and no purchases. It asks no one for their age, name, email address or location, and it stores nothing about anyone beyond the sign-in identifier and the game.
To play, you need an Apple or Google account. For children, those accounts are set up and managed by a parent under Apple's or Google's own rules. A parent who wants a child's Tikivela account gone can delete it in the app on the child's device, or write to us.
How we protect your data
Everything between the app and our server is encrypted. Our server checks every sign-in with Apple or Google itself and never trusts the app's word for who you are. Session keys are stored only as hashes, so even a copy of our database would not let anyone sign in as you. Your hidden talents never leave the server.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we change the date at the top of this page. If we ever want to store more about you than is described here, we will update this policy before we do.
Contact
Craftshift
Letterhout, 1507 EG Zaandam, the Netherlands
support@craftshift.com