Privacy Policy
The short version
- We collect what it takes to run your account and your game: your email, your handle and name, your birth year, and your saved game.
- We check your date of birth and keep only the year.
- We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for targeted advertising.
- You can download everything we hold about you, or delete your account, from the game at any time.
This summary is here to help. The full policy below is what applies.
1. Who we are
Escape the GrindLife ("GrindLife", "the game") is run by Nick Githinji, doing business as SetForMoney, based in New York ("we", "us", "our"). This policy explains what personal information we collect when you use the game, our websites and related services (the "Service"), how we use it, and the choices you have. It is part of our Terms of Service.
2. What we collect
Information you give us
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Email address | To sign you in (we email you a one-time link and code) and to contact you about your account. |
| Handle and display name | The @handle and name you choose. Other players see them. |
| Birth year | You enter your full date of birth when you sign up. We use it once to check that you are 18 or older, then keep only the year and the time of the check. If you are under 18, we keep nothing: the date is not stored, and the email address you signed in with is deleted at once. |
| Career choice | The career you pick for your life in the game. |
| Agreement records | Which version of the Terms and this policy you accepted, and when. |
| Messages to us | If you write to us or send a report, we keep what you send and our reply. |
Information from playing
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Your saved game | Your character's progress: career, pay, money, home, belongings, choices and the game's calendar. Stored on our servers so you can play on any device, and on your device so you can play offline. |
| What you share | Posts, replies, likes and reposts in the game's feed, which other players see. |
| Messages | Messages you send to other players, with who they went to, when, edits, reactions, and whether they were delivered and read. Stored on our servers so they reach the people you sent them to. Before a message is sent, its text is checked automatically (see Moderation, below). Nobody at GrindLife reads your messages unless one is reported or an automatic check finds a problem. |
| Moderation | To enforce our Terms, what players type to each other (messages, street chat and other posts) is checked automatically before it goes out, by our own rules and by OpenAI's moderation service. A second automatic review, by an OpenAI model working for us, reads: messages the first check was unsure about or stopped, every report, signs that a player may be under 18, and a small random share (about 2%) of direct messages between people who do not both follow each other, each with a few messages around it. The review sees no names or handles. A randomly checked message is not stored for review: if nothing is wrong, no record of it is kept, and nobody at GrindLife sees it. When something is wrong, we keep the message, the messages around it, the decision and what we did (a removal, a warning, a pause, a suspension, a lock or an age check). OpenAI processes this only to give us the result and does not use it to train its models. If you are asked to confirm your age, we keep your answer and the outcome. |
| Dating | If you turn dating on: your settings (open or not, who can ask you, whether your partner shows on your profile) and when you confirmed your age again (only that you did, not your date of birth). For each person you date: the stage you are at, a closeness score, when it started and ended, and a timeline of asks, answers and dates. Dates you plan: the place, the time and who paid what in game money. Closeness comes only from time the server saw you spend together in the same place, never from your messages. We do not ask for or keep your gender, orientation or who you are interested in. |
| Invites | If you sign up through a friend's link: who invited you, and, to stop fake accounts claiming bonuses, a scrambled code made from your browser's random id and your IP address (not the address itself). |
| Presence | While you play online, where your character is in the game world, how they look and what they are doing, so other players nearby can see them. This is passed along live and not stored. |
| Usage stats | Counted by our own server, never by another company: which pages are opened and which sign-up steps are finished, the site or campaign that sent the visit, browser and device type, your country and region (from our network provider, not your device), and which days your account played. Visits carry random ids, and the per-browser one is not used at all if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. No IP address is kept with any of it. We only look at it as totals, like "how many played today", some of which we publish at grindlife.app/stats. It is never used for advertising. |
| Device and connection | Your IP address, browser type and version (the "user agent"), and when you signed in and were last active. We use these to keep accounts safe, stop abuse and fix problems. |
What we do not collect
We do not collect your real-world location, your contacts, photos from your device, or payment card details. We do not use advertising or analytics trackers from other companies.
If you advertise with us
When you book an ad spot we collect your name, email address, the business or brand name, the link you give us (if any), the artwork you upload, the spots and dates you book, and a reference to your payment. Card details go straight to our payment processor, Stripe, and never reach us. We use this to run, review and report on your ad, to send you receipts and updates, and to keep business records the law requires.
Advertisers get counts only: how many times their ad was on screen and how many players saw it. We never give advertisers anything that identifies a player.
If you write books
When you write in the Library app we keep your drafts (title, description, chapters) on your account, any private sharing link you make, the copy you send for publishing, our review of it and the reasons we gave, your price, your sales and earnings in game money, and reports other players make about your book. A published book is public, in the game and on its own page on grindlife.app, with your handle and display name. Before a book goes public, its text is checked against our rules by our content-checking provider (OpenAI), which processes it for us only to give us the result and does not use it to train its models. If you pay to publish or to feature a book, Stripe handles the payment: we get your email address, the amount and a payment reference, never your card details.
3. Why we use it
- To run the game: sign you in, save and sync your game, and show your handle, name, character and posts to other players.
- To keep it for adults: check that every player is 18 or older.
- To keep players and the Service safe: stop spam, cheating and abuse, limit repeated sign-in attempts, review reports and enforce our Terms.
- To talk to you: send sign-in emails, answer your messages, and tell you about important changes to the Service, the Terms or this policy. We will not send you marketing email unless you ask for it.
- To improve the game: understand, in aggregate, how the game is played and where it breaks.
- To meet legal duties: keep records the law requires and respond to lawful requests.
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we rely on these legal bases: performing our contract with you (running the game and your account), our legitimate interests (safety, security and improving the game, balanced against your rights), legal obligations, and your consent where we ask for it.
4. Who can see it
- Other players see your handle, display name, character, posts and replies, and where your character is when you are online in a shared place. They never see your email address or birth year.
- Service providers who work for us under contract and only on our instructions: hosting and database providers, our email delivery provider, Stripe for advertisers' and authors' payments, and OpenAI for checking books before they are published and for checking messages and posts (section 2, Moderation). They may use the information only to provide their service to us.
- Authorities, when the law requires it, or when we believe in good faith that it is needed to protect someone's safety, to investigate abuse such as sexual content involving minors, or to protect our rights.
- A new owner, if the game is sold or merged, who must follow this policy for the information they receive. We will tell you before that happens.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for targeted advertising. We have not done so in the past 12 months.
5. Cookies and storage on your device
We use one cookie, and it is needed for the game to work:
| Name | What it does | How long |
|---|---|---|
| gl_session | Keeps you signed in. It holds a random code that only works on our servers. Your browser cannot read it with scripts, and it is only sent to our own site. | 60 days, or until you sign out |
The game also keeps information in your browser's storage: your saved game, your settings, and a random id for this browser that keeps your posts linked to you when you play signed out in testing. This stays on your device. You can clear it in your browser's settings, which removes the offline copy of your game but not the copy on your account. A second random id, for usage stats, goes with each visit (section 2). It is never made if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking cookies.
6. How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, saved game and agreement records | While your account exists. Deleted at once when you delete your account. |
| Your handle after you delete your account | Held for 30 days so nobody can take it straight away and pretend to be you, then released. Nothing else is kept with it. |
| Sign-in links and codes | Expire after 15 minutes, can be used once, and are deleted within a day. |
| Sign-in sessions (with IP address and browser type) | Until you sign out, or 60 days. |
| Sign-ups that were never finished | Deleted after 7 days. |
| Server logs (with IP addresses) | Up to 30 days. |
| Usage stats | Visit records 13 months. Days your account played, 400 days, or until you delete your account. Daily totals with nothing about any one person in them are kept. |
| Backups | Deleted data leaves our backups within 30 days. |
| Books you write | Until you delete them. Deleting your account deletes your books too, including from the shelves of players who bought them. Payment records are kept as long as tax law requires. |
| Messages | Up to 12 months, then deleted. A message you unsend is wiped at once. Deleting your account deletes the messages you sent. A reported message and the ones around it are kept with the report. |
| Dating | Settings while your account exists. A relationship and its timeline until 12 months after it ends. Asks and answers 90 days, longer if one was reported. Reports about dating are kept as other reports are (below). Deleting your account deletes all of it; the other person sees "Deleted account". |
| Who invited you | While your account exists. |
| Reports and moderation decisions | Items reviewed with no action: deleted within 90 days. Randomly checked messages with nothing wrong: not kept at all. Actions and their evidence (the message and the few around it): up to 400 days, so we can handle appeals and repeat problems, and longer where the law requires it (for example, evidence we must preserve after a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children). In-app notices: 90 days after you see them. Daily totals with nothing about any one person in them are kept. |
7. How we protect it
We follow the New York SHIELD Act and keep reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards for the personal information we hold. Among other things:
- Everything between your device and our servers is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
- There are no passwords to steal. Sign-in links and codes work once and expire in minutes.
- Sign-in codes and session codes are stored only in a scrambled (keyed hash) form, so a copy of our database could not be used to sign in as you.
- Repeated sign-in attempts are limited, and only a few people who need it for their work can reach the servers.
- We collect as little as we need and delete what we no longer need.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.
8. Your rights and choices
Wherever you live, you can:
- Get a copy of your data. In the game, open Account, then Download my data. You get one file with everything we hold about your account.
- Correct it. Change your display name in the game. To change your email address or anything else, write to us.
- Delete it. In the game, open Account, then Delete my account. Your account and saved game are deleted at once (see section 6 for the handle hold and backups).
- Know what we do with it. This policy explains it. Ask us if anything is unclear.
- Opt out of sale, sharing for targeted ads, and use of sensitive information. We do none of these, so there is nothing to opt out of.
Some laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and the privacy laws of other US states and of the EEA and UK, give you these rights formally. We extend them to everyone.
How to make a request
- Use the tools in the game, or use our contact form with the subject "Privacy or data request", giving the email address on your account.
- To protect you, we confirm requests by email to the address on the account before we act on them.
- You can ask someone to make a request for you. We will need your signed permission, and we may ask you to confirm the request yourself.
- We answer within 45 days. If we need more time, we will tell you why, and take no more than 45 more days.
- Using your rights is free, and we will never treat you differently for using them.
- If we say no to a request, we will explain why. You can appeal by replying to that email, and we will respond within 45 days. If you are not satisfied, you can contact your state attorney general or, in the EEA or UK, your data protection authority.
9. Adults only
The Service is only for people 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe someone under 18 has given us information, tell us through our contact form and we will delete it.
We do not ask everyone for ID. If something suggests a player may be under 18 (what they write, or a report), we ask them to confirm their date of birth again and limit some features until a person on our team checks. We may later offer an age-verification provider for this; if we do, we will name it here first, and say what it receives.
10. Where your data is stored
Our servers are in the United States. If you use the Service from another country, your information is sent to and kept in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those where you live. Where the law requires, we use appropriate safeguards for these transfers.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we will update the date and version at the top. If a change matters, we will tell you in the game or by email, and where the law requires it we will ask for your agreement.
12. Contact us
Connect on X: @delicto_nick
Contact: grindlife.app/contact