Privacy policy

Effective 2026-10-27. PettyPawn is run by Hamza Hassan, an individual operator in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, who is responsible for your personal information and is the person in charge of protecting it. Contact: hello@pettypawn.com.

Who can play

PettyPawn is for players 14 and older in the United States and Canada. If you are 14 to 17, a parent or guardian must agree to the Terms before you play. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 14. If we learn that we have, we close the account and delete its data. A parent or guardian can email us to see, correct or delete their teen’s account.

What we collect in the app

Your account: the email address and password you sign up with (handled by Clerk, our sign-in provider, along with verification codes and sessions) and the username you choose. We do not ask for your name, phone number, address, country, photos or contacts. Your game: your pet’s look, your matches, moves and results, rating, coins and abilities, the pets you hold, your place on The Board and your Beef list. Your words: the taunts, saved lines, messages and notes you send, and the text of reports you file. Safety records: reports you make or receive, blocks, moderation decisions and appeals, and when you accepted our policies. Notifications: if you turn them on, a push token for your phone and its time zone offset. Technical data: connection and security logs kept by Clerk and Cloudflare, which can include your IP address, device and browser type, and times of access. We do not collect your precise location, contacts, photos, or microphone or camera input, and we do not use advertising identifiers.

Your age

When you create an account, the app asks for your date of birth. The check runs on your phone and the date never leaves it. If you are under 14, sign-up stops and the phone keeps only a note that it said no. Where a law requires it (Texas today), the app also asks Apple or Google for your age range and parental-consent status when you sign in. That answer is used once, on your phone, to apply the age rule and keep players safe; it is not sent to us and not kept.

Our website

pettypawn.com shows no ads and uses no analytics or tracking cookies. If you join the waitlist, we store your email address, the kind of device you signed up on (iPhone, Android or a computer), the site or link that sent you, the country your connection comes from, and the time. We use them only to email you about PettyPawn’s launch and the game. You can leave the list at any time by replying to any email from us or writing to hello@pettypawn.com.

How we use it

We use your information to sign you in and keep your account secure; to run matches, ratings, The Board and who holds which pet; to show your words to the players you send them to; to send the notifications you turned on; to keep PettyPawn safe (an automatic filter stops some words before they are posted, and a person reviews every report and decides every account restriction); to answer your emails; and to meet legal obligations. We do not show ads, sell or rent your personal information, share it for advertising, or build advertising profiles.

Who sees or receives it

Other players see your username, pet, record, rating and place on The Board, and the taunts and messages you send them; never your email address. Our service providers run parts of PettyPawn for us: Clerk (sign-in), Cloudflare (hosting, databases, storage, security and our alert emails), Expo with Apple and Google (delivering the notifications you turned on), and Google Workspace (our email, when you write to us). They may use your information only to provide their services to us, under terms that protect it at least as well as this policy. We may also disclose information when the law requires it or to protect someone from serious harm; if a report shows an adult sexually exploiting a minor, we report it to the authorities.

Where it is stored

Our providers store and process data in the United States and other countries. Your information may therefore be kept outside Canada and Quebec, where local authorities may be able to access it under their laws.

How long we keep it

Account and game data stay while your account is open. When you delete your account, access closes at once and a cleanup removes your account details and your words from our active systems, caches and archives, normally within 30 days; Clerk deletes your sign-in. Anonymous match results and pet ownership stay so other players’ records remain correct, with your identity removed, and a one-way fingerprint stops an old session from bringing the account back. Evidence from a closed report is kept for 90 days after it is resolved, for appeals and abuse prevention; unresolved reports stay until they are handled. Provider logs and backups follow their own schedules and are never restored into the live game. Waitlist entries stay until you leave the list or we stop sending launch news. We keep emails you send us as long as we need them to help you.

Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit. Only the operator can reach player data, through a separately protected login. No system is perfectly secure: if a breach creates a real risk of significant harm, we will tell you, and the regulators the law requires us to tell.

Your choices and rights

You can block or report players, turn notifications off (in the app or your phone’s settings), and delete your account in the app (Account, rules & support → Delete account) or at pettypawn.com/delete-account. Email hello@pettypawn.com to get a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, withdraw your consent, or ask for a person to review a moderation decision. Withdrawing consent to information the game needs to run means closing your account. We answer within 30 days and may first confirm that you control the account. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, in Quebec to the Commission d’accès à l’information, or in the United States to your state’s attorney general.

Do Not Track

PettyPawn does not track you across other companies’ apps or websites, and no one else collects information about your activity across sites through PettyPawn. A browser’s Do Not Track signal therefore changes nothing here.

Changes to this policy

We post every change on this page with a new effective date and policy version. When a change is material, the app asks you to accept it before it applies to you, and we email the waitlist about changes that affect it.

Contact

Questions, requests and complaints: Hamza Hassan, person in charge of the protection of personal information, hello@pettypawn.com, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.