Who we are
SoftLife is operated by SoftLife Interactive Media Limited, a company registered in Nigeria. We're the data controller for the personal data described here: we decide how and why it's used. This policy covers the SoftLife game on the web, iPhone and Android, this website, and support. It doesn't cover the sites of brands or payment providers you visit from SoftLife.
Questions or requests: privacy@playsoftlife.com.
What we collect
| What | Details | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Game name, market (country), time zone, whether you're a guest or have a full account, and account status | You, when you start |
| Date of birth | Asked before your first purchase, or before you speak or host in an audio room, to check your age | You |
| Email address | If you sign in with Google, Apple or Facebook and they confirm it; if you give one at checkout; or if you verify one in settings | You or your sign-in provider |
| Sign-in details | Your phone number, used to text you sign-in codes, which we store only as a one-way hash; your Google, Apple or Facebook account ID, also stored as a hash; and the name your sign-in provider shares | You and your sign-in provider |
| Device | A random identifier the app creates and keeps on your device, which we store only as a hash, and whether you play on the web, iPhone or Android | Your device |
| Profile and play | Avatar, bio, interests, level and progress, your wallet and its history, what you own, missions, cups, and where you are in the game's world (a city or district in SoftLife, not your real location) | Your play |
| Businesses | Businesses you found or manage: their name, logo, slogan and about text and their earlier versions, the district and unit, opening hours, prices, treasury and sales, and who follows them. Their name, brand, district and sales figures are public in the game | You |
| Game jobs | Your in-game job, job applications (your interview answers and the result), shifts (when you clocked in and out, the tasks you did, how quickly you answered them and your performance score), weekly reviews (promotions, raises and warnings), payslips, and your in-game energy and mood. Game jobs are part of the game: they aren't real employment and pay play money only | Your play |
| Social | Friends and blocks, crews, chat messages (and who you said them to in the world), guestbook notes, parties, shout-outs, polls and votes, events, audio rooms and world voice (when, your role, and how long you listened, never the audio) | Your play and other players |
| Purchases | What you bought, price, tax, currency, payment method, the provider's reference, the email used at checkout, refunds, disputes, your Pass and your spending limits | You and our payment providers |
| Safety and fraud | Keyed hashes of your IP address and network at sign-up and when you sign in, device links between accounts, signals like a purchase attempted by someone under 18 or a chargeback, reports you make or that are made about you, and moderation records (what moderators decided about things you wrote, strikes, appeals, and your creator trust tier, which is worked out from your account's age, level and history and decides how much you can create and whether it's checked first) | Your use of SoftLife and other players |
| Support | Your messages, plus the app version, device type, market and your last 10 wallet entries, so we can help with payment questions | You |
| Notifications | Your push token or browser push subscription, your notification settings and a log of what we sent | Your device and your settings |
| Website forms | Email, name, company, country and message, and a keyed hash of your IP address to stop abuse | You |
We need your account, date of birth (for purchases and speaking) and payment details to provide SoftLife; without them you can't use those features. Everything else is optional or created by your play.
What we don't collect. We don't access your real-world location, contacts, photos or microphone outside audio rooms, and we don't record audio rooms. We don't receive your full card number, card security code or bank login: payments are taken on the provider's own checkout. Payment confirmations providers send us can include limited payment details, such as the card type, the last four digits and the bank. Our access logs don't record IP addresses; we use your IP address only for a few minutes to limit how many requests can be made, and keep it longer only as a keyed hash that can't be turned back into the address.
How we use it, and our legal reasons
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Creating and running your account, wallet, game and social features, and delivering what you buy | Performing our contract with you |
| Checking your age before purchases, speaking in rooms and age-restricted sponsored content | Legal obligation, and our legitimate interest in protecting young people |
| Taking payments, applying spending limits, issuing refunds and keeping financial records | Contract and legal obligation (tax and accounting law) |
| Preventing fraud and abuse: the device graph that stops welcome-gift farming, payment fraud checks, rate limits | Our legitimate interest in keeping SoftLife fair and secure, and legal obligation |
| Moderating chat, guestbooks and rooms, handling reports, and enforcing our terms | Contract and our legitimate interest in keeping players safe |
| Answering support requests | Contract and our legitimate interest |
| Push notifications | Your consent (given in your device's or browser's permission prompt), which you can withdraw at any time |
| Choosing which sponsored content to show | Our legitimate interest in funding SoftLife through labelled sponsorship (see below) |
| Understanding how SoftLife is used and improving it, using pseudonymous event data in our own systems | Our legitimate interest in improving the game |
| Replying to website enquiries | Our legitimate interest, or steps you asked for before a contract |
| Complying with the law, and protecting our rights and other players | Legal obligation and our legitimate interest |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we've weighed them against your rights; you can object (see your rights). We don't make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. Our automatic checks, such as holding a welcome gift or hiding a message after several reports, are reviewed by people on request.
Sponsored content
Brands sponsor places, events and content in SoftLife, always labelled "Sponsored". We choose what to show ourselves, using information from the game only: the city you're in, your level, whether you have a full account, whether you've made a purchase, whether you're in a crew, and your platform. Age-restricted products only reach full accounts over the legal drinking age in your market. We don't use what you do on other sites or apps, and we don't share your personal data with brands. Brands only get totals: views, clicks and how many different players saw their content, by day or hour, by place in the game, by city and by platform. A total that covers fewer than 20 players is shown as "under 20" and left out of any finer breakdown, so no one can be picked out. Brands never get your name, account, device or anything else that identifies you. If you follow a sponsored link, you leave SoftLife and the brand's privacy policy applies.
International transfers
SoftLife's hosting and some of our providers are outside your country, so your personal data may be transferred to and processed in other countries, including South Africa, the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States. When we transfer it, we protect it as the law where you live requires: by transferring to countries recognised as having adequate protection, using standard contractual clauses or similar safeguards, or relying on another lawful basis such as the transfer being necessary to perform our contract with you. Write to privacy@playsoftlife.com for details.
How long we keep it
We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purposes above. These periods are applied automatically every day.
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, profile, wallet and game progress | While your account is open. Deleted (or anonymised, for financial records) within 7 days of a deletion request. |
| Chat messages (including what you say to people in the world, and who it was said to) | 30 days. A message that's been hidden after reports and is waiting for a moderator is kept until it's reviewed, and at most a year. If you delete your account, messages said to you no longer say they were to you. |
| Guestbook notes, shout-outs, friends and your activity feed | Until they're deleted or you delete your account. |
| Visits you make to players' houses and businesses (which place and which day, counted for their owners) | Until you delete your account. |
| Which of a district's people (the game's own characters) you've talked to, so they greet you by name | 60 days after your last chat with one, or until you delete your account. |
| The districts and landmarks you've found in the game's world, and which parts of each district you've walked (the map's fog of war) | Until you delete your account. |
| Audio room membership (which rooms you joined, your role, how long you listened) | 90 days after you leave the room. |
| Reports, and moderators' decisions on what you wrote | One year after they're closed. |
| Strikes and appeals | A strike counts for 90 days (a year for a serious one). The record is kept for 3 years, including after you delete your account, to protect other players; the text of an appeal is erased when you delete your account. |
| Sign-up and sign-in fraud signals (keyed hashes of your IP address and network) | 90 days. |
| Other fraud and risk signals | Up to 3 years, or longer while they're part of an open fraud case. |
| Hash of a phone number that has earned the welcome gift | Kept after your account is deleted, so the same number can't earn the gift twice. |
| Device identifiers (hashed) | While linked to an account, then 90 days. |
| Signed-out sessions | 90 days after sign-out. |
| Purchase, payment, refund and wallet records, including the email used at checkout | As long as tax, accounting and anti-fraud laws require us to keep them, even after your account is deleted. |
| Notification history | 35 days. |
| Data export copies | 7 days, then the copy is deleted. |
| Messages from this website's forms | 2 years. |
| Support messages | While your account is open; erased when it's deleted. |
| Records of staff actions on your account | Kept as a permanent, tamper-evident record, so staff are accountable for what they do. |
| Backups | Up to 35 days. |
When you delete your account we erase your name, email, date of birth, profile, sign-in methods, devices, push tokens, notification settings, chat messages, guestbook notes, shout-outs, friends and blocks, activity feed, inbox, your place in the game's world, trips, check-ins and house visits, the places you've found and the parts of districts you've walked, which of the game's characters you've talked to, audio room membership and DJ slots, crew invites and requests, event replies and poll votes, reports you've made, scheduled and sent notifications, story messages and appointments, the Today suggestions picked for you, sign-up and sign-in fraud signals and support messages, and you leave your crew. Your businesses close, and what's left in their treasuries is lost. We keep the records the law requires, such as purchases and payments, and game and wallet records that no longer identify you. We may also keep information we need for an open fraud case or legal claim.
How we protect it
- Data travels encrypted (HTTPS), and our databases and backups are encrypted at rest.
- We store phone numbers, sign-in IDs, device identifiers and sign-in tokens only as one-way hashes, and IP addresses only as keyed hashes.
- Real money and play money are kept in separate databases run by separate services.
- Staff only see what their role needs, limited to their markets. Sensitive actions, including deleting an account or refunding a large purchase, need a second person to approve them.
- Every staff action is written to a tamper-evident log, and copies of that log are locked in separate storage that can't be edited.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your personal data at risk, we'll tell you and the regulators as the law requires.
Your rights and choices
Depending on where you live, you have the right to access your personal data, to get a copy of it, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, to data portability, and to withdraw consent where we rely on it. You can do the most common things yourself:
- Download your data: on Me, under Your data, choose Download my data. We send a link to your verified email within 7 days (or through support if you haven't verified one). The link works for 7 days and you must be signed in to the same account to use it.
- Delete your account: on Me, under Your data, choose Delete my account. We finish within 7 days. See what we erase and keep under How long we keep it.
- Correct your details: change your game name (once every 30 days) and email in settings. For anything else, including your date of birth, contact us.
- Notifications: turn push notifications off entirely or by type, and set quiet hours, in settings, or turn them off in your device or browser settings.
- Privacy settings: appear offline, stop sharing your activity, and choose who can send you friend requests, invite you to crews or visit your house.
For any other request, write to privacy@playsoftlife.com with your game name, from the email on your account if you have one. We may need to confirm it's you. We'll reply within the time the law sets (usually a month) and won't charge you unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive. We won't treat you differently for using your rights.
Your country
If you're not happy with how we've handled your personal data, please contact us first. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live:
| Where you live | Law | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Nigeria | Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 | Nigeria Data Protection Commission |
| Ghana | Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843) | Data Protection Commission |
| Kenya | Data Protection Act, 2019 | Office of the Data Protection Commissioner |
| South Africa | Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) | Information Regulator |
| United Kingdom | UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 | Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) |
| United States | State privacy laws, where they apply to you | Your state attorney general |
| Canada | Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA); in Quebec, also Law 25 | Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada; in Quebec, also Quebec's access to information commission |
| India | Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 | Data Protection Board of India |
United States. In the last 12 months we've collected the categories of personal information listed in What we collect, for the purposes in How we use it, from the sources listed there, and disclosed them only to the service providers and others listed in Who we share it with. We don't sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we don't use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. Depending on your state, you can ask to know, access, correct or delete your personal information, and you can use an authorised agent; we'll verify the request. Because we don't track you across other sites, we treat browser opt-out signals such as Global Privacy Control as confirming that preference.
Children
SoftLife is for people aged 18 and over, and we don't knowingly collect personal data from anyone younger. We block purchases by anyone who gives a date of birth under 18. If you believe a child is using SoftLife, contact privacy@playsoftlife.com: we'll close the account and delete its data. A parent or guardian can also ask for a refund of a child's purchases; see our purchases and refunds policy.
Changes to this policy
We'll update this policy when we change how we handle personal data or the law changes, and show the date of the latest version at the top. If a change is significant, we'll tell you in the game before it takes effect.
Contact us
Email privacy@playsoftlife.com. SoftLife is operated by SoftLife Interactive Media Limited, a company registered in Nigeria.