Sniff Scout or Scare Privacy Policy
The privacy policy for Sniff Scout or Scare: no account, no ads, no tracking, and what the optional Walk Here feature sends.
Sniff Scout or Scare is a dog adventure for iPhone, made by Mark Barney in Connecticut. This page explains what the game does with your information. The short version: it collects almost nothing, and it does not track you.
Contact: [email protected]
What stays on your phone
There is no account to make and no sign-in. Your dogs, your progress and your settings are saved on your phone and nowhere else. If you delete the game, they go with it.
What the game does not do
No ads. No tracking across other apps or websites. No analytics or advertising tools. No in-app purchases. No chat, and no way to post anything for other players to see. The game does not ask for your name, your email address, your contacts, your photos or your camera.
Walk Here (optional)
Walk Here turns a real neighbourhood into a place to explore. You never have to use it. If you do, there are two ways in.
If you tap WHERE I AM, the game asks iOS for your location. You can say no, and then nothing is sent. If you say yes, the game rounds your position to roughly the nearest hundred metres and sends only that rounded position to Mark’s map service, which builds the neighbourhood from public OpenStreetMap data.
If you type a place or an address instead, the text you typed is sent to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim search service or, for numbered US street addresses, to the US Census Bureau’s address lookup. Their own privacy policies apply to what they receive.
Your rounded position and your typed search are used only to build the map you asked for. They are not linked to you, because the game has no account to link them to, and they are not used for tracking or advertising. The map service keeps the maps it has built so they load faster next time, and it does not record who asked for them. The service sits behind Cloudflare, which, like any web host, can see the internet address a request came from while it passes the request along.
Playing with friends
Wolf Pack play happens between phones on the same local Wi-Fi network. The game may ask iOS for permission to find devices on your local network for this. It is used only to connect your phones to each other, and nothing about it is sent to Mark.
Beta testing and Apple
If you play through Apple’s TestFlight beta, Apple handles installation and can share crash reports and any screenshots or comments you choose to send. Those reach Mark through Apple. Apple’s own policies cover what Apple collects through TestFlight and the App Store.
Children
The game is made for everybody, and nobody gets hurt in it. Because it collects no personal information, there is nothing about a child to collect, share or delete.
Changes to this page
If the game ever changes what it does with information, this page will change first and the date below will move.
Questions
Ask Mark directly at [email protected].
Last updated 29 October 2026.