The career plays fully offline. Your career is a file on your own phone. The game never asks for an email, a password or a photo, and there is no Apple or Google sign-in.
The online leaderboards are new in this update. To run them, the game gives your phone an anonymous player id the first time it connects — nothing is asked to make it. If you make your player and play Compete, other players can see the name you chose for him, his county and club, his face and kit, and your scores and badges. That is what a leaderboard is. You can report or block a name, and you can delete your account and everything on the boards from Settings at any time.
The game also sends us anonymous notes on what gets played, so we can see where people get stuck, and it carries advertising, which is what pays for a game that costs nothing. Anyone under 13 is shown no ads at all, and until the game has been told an age it treats the player as a child and shows none. Your date of birth stays on your phone.
Who we are
Gaelic Star is made and published by Peter O’Donovan, an individual developer based in Ireland. For the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that is the data controller for this app.
You can reach us at gaelicstar@proton.me.
What stays on your phone
Your career save, with your county, your panel, your results and your seasons. Your settings. The manager name you typed for the career, which is never sent anywhere. Your date of birth, if you gave it. And the list of names you have blocked on the leaderboards.
All of this lives inside the app’s own storage. We cannot see it. If your phone is set to back up to iCloud or Google, that backup may include the file, the same as it does for other apps. That is a setting on your phone, not something the game does.
What leaves your phone
Three things, each in its own section below.
- Anonymous notes on what is being played. A session started, a career started, a match played or simulated, a week advanced, a manager sacked, a leaderboard opened, a run sent to the boards, an ad offered or watched. Each note carries the version of the game, the time it happened, a random id made for that install of the app, and the number of the county you are managing. There is no name, no email, no location, no contacts and no advertising identifier in any of them.
- What the online leaderboards need — your anonymous player id, and, once you play Compete, your player’s name and look and your scores. See Online leaderboards.
- What the advertising needs, which is handled by a different company. See Advertising.
The game asks your date of birth once, on its own screen, and that answer decides which ads you may be shown. It is kept on your phone. It is never sent to us, never put on a leaderboard, and never handed to an advertiser — the advertising software is told only whether the player is a child, under 16, or an adult.
Who holds it
Unity Technologies holds the notes and everything the leaderboards need for us, as our processor, under their Data Processing Agreement and on our instruction. The notes are kept for 13 months, and we use them only to see what people play and where they get stuck, so the game gets better. How long the leaderboard data is kept is set out in its own section.
We do not sell any of it. We do not share it with advertisers, and we do not join it to anything else — including to anything to do with the ads described below. The two are kept entirely apart.
Online leaderboards
Compete is the part of the game where you kick against everybody else who plays it, on a board for the day and a board for the week, for the whole world, for your county and for your club. It is the one part of the game that is public.
Your player id
The first time the game connects, Unity makes an anonymous player id for your phone. It is a random string. Nothing is asked to make it — no email, no password, no phone number — and there is no Apple or Google sign-in. It is what lets the boards tell your score from somebody else’s.
What other players can see
When you make your player and play, every other player of the game can see, beside your score:
- the name you chose for your player;
- his county, and his club if you picked one;
- his look — the face, hair, beard and skin tone you built, his height and build, his kit, number, boots and portrait frame;
- your scores and your streak;
- up to five badges you chose to show, and a short public record: medals won, days at number one, your best day and best week, your best streak and how many days you have played.
That is all. Your player is built from parts in the game, so there is never a photo. No email, no date of birth and no location go on a board. The name is the only thing you type, so think about whether you want your full real name on it — a nickname works just as well.
How a score is checked
The phone never sends a score. It sends the kicks you made — where you aimed, how hard, how much curl, and what happened — and our server plays them back and works out the score itself. The kicks are not kept once the score is worked out; a short fingerprint of them sits with the score. A score that does not check out is shown to you and to nobody else.
Why we use it
Because you asked to take part. Showing your name, your player and your score to the other players is what running the competition means, and it cannot be done without them. Checking scores and dealing with reported names is what keeps it fair and safe for everybody in it, which is a legitimate interest of ours and of every other player. None of it is used for advertising.
How long it is kept
- The day’s boards are wiped every evening, at 8pm Irish summer time (7pm in winter).
- The week’s boards are wiped every Sunday at the same time.
- Old boards are not kept. When a board is wiped, it is gone — there is no archive of past days or weeks.
- The streaks board never resets, so your best streak stays on it, and the server’s own copy of your streak, your badges and your record stays with it, until you delete your account.
- Reports made about a name are kept with that player’s account until it is deleted.
Reporting and blocking a name
Names are checked against a list of banned words before they are saved, and a name that fails is not saved at all. If one gets through anyway, tap it on any board to open that player, then tap REPORT or BLOCK.
- Block — that player disappears from every board you look at. It happens on your phone. They are not told.
- Report — the report reaches us with the reason you gave. When three different players have reported a name, it is hidden on every board for everybody, and we read reports ourselves as well. A report records who made it, so that one person cannot report the same name three times.
Deleting your account
Open Settings in the game and tap Delete account, then tap it again to confirm. That deletes your player id, everything the server keeps for it, and every score you have on a live board, including the streaks board. On the phone it also clears your player, your streak, your badges and your blocked list. Your career save is not touched.
If you no longer have the game, email us with your player’s name and county and we will find the account and delete it for you. The steps are also on their own page: Delete your account.
Advertising
Gaelic Star is free and carries advertising. That is what pays for it. There is nothing to buy in the game. After three free goes a day at the daily kicking challenge, another go costs a short video ad; nothing else is behind an ad.
Personalised only for an adult who says yes
If you are under 16, or the game has not been told your age, your ads are never personalised. That is set when the game starts, before the advertising software is switched on, so it applies to that software and to every network it works with, and nobody asks you about it.
If you told the game you are 16 or over, the ads may be personalised — but only if you agree. In Europe and the UK you are asked on Google’s consent screen (below). Say no and you get ordinary, non-personalised ads, and the game is exactly the same.
On an iPhone, anyone who is shown ads is also asked by Apple whether the game may track them across other companies’ apps and websites. Say no and the phone’s advertising identifier is not shared with anybody. You can change that answer at any time in the iPhone’s own Settings, under Privacy & Security.
On an Android phone, you can reset or delete the phone’s advertising ID at any time in the phone’s own Settings, under Privacy, then Ads. A deleted ID is not shared with anybody.
Under 13 sees no ads at all
The game asks your date of birth once, on a plain screen with no right answer suggested. It is kept on your phone and never sent to us.
- Under 13 — no advertising is shown, at all, ever.
- Under 16 — every ad request is marked as being for a person below the Irish digital age of consent, and is handled accordingly.
- 16 and over — ads are personalised only if you agree, as above.
Until that question has been answered, the game treats the player as a child and shows no ads. Guessing the other way would mean an ad network serving a twelve-year-old, so we do not guess.
Who serves them, and what they involve
Advertising is served by Google AdMob (Google Ireland Limited), and by the advertising networks AdMob works with, including Liftoff. To deliver an ad and to count it, they process technical information from the device — its type and operating system, the internet address it is connecting from, the device’s advertising identifier where you have allowed it, and whether an ad was shown, watched or closed. They are the ones who decide how that information is used for their own purposes, so for that part they are a data controller in their own right, not our processor.
Google’s own explanation of what it does with that information is here: Google Advertising and Privacy, and its list of partners is here.
Consent, if you are in Europe
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the game asks for your advertising choices on a Google consent screen before it requests a single ad, and it will not request one until that is settled. You can change your answer later from Settings in the game.
What is never advertised
No betting or gambling advertising, ever. Plenty of the people playing this are children, and that is not something we will take money for.
Deleting it
There are two buttons in Settings in the game, because there are two different things to delete:
- Delete my play data erases the anonymous notes on what gets played.
- Delete account erases your player id, everything the leaderboards keep for it, and every score you have on a live board — see Online leaderboards and Delete your account.
Or email us at the address above and we will do either for you.
Deleting the app removes the save and the settings on your phone, and stops anything further being sent. It does not erase what was already sent, and it does not take your name off the boards, so use the two buttons first if you want those gone as well.
Children
Gaelic Star is made for players aged 13 and over, and plenty of the people playing it are under 18. It is not in the App Store’s Kids Category. In Ireland a person has to be 16 to agree to a service using their data themselves, under section 31 of the Data Protection Act 2018. The game asks nobody for an email, a phone number or a photo, at any age.
The online leaderboards are the one place a player is seen by other players. A player under 13 is never put on them: he can play the kicking challenge and read the boards, but his name, look and scores stay on his phone and are never sent. From 13 up, a player appears by the name they chose for their player — which may be their real name — with his county, club and look. So:
- every name is checked against a list of banned words before it is saved;
- any name can be reported or blocked by any player, and three reports hide it everywhere;
- there is no chat, no messaging and no way for one player to contact another;
- a nickname works just as well as a real name;
- the account and everything on the boards can be deleted from Settings at any time.
The game also asks a date of birth, once, so it knows whether it is allowed to show an ad at all — see Advertising above. That answer stays on the phone. Nothing the game sends us is used to build a profile, and no player under 16 is ever shown a personalised ad.
If you are a parent or guardian and you have a question about what this game does, write to us at the address above and we will answer it plainly.
There is nothing bought and nothing sold
Gaelic Star has no in-app purchases. There is no store, no currency you can buy, and no payment information of any kind is asked for or handled by this game. Everything the game has, every player has. The advertising described above is how it is paid for, and there is no version of the game you can buy to remove it.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to access, correct, erase, restrict, port and object to the processing of your personal data.
What we hold is the anonymous notes and what the leaderboards need, both described above. To erase them, use Delete my play data and Delete account in Settings. For anything else — including a copy of what we hold about your player — email us and we will sort it.
If you believe your data has been handled improperly, you have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In Ireland that is the Data Protection Commission.
This website
This site sets no cookies and runs no advertising or tracking scripts. It is a handful of plain pages served by Vercel, which keeps ordinary server logs — the address you came from, the page you asked for, the time, and your browser’s user agent — for a short period so that the site can be kept working and abuse can be spotted. That is the same record every web server on the internet keeps, we do not join it to anything else, and we do not build a profile from it.
The fonts on this site are served by Google Fonts, which sees the request for the font file. Nothing else on the page is loaded from anywhere but this site.
If a visitor-counting tool is ever added here, it will be one that does not use cookies and does not identify anybody, and this section will say so on the day it goes in.
The club form
There is one form on this site, at Add your club. It is there because the game is missing the colours of several hundred GAA clubs, and the people who play for them are the ones who know.
What it sends is the club: the county, the club name, the two jersey colours, the home pitch, and the optional extras on the form — nickname, grade, championship, titles and a line about the club. None of that is personal data. The last box asks for a name or a handle if you want the credit, and it is the only thing on the form that could identify you. It is optional, leave it empty and nothing about you is sent.
No account, email address or password is asked for. Entries go into a private spreadsheet held in Google Workspace and read by a person, and are used for one thing only: putting clubs into the game. They are never sold, never shared and never used to contact anybody. If you gave a name and want it removed, email gaelicstar@proton.me and it goes.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or why, the date at the top of this page changes with it, and the change is named here and in the app’s release notes. We will not quietly widen what is collected.
6 September 2026: the anonymous notes on what gets played were added with version 1.0.1, along with the Delete my play data button, and this page was updated for them. Before that the game sent nothing at all.
23 September 2026: the online leaderboards were added with version 1.0.4 — the anonymous player id, the name, look and scores other players can see, reporting and blocking, and the Delete account button — and this page was updated for them. The same update corrects what this page said about advertising: since version 1.0.3, a player who told the game they are 16 or over and agreed to it may be shown personalised ads. Under 16, they never are.
Contact
Questions, corrections and complaints all go to the same place: gaelicstar@proton.me. A person reads it.