Tanglewire — untangle the web of connections
Tanglewire has no way to send anything anywhere, and it does not collect anything to send.
No account, no sign-in, no cloud, no advertising, no measurement. The app remembers which levels you have finished, your best untangles, and how you like it set up — all of it written into its own private folder on the phone, all of it staying there. None of it reaches me, and there is nowhere for it to go.
Below is the detail: what is stored, what the app is not permitted to touch, why a "daily" puzzle needs no network, what Google sees because the app lives on Google Play, and what you can ask of me.
Tanglewire is made and published by Per Andreas Kirste, working under the name Pea Kirste, at Sarbuvollveien 9B, 1363 Høvik, Norway. There is no company between you and me — the controller here is a person, and that person is the one answering this address: pod@peakirste.monster.
In data protection terms that makes me the controller for the app, a role which in this case governs almost nothing, because the app puts nothing of yours in my hands. The one place it bites is email, and that has a section of its own.
Three things, none of which describe a person:
There is no name, no email address, no account, no device identifier and no advertising ID anywhere in that. Android keeps each app's private folder out of reach of every other app on the handset, and that folder is the whole of the app's memory.
This is the load-bearing sentence of the whole document. Tanglewire is built without the internet permission, and Android enforces that at the system level: an app that does not hold it is stopped by the operating system from opening a connection, regardless of what its code would like to attempt. The promise is not that nothing is sent — it is that nothing can be.
Nor is there any permission for the camera, the microphone, your location, your contacts, your photos or your wider file storage. A puzzle about dragging dots has no use for a single one of them. If the phone gives a short buzz as a crossing clears, that is the vibration motor, which needs no permission and reports to nobody.
"Daily" usually means a server somewhere handing out today's puzzle and noting who asked for it. Not here. With no network permission there is nothing to ask, so a tangle tied to a day is produced on your own phone from the date itself — the date goes in, a web comes out, the same one anybody else would get on that date, with no request leaving the handset.
A consequence worth spelling out: the app has no idea whether you came back today, yesterday or last year. It cannot count streaks it cannot see, and nothing anywhere is keeping a record of the days you played.
Move attack and time attack keep scores, and scores are usually the thing an app wants to upload. These are not uploaded. There is no leaderboard, no global ranking, no friends list, no share-your-score prompt and no username to choose, because a username would be the first piece of personal data the app ever asked for and it is not going to ask.
Your best times sit in the same private folder as everything else, are compared only against your own earlier attempts, and vanish with the app when it goes.
There is no ad network in this build, no analytics library, no crash reporter, no attribution kit and no social sign-in. Nothing here is funded by watching anyone.
That is worth stating plainly for a puzzle game, because puzzle games are where advertising reaches children most reliably. Since Tanglewire shows no advertisements and gathers nothing from anybody, there is no profile to assemble from a child's play, no audience to sell on, and no reason to ask anyone's age, since no answer would change a thing.
One thing happens over the app's head. If backup to Google Drive is switched on for your phone, Android may copy the small progress-and-settings file into your own Google account along with the backups of everything else. That copy is yours, sits under Google's terms rather than mine, and is invisible to me — I have no account there to open.
It is also the only route by which a shelf of finished levels survives a new handset. Android's own settings switch it on or off, for everything at once or for this app alone.
Installing from Google Play is a transaction between you and Google, recorded under your account. What reaches a developer afterwards is a console of totals: installs by country, Android versions in use, the drift of the rating. There are no individual rows beneath those figures that I could open, and nothing in them touches a level, a record or a board.
Google's own handling runs under Google's privacy policy at policies.google.com/privacy.
It is all in one folder, so there is one thing to remove and nobody to write to. Uninstalling takes the progress, the records, the saved board and the settings with it. To keep the game but start from nothing, Android's app settings will clear its storage, which returns every level to unplayed and every record to blank.
Both are immediate and neither can be undone, and neither needs anything from me, since no second copy was ever made.
Email is the single point at which personal data genuinely arrives: your address, and whatever you chose to put in the message. I use it to answer and for nothing else — no list, no sale, no passing it on. A thread stays while the question is open and for a reasonable while after, in case it comes back, and is then deleted.
The basis for keeping it is the legitimate interest in replying to someone who has written. Nothing in an email can be joined to anything in the app, because the app holds no identifier to join it to. Ask me to delete an exchange and it goes.
Norway gives effect to the General Data Protection Regulation through personopplysningsloven. It grants you the right to ask what is held about you, to receive a copy, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict its use, to object to it, and to have it handed over in portable form. Here those rights land on email correspondence, because that is the only place anything of yours exists.
Ask at pod@peakirste.monster and an answer follows within a month. If it does not satisfy you, Norway's supervisory authority is Datatilsynet at datatilsynet.no, and anyone living elsewhere in the EEA can go to their own national authority instead.
The date beneath the title is the version in force. Anything that truly alters what happens to data — any collection at all, any third-party component, any transfer abroad — appears here before the release that carries it reaches Google Play, and the Data safety declaration in the console is corrected in the same pass.
Tidying a sentence is not that, and simply turns up under a later date.
Pea Kirste
Per Andreas Kirste
Sarbuvollveien 9B, 1363 Høvik, Norway
Du kan gjerne skrive på norsk.
© 2026