Sweet Street is a game about a garden. It asks for no account, no email address and no password, it shows no advertising, and it carries no analytics, telemetry or tracking of any kind — not our own, and no third party’s. There is no advertising identifier anywhere in it.
Almost everything the game knows about you stays on your own device. The one exception is sharing a house with other players, which you have to go and do on purpose, and which is described in full below.
Playing on your own
Nothing leaves your device. Your garden, your dog’s name, the cats you have met, the catalogue and the money in the tin are written to a single save file on the device itself, and the photographs you take in the game are ordinary image files kept beside it. We never see any of it. On a phone or a tablet, deleting the app deletes all of it; in a browser, clearing the site’s data does the same. The game opens no network connection at all while you play alone.
Sharing a house
Four flats can share one house. Somebody founds a house, the game gives them a six-letter code, and they read it out to the people they want in it — so a house is private, and the only way into one is to be told the code. From the moment you found or join a house, the game keeps an encrypted connection open to our server, and the server stores:
| The nameplate | the household name you type on the door, up to twenty-four characters. The other three flats see it. |
|---|---|
| A key to your flat | a random secret the game keeps for you, so that only your device can act as your flat. It is not tied to you, your device, or anything you have ever typed. |
| The shared street | the state of the four gardens and the animals that walk between them. |
| Anything you post next door | a keepsake, tuppence, or one of the photographs you have taken in the game. A photograph is a picture of your own garden, drawn by the game; no camera is involved and the game never touches your photo library. |
| Your address, briefly | the internet address your connection comes from is written to the server’s working log, and is used to stop one machine flooding the street. It is not joined to your flat, your nameplate or your garden. |
There is no chat in Sweet Street and no message box. Apart from the nameplate, everything a player can send is chosen from the game’s own fixed vocabulary, and the caption on a posted photograph is written by the game, not typed.
How long it is kept, and how to have it removed
A house keeps its gardens while anybody is living in it. Leaving a flat takes your nameplate off the door and frees the flat for whoever moves in next; at present it does not, by itself, erase the photographs you posted or the garden you left behind, because the street was built to carry on after you. If you would like a flat’s nameplate and photographs erased, write to [email protected] with the house code, and we will remove them. Working logs, including the addresses in them, are kept no longer than thirty days.
Who else sees any of it
Nobody. Nothing is sold, nothing is shared with advertisers, and there is no third-party service inside the game. The server is ours, it runs in Germany, and the connection to it is encrypted.
Money
The current build sells nothing and contains no purchases. If purchases are ever added, they will run through Apple’s or Google’s own payment flow, which means the store — not us — handles your payment details. We would never see a card number.
Children
Sweet Street contains nothing unsuitable for any age, but it is a game you read: the cards, the letters and the catalogue carry it, and it is not made for, or directed at, children under thirteen. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child.
This website
sweetstreetlullaby.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics. The browser version of the game keeps its save in your own browser’s storage, on your machine, and the Bandstand keeps a tune you are working on the same way. Our web host keeps ordinary server logs.
Changes, and how to ask
If this ever changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it and the change is described here. Any question about what is kept, or any request to see or erase it, goes to [email protected].