Gaelic Star plays fully offline. You need no connection, no account and no sign-in. The game asks you for nothing about yourself: no name, no email, no date of birth. Your career is a file on your own phone.
Two things leave the phone. The game sends us anonymous notes on what gets played, so we can see what people play and where they get stuck. They carry nothing about who you are, and you can delete them from Settings at any time.
The game also carries advertising, and that is new in this update. It is what pays for a game that costs nothing. Those ads are never personalised — we have switched personalisation off for everybody, so no profile of you is built or used to pick them. 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.
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. And the manager name you typed for the career, which is never sent anywhere.
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
Short anonymous notes about what is being played, and nothing else. A session started, a career started, a match played or simulated, a week advanced, a manager sacked. 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 those notes. The game does ask 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 and is never sent to us with the notes.
Separately, the advertising described below involves data leaving the phone. That is set out in its own section, because it is a different thing handled by a different company.
Who holds it
Unity Technologies holds those notes for us, as our processor, under their Data Processing Agreement and on our instruction. They are kept for 13 months. We use them only to see what people play and where they get stuck, so the game gets better.
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 in the next section. The two are kept entirely apart.
Advertising
Gaelic Star is free and carries advertising. That is what pays for it. There is nothing to buy in the game and nothing is locked behind an ad.
The ads are never personalised
We have turned personalisation off for every player, everywhere, without exception. It is set once when the game starts, before the advertising software is switched on, so it applies to that software and to every network it works with. In plain terms: no profile of you is built, and nothing about you is used to choose which ad you see. You are shown an ad because you are playing this game, and for no other reason.
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.
- Everyone — ads are non-personalised, 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. 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, 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
Open Settings in the game and choose Delete my play data. That erases everything your phone has sent us. Or email us at the address above and we will do it for you.
Deleting the app removes the save and the settings on your phone, and stops any further notes being sent. It does not erase the ones already sent, so use Delete my play data first if you want those gone as well.
Children
Gaelic Star is rated for a general audience 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. That question never comes up here. The game asks nobody for a name, an email, a date of birth or anything else about themselves, at any age, so there is nothing for anybody to agree to.
The one question the game does ask is a date of birth, once, so it knows whether it is allowed to show an ad at all — see Advertising above. Nothing the game sends us is used to build a profile or to choose an ad, and no advertising a player sees is personalised at any age.
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.
The only thing we hold at all is the anonymous notes described above. To erase them, use Delete my play data in Settings. For anything else, 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.
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.
Contact
Questions, corrections and complaints all go to the same place: gaelicstar@proton.me. A person reads it.