Good Soil — Safety & Privacy, One Page
Read time: about five minutes. You can hand this to a parent as-is.
Every claim below is drawn from the game's own live, founder-blessed /privacy and /terms pages (src/app/privacy/page.tsx, src/app/terms/page.tsx — last updated 2026-08-21, amended 2026-08-25) and the posture and legal reasoning behind them, docs/CHILD_SAFETY_POSTURE.md. A note on that second document below, in "What has not happened yet" — its own evidence tables have fallen behind the shipped product on a few points, and this page is written from the newer, live source where the two disagree. See the flag at the bottom.
What Good Soil is
A general-audience farming game with a Christian heart, free to play in a browser. It is not marketed to a specific age group, and younger children can play the whole thing — the whole farm, the whole town — without ever being asked for anything.
The age rule, and why
Signing in (an account) is for age 14 and up. Under 14, a visitor never sees the sign-in offer at all, is told so kindly, and keeps playing — asked for nothing, ever. Fourteen is deliberately the highest of the three age lines that actually bind a Canadian company: the US children's privacy rule and Canada's federal privacy office both draw the line at 13; Quebec's Law 25 draws it at under-14, and binds by where the player is, not where the company is. One number, applied to every player everywhere, clears all three at once.
What is collected, and when
Nothing — until someone chooses to sign in, and signing in is never required to play. The sign-in card is also the only place age is ever asked, once. Two ways to sign in exist, and they collect different amounts:
- Email link: just the email address. That's the whole of it.
- "Continue with Google": email, name, and profile picture — Google hands over more than the email route does. Use the email link if you'd rather the game not hold a name or photo.
If someone signs in, the game also keeps a copy of their save (the farm's state, plus any names they typed for their farm, animals, or a well). Those typed names are never shown to other players — every other player only ever sees a name the server assigns from an approved list.
What never happens, whatever your age
No advertising. No push notifications. No location tracking. No analytics or tracking cookies of any kind — audited directly in the code, not just promised. No player can type a message to another player, ever — the most one player can send another is one of eight fixed phrases, like "thank you." No reward of any kind — coins, items, unlocks — for praying, reading Scripture, giving, or professing faith; those stay invitations, never scored.
Neighbors (visiting another player's farm)
Requires an account, so this whole feature is 14-and-up only. Nobody can search for or discover another player — no directory, no "people you may know." The only way two farms connect is a single-use invite link one player hands to another, and both sides have to accept; an invite expires after seven days, and one account can have at most twenty neighbors. A player can mute, remove, or report a neighbor from inside a visit. Reporting cuts contact both directions immediately, not only for whoever reported, and is flagged for the founder to look into.
Purchases: there are none
Nothing in Good Soil can be bought. There is no shop, no currency to buy, no ads, and no way to spend money on the game at all. A child cannot run up a bill in it, because there is nothing to run up.
That is a live fact and not a promise about intentions: the purchase code exists in the game but is switched off in production, and it is the absence of a single setting that keeps it off. Verified on 2026-08-28 by reading the production environment directly, not by reading the code.
If that ever changes it will be visible, and buying would require being 18 or older — stricter than the 14+ account age, because a purchase is a contract. Payment would be handled entirely by Stripe on Stripe's own page, and the game would never see a card number. But today there is no shop.
Where the data lives
If someone signs in, their email and save data are stored on a database in Ohio, USA (run by Supabase), and the game's pages are served by Vercel, also US-based. That means once a player signs in, their information sits under US law as well as Canadian law — worth knowing plainly, not a reason for alarm on its own; it's true of most services built on US cloud infrastructure. If nobody signs in, none of this applies — nothing about that player's farm ever leaves their device, in any country.
Deleting an account
Self-serve, from Settings, inside the game. It removes the farm, the save, and everything the neighbor system holds about that account — connections, invites, reports — immediately, with no waiting period and no undo. Two things it does not remove: the sign-in record itself (email hello@churchwiseai.com and a person will take care of it), and a purchase record if one exists, which Canadian tax law requires be kept for six years.
What has NOT happened yet — said plainly, not softened
No outside legal review has been completed for distributing this to churches or families as a children's program. No formal theological review board has signed off on the content. The posture above is researched carefully against the actual shipped code — not just designed on paper — but it has not been confirmed by a lawyer.
A discrepancy worth flagging, not smoothing over: CHILD_SAFETY_POSTURE.md is the document this page was asked to be derived from, and its reasoning about the 14+ threshold is still sound and is what this page uses. But its evidence tables (§3-§4) predate several things the live /privacy page now describes as shipped: Google sign-in collecting a name and photo (not just an email), a purchase shop that exists in the code but is switched OFF in production (see "Purchases" above — the founder confirmed on 2026-08-28 that purchases are not being done), US-based (Ohio) data storage, and the neighbor system's mute/remove/report controls and retention schedule. This page is written from the newer, live /privacy page where the two disagree, because that page is what a family actually reads and what the product actually does today. CHILD_SAFETY_POSTURE.md itself would benefit from a refresh pass against /privacy's 2026-08-21 and 2026-08-25 corrections — flagged here for the founder rather than silently fixed, since it's the canonical safety document and not this agent's file to rewrite.
One rule for you, if you're promoting this to your congregation
Please don't describe Good Soil as "for kids" or give it an age range in your own bulletin, poster, or social post. It's a general-audience game that happens to be safe for younger children to play without handing over anything — say it that way, not as a children's product. This isn't a style preference: how a game is marketed is one of the things regulators weigh in deciding which privacy rules apply to it.
Questions or an incident
hello@churchwiseai.com. Full policy: the game's own /privacy and /terms pages at goodsoilgame.com.