Privacy policy

We collect no Personally Identifiable Information using our core ScreenZen App

Individual settings and data relating to the core ScreenZen blocking functionality are stored only on your device.

Social accountability and halo companion hardware

Social accountability can be a powerful motivator for changing your habits for the better. To do this, we require storing and sharing data with your selected friends. Social accountability and halo hardware are optional features inside of the ScreenZen app and not required to use the core app blocking functionality.

For Social Accountability and halo registration we use your Apple ID or Google Auth. We may store email address, the username and a user selected profile picture in Google's Firebase and cloud storage. For social accountability, we store your aggregate daily screen time, specific apps or interactions that you choose to share with friends, your daily app opens, streaks, and friend information. For halo, we store your halo settings so it can be shared with others that join your halo as well as the presence or absence of different members in the halo radius.

We do not share this information with third parties. The data resides in Google's Firebase and cloud storage.

Halo purchases

If you choose to purchase halo, checkout is provided through Shopify. To complete your purchase, you may provide shipping, billing, payment, and contact information directly in Shopify’s checkout flow. Order information, including contact, shipping, and billing details, may be stored in Shopify and accessed by the ScreenZen team as needed for order fulfillment, customer support, refunds, and related purchase issues. ScreenZen does not store your full payment card details in the app.

Bug reports & diagnostics

If you choose to submit a bug report or run a diagnostic through the app, we collect limited information solely for the purpose of diagnosing and resolving the issue you reported. Depending on the platform, this may be collected through our in-app bug report form, diagnostic tools, or through BugLife, an open-source tool we self-host.

The information collected may include:

• • Your email address (so we can follow up with you)
• • A description of the issue you provide
• • Basic device information: device model, OS version, accessibility preferences, and app version
• • An anonymous identifier used only to associate your report with diagnostic data
• • Internal app diagnostic logs, which may contain information about app state and events but do not contain personal data
• • A screen recording, if you choose to attach one

For halo diagnostics specifically, we may also collect:

• • A single photo captured when you tap the halo during the diagnostic process (no continuous video is recorded)
  
• • Spatial tracking data from the camera used to compare our distance estimate with real-world movement
• • Motion and activity data generated during the diagnostic session
• • App logs related to the diagnostic

This information is submitted voluntarily and only when you submit a bug report or run a diagnostic. It is used exclusively to investigate and resolve bugs and improve halo performance. Your email is not shared with anyone outside of ScreenZen and is not used for marketing or any other purpose. Bug report and diagnostic data is stored securely and only accessed by the ScreenZen team for debugging and improvement purposes.

Analytics

We may use OpenPanel, which is an open source analytics software that we self-host. OpenPanel may record actions, device details (type, version, model, operating system), and certain in-app choices and interactions, including responses to halo questionnaires and activity related to halo purchase flows. To understand whether ScreenZen is actually helping, we may also collect one simple daily total: the combined time spent in your blocked apps that day and how many times they were opened. We never collect per app usage or anything about apps you have not chosen to block. We use the information collected by OpenPanel to improve our app. We do not store directly identifying personal information in OpenPanel and it does not track your browsing habits across apps or websites.

How we share information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own commercial purposes. We do not use advertising or marketing networks, we do not work with data brokers, and we do not track you across other companies' apps or websites. Our usage analytics run on servers we operate ourselves rather than on a third party analytics service.

We rely on service providers that process data only on our behalf and on our instructions, for things we could not run alone: cloud hosting and databases, push notifications, sign in, and checkout for hardware orders. They may not use your data for their own purposes.

The one case in which a third party receives data for their own use is non-commercial academic research, described next.

Research

We may make the usage analytics described above available to researchers at universities and non-commercial research institutions, for research that is not commercial. Research datasets are built only from those usage analytics. They never include social accountability data, halo data, purchase information, bug reports, or your email address.

Summary statistics, such as counts, averages and distributions, contain no information about any individual. We may produce these from any usage analytics we hold.

Individual level datasets are de-identified before they leave our systems. We remove device and session identifiers, IP addresses, any location more precise than country or time zone, and any text a person typed. We replace our internal identifier with a new random one created for that dataset and destroy the link between the two. Timestamps are reduced to the hour. Each dataset contains only the fields the study needs. We will not attempt to re-identify anyone from a de-identified dataset.

A researcher receives an individual level dataset only under a written agreement that prohibits any attempt to identify a person, prohibits passing the data to anyone else or combining it with other data about individuals, requires secure storage and deletion when the research ends, and limits use to the stated research. Published findings must not identify any individual.

Because a shared dataset contains nothing that ties a record to a particular person, we cannot remove one person's records from it after it has been shared. Our analytics are not linked to your identity, so we also cannot find your records from a request. Deleting the app stops further collection.