Google Play requires publishers have a privacy policy.
As of this writing, I have two apps on Google Play. Here are their privacy policies:
Tippette
I collect no data. Your tipping habits are private. This is basically a streamlined calculator app for tips. It’s doing math. That’s it. I couldn’t care less about your data, and have made no way to store it, and have zero desire to ever store it.
Ticky-Tacky-Toey
It’s… it’s tick tack toe. No I don’t store any of your data. Not your games, nothing. Again, I don’t even have the ability to track any of this data myself. Even for how few users I likely have, I wouldn’t be able to store any data. Just have fun, your games are local, and they’re yours.
FunShine Weather
FunShine is a simple weather app. It’s made mostly to illustrate and grow the FunShine design library. However, it is a weather app. One permission it requests is location. I added the option to provide any latitude and longitude you’d like, so you can skip using the location permission. I also only use coarse location permission, which will basically grab the location of your neighborhood, not your house. Though, if your house is in the center of your neighborhood, it could actually be “accurate” without trying to be. Just keep that in mind. What do I do with the location? It’s stored on your device and your device alone, along with your settings in the app, like your preferences for inches over millimeters. I also log the last forecast, which will include the location and the request parameters that generated it. This is to reduce hits on the API, as the API only updates the weather once per hour, so you only actually need to send data to the API once per hour.
The API itself is Open-Meteo. You can find their terms and privacy policy here. Do check it out! Among other things, they also log requests and forecasts on their servers. While this won’t have any identifying information like your email address or name, it will include your IP address. I highly recommend reading all of their information, but you can find some information on their privacy here.
“We may collect non-personal information, such as IP addresses, for technical reasons such as server maintenance or prevent misuse, but this information is not linked to user identities in any way.”
“For troubleshooting purposes, we keep webserver log files that may contain sensitive information such as geographical coordinates. We do not share this data with any third party. All log files will be deleted after a period of 90 days.”
– from Open-Meteo.com
Please give it a full read. While I do not store your location, IP address, or other information, Open-Meteo logs it. You can contact them for more information, or to have them expunge your data, via the contact methods on their website.
All of these apps are also available on Google Play, and Google may track downloads and other information about installed userbase, such as device model and OS version. These statistics are anonymous and out of my control.
dLyteFal Watch Faces
While these watch faces may display complication data, I do not collect any of it. Watch Faces are built using either Samsung’s WatchFaceStudio or as a WatchFaceService in Kotlin. They do not send your private information to myself and I do not collect user data. Data on devices may be shared with Google Play, including items like install rate, but this is not my data, it is anonymized, and it is only shared with me according to your agreement with Google Play. I do not collect or aggregate any user data.
Listen, at the end of the day, I believe privacy is a right. It’s sad that so few companies would agree. Many of them wish they could, but are forced to compete and therefore have to collect data. It’s a sad system that forces everyone to play with the morals of the worst companies. But I’m not a company. I’m just a software engineer who wanted to put some apps out on Google Play for fun, practice, and to build out a portfolio to show off to potential employers. That’s it. So at the end of the day, your privacy is your business, and I shouldn’t have ever been involved at all. It should be legally impossible to collect and store private information to begin with! If it were up to me, privacy would be enshrined in every nation’s constitution. But, we don’t have that yet, so I have to declare it. The policies are above, I hope they’re helpful. Enjoy and stay safe out there!