Privacy Policy

Untrack · Last updated: 2026-08-16

This policy describes what the app does with information. The short version: the app has no account, and it sends nothing about you anywhere. Everything below is the detail behind that sentence.

What runs on your phone, and stays there

• Which apps you have. If you turn on automatic scanning, the app reads the list of apps installed on your device so it can show tips for them. That list is used on your phone only. It is never uploaded, and there is no server that could receive it.
• What you've marked as done. Your progress and privacy score are stored locally on your device.
• Your settings. Language, notification choices, and whether scanning is on are stored locally.

Uninstalling the app deletes all of this from your phone.

One copy can exist outside your phone, and it is yours. Android's own backup service includes this app, so your settings, your progress and the list of apps the app knows about may be copied into your Google account along with the rest of your phone's backup. That copy is what restores your progress when you set up a new phone, which is why it is switched on. It is encrypted, it is held by Google under Google's terms, and this project cannot see it or ask for it — there is no account here to attach it to. You can turn it off for this app, or for everything, in your phone's Settings under System → Backup. Nothing else leaves your phone.

You can turn automatic scanning off at any time in Settings. When it's off, the app does not read your installed apps at all, and you add the apps you care about yourself. That applies to the daily background check as well, not only to the app on screen — with scanning off, nothing asks your phone about your apps whether you are looking or not.

Notifications

The app can tell you two things: that you installed an app it has tips for, and that new tips arrived for apps you already have. Both are switched on by default, but nothing is delivered until you allow notifications when your phone asks — declining costs you nothing else, and the same information is waiting the next time you open the app.

Working this out needs no information beyond what the app already reads on your phone. Nothing is sent anywhere to decide whether to notify you, and no server knows what you were told or whether you opened it.

What leaves your phone

Downloading privacy tips. The app downloads the tip catalog from a public content network. This happens when you pull the list down to refresh it, when the app opens (at most once every thirty minutes), and — if you have notifications switched on — once a day in the background. This is an ordinary file download of public files: it sends no information about you, and no account or identifier is involved. The request identifies itself only as Untrack, with no version number and nothing about your device — apps normally send their Android version, phone model and build number here, and this one deliberately does not. Your network provider, and the content network, can see your IP address, as with any download.

The daily background check is skipped entirely while both notification switches are off, and while your phone is roaming. Turning both off cancels the scheduled job rather than leaving it running with nothing to do.

Visual guides. A tip may have a short recording showing the steps. It is downloaded only when you tap to play it, never automatically, and only the first time — after that it is kept on your phone. Like the catalog, it is a public file requested without any information about you.

Downloaded tips and guides are both checked before they are used. If a check fails, they are discarded and the app carries on with what it already had — so a tampered download changes nothing rather than showing you advice we did not write.

Links you choose to open. Some tips link to the official guidance from whoever owns the setting — Instagram's help pages, Google's support site. Tapping one hands the address to your browser and leaves the app. From that point it is an ordinary visit to that website, which will see your visit in the way any website does. The app passes nothing along with the link, and no link is opened unless you tap it. Links are always https, and the app refuses to open anything that is not.

Nothing else. The app contains no analytics, no measurement code, no crash reporting, no advertising, no social logins, and no tracking of any kind.

What the app remembers about your apps

The app keeps a list of the apps it has tips for that it has seen on your phone — the ones it found, and any you added yourself. It is kept so that turning off "check my installed apps" does not make them disappear along with the tips you have already ticked off.

The list only grows. An app you uninstall stays on it, because forgetting it would also lose the progress you made on it. That means the list is a record of what this app has seen, not a live picture of what is installed right now.

It is a list of package names in the app's private storage, which no other app can read. It is deleted when you uninstall, and it is never sent anywhere: the app has no code capable of transmitting it. It only ever contains apps this project has written tips for, which is a short list — not a survey of what is on your phone. It does not send a usage signal, a heartbeat, or a device identifier, because it has no code capable of doing so.

The project does see how many people install the app, roughly how many use it, and which countries they are in — but that comes from Google Play's own statistics, which Google produces from data it already holds. Nothing in the app reports it, and the project never receives anything that could identify a person.

If you submit a privacy tip

Submitting is entirely optional and only happens when you choose to. When you do:

• The tip itself becomes public. It is posted as an issue on the project's public GitHub repository so it can be reviewed and improved. This includes the app or phone it concerns, the title, steps, explanation, trade-offs, and the display name you chose (if any). The app tells you this before you submit.
• Your contact detail is not published. If you fill in the optional "how to reach you" field, it is sent by email to the maintainer only. It is not written into the public issue and it is not stored in any database. It exists solely so the maintainer can ask a question about your tip, and the email is deleted once the submission is processed.
• No account, no email address required. You may submit anonymously.
• Submissions pass through a small service on mjcyberwise.com that forwards them. That service keeps no submission database, and there is no CAPTCHA: nothing about your device or browsing is examined in order to decide whether you are a person.
• That service keeps short-lived operational logs (three days) so that failures can be diagnosed rather than silently losing your submission. Those logs record error codes and configuration names only — never the content of your submission, your contact detail, or your IP address.

Contributions are licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, as stated in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Donations

The Contribute tab links to PayPal. If you choose to donate, PayPal handles the payment under its own privacy policy — the app receives no information about you, and the project never learns anything about you from the app itself.

Children

The app has an optional mode that surfaces parental-control suggestions for a phone used by a child. It is a filter on which tips are shown; it collects no information about the child, and no information about anyone is transmitted.

Your rights

Because the app holds no personal data about you on any server, there is nothing for the project to look up, export, or delete on request. Your data lives on your device and is removed when you uninstall the app. If you submitted a tip and want the public issue or the maintainer's email copy removed, ask via the repository and it will be honoured.

Changes

Material changes to this policy will be noted in the repository history, and the app will point to the current version. Because the app is open source, you can verify every claim above by reading the code.

Contact

Open an issue on the project repository. For anything sensitive, use the private reporting route in SECURITY.md.