Privacy Policy

The whole of it, before the detail

Hearth keeps no personal data about anybody. There is no account, no server behind it and no path out of the app. The scenes you arrange and the focus sessions you log sit in a folder belonging to the app on your own device, and they are gone the moment you clear them or uninstall.

Everything below is that same sentence taken apart so it can be tested rather than trusted. A short policy is usually a sign that there was little to declare; this one is short for exactly that reason.

The publisher, and where letters go

Black Snow — trading as Black Snow Games
Ove Staubo Munthe-Kaas
Tidemandsgate 43b, 0260 Oslo
Norway
Mail: peis@blacksnow.best

In the Regulation's vocabulary that makes Black Snow the controller — behandlingsansvarlig — for whatever Hearth might process. Nobody processes anything on our behalf, no other party shares the decisions, and no representative has been appointed in any country, because there is no flow of data for such a role to attach to. A data protection officer is neither appointed nor required: that duty attaches to public bodies, and to outfits whose main business is watching people in bulk or working in bulk with the special categories — neither of which describes a timer that never opens a socket.

På norsk: skriv på norsk om du heller vil det, så svarer vi på norsk. Alt som gjelder personvern sendes til adressen over.

What the app stores, and where it sits

Inside the app's private storage Hearth keeps the scenes you have saved, each with its backdrop, its props and the ambience you set; the focus lengths you prefer and whether you use a focus-and-break rhythm; the history of completed sessions that feeds the calendar glow; which scene is currently in use; and your choice of English or Norwegian.

That session history deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the most personal thing in the app: it says when you sat down to work and for how long. It is written on your device, read only by the app that wrote it, and never sent anywhere. Android walls the folder off from other installed software, and Black Snow has no way in either — nothing in the build responds to an instruction from outside.

Uninstalling removes the folder and everything in it. Clearing the app's data from Android settings empties it while leaving the app installed, which is also how to erase a session history without losing the app.

The things that are simply not in the build

No advertising framework was linked in. Nor was anything that counts what you do, attributes an install, reports a crash, signs you in or takes a payment. These are properties of the package rather than options inside it: nothing waits to be switched off, and no server exists anywhere with the power to switch it back on. Taken one at a time, the app never reads, infers or transmits:

• a name, an address, a number or anything else by which you could be reached;
• the advertising identifier Android maintains, the Android ID, a device serial or a hardware address;
• where you are, established by satellite, by network or by inference;
• anything in the address book, the diary, the message history or the call log, and nothing from the microphone or the camera;
• the times at which you start and finish a focus session, which stay on the device as described above;
• the scenes you build, or any picture already stored on the phone.

What Google Play reports back to a developer is a separate matter and arrives already aggregated: installs counted by country, crash rates, star ratings. Not one figure in it identifies an individual, and no other source of information about anyone exists.

What the app asks the system for

Very little appears in the manifest. If a scene is exported as a picture it goes out through Android's own document and media pickers, which permit a single write to the one destination you point at and give the app no view of your photographs before or after. Camera, microphone, location, address book and telephone are absent from the manifest altogether, which is why Android never puts a permission dialogue in front of you.

Backdrops, props, textures and sounds arrive inside the installer rather than being fetched later, so the installation leaves nothing outstanding, and the app is the same piece of software with every radio dead as with all of them live. Obtaining or updating it through Google Play is an arrangement between you and Google under Google's terms, and no part of the account or device data involved there passes through Black Snow.

Children

A quiet room with a fire in it is a reasonable thing to hand a child, and Hearth holds no advertising, no messaging, no links leading out, no sight of other users and no screen asking for money. The collecting is nil across the board, so it is nil for a child as well. Where a child's consent would matter, Article 8 applies and the Norwegian threshold set in the Personal Data Act is thirteen years — but nothing in this app is built on consent in the first place, so the question never opens. Any parent who would like that in writing need only ask.

Which rules apply, and who enforces them

The General Data Protection Regulation applies here even though Norway stands outside the Union, because the EEA Agreement carries it across. It was written into domestic law by the Personal Data Act of 2018 — personopplysningsloven — which additionally resolves the points the Regulation hands over to national legislatures. Supervision belongs to Datatilsynet, at datatilsynet.no.

Because the listing is open worldwide, Hearth is installed by people living in EU member states and in Britain. Anyone inside the Union can take a complaint to the data protection authority of the country they live in; someone in the United Kingdom is covered instead by the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and takes the matter to the Information Commissioner's Office — ico.org.uk. Coming to us before going to a regulator usually settles things faster, but no rule requires it.

What you can ask for, and what comes back

Under Articles 15 to 21 you may see what is held, have it put right, have it removed, have its use suspended, receive it in a portable form, and object to it being processed at all. Article 77 stands beside them: a complaint to a supervisory authority is yours to make, and no wording here has the power to dilute that.

Write to peis@blacksnow.best. Article 12(3) allows a month and the reply will come long before that, running to very little, because no file exists under your name to show you, amend, delete, suspend or pass on. Nobody is asked to prove who they are first: there is nothing in storage for such a check to defend, and asking a stranger to send a photograph of their passport so that we can confirm an empty shelf would put more at risk than the rest of the correspondence put together.

An answer that leaves you unsatisfied is worth one more letter, and it will be read properly. Past that the venue is Datatilsynet, or whichever authority covers where you live.

When this page is set down again

If a later build of Hearth takes on anything touching personal data — a history that synchronises between devices, a reporter for faults, scenes or ambiences sold for money, advertising of any description — this text is rewritten and published first, with the build following behind it. The edition line under the title moves at the same time, while the Play release notes carry a plain summary, which is how the news reaches anyone who never visits this page.

The address itself is fixed for as long as the app is listed, and that edition line is the fastest way to see whether anything has moved since your last visit.