Privacy

Last updated 20 September 2026.

What STARE collects

• Your Apple account identifier. Sign in with Apple is the only way in. If you use Hide My Email we never see your real address, and nothing about the app works differently.
• A username and display name that you choose.
• Your stares — the photographs your camera took while you sat still, and how long the sitting lasted.
• Who you are friends with, and who has asked.
• A city name, only if you turn that on in settings, and only ever the city.
• Six facts about how the app was used. That you opened it; that a sitting began; that one ended early, or ended too short to count; and that a stare was kept or discarded. Each one carries the time it happened and, for a sitting, how long it was. That is the whole list — it is written down in full in the source, and the app cannot send anything that is not on it.
• Crash reports, and only if you have left “Share With App Developers” switched on in iOS Settings, under Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. They come from Apple’s own diagnostics, contain a stack trace, an iOS version and a device model, and are not connected to your account when the crash happened before you signed in.

What STARE does not collect

• Location coordinates. The app is limited to reduced accuracy at the system level and cannot receive a precise position even if it asked. The city is stored as text and nothing else is kept.
• Photo metadata. Every frame has its EXIF stripped on your device before it is stored — no GPS, no device model, no timestamp.
• Your contacts, your photo library, your microphone. The app never asks for any of them.
• Behavioural advertising data. There is no advertising SDK, no tracking pixel and no data broker. There is also no third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDK of any kind: the six facts above go to our own database and nowhere else, and the crash reports come from a framework built into iOS.
• Anything about how well you sat still. The app does not measure, score or store how much you moved, how often you picked the phone up, or whether you were really there. It was designed with those measurements in it and they were deliberately removed, because an app whose promise is that nothing is being counted should not be counting that.

Optional phone use comparison

If you connect Screen Time in settings, Apple supplies available usage history to a private report on your iPhone. That report shows the change in time spent in other apps as a percentage, excluding STARE from both comparison periods. Usage totals and the percentage stay inside the report; they are not sent to our servers, analytics, or your friends. We store only your first recorded STARE date locally to choose the comparison period. Older Screen Time history may not be available. You can disconnect in STARE or revoke access in iOS Screen Time settings.

Who can see your stares

Only people you have accepted as friends, and only for 24 hours. Access is enforced by the database rather than by the app: images are served as links that expire, issued only after a check that you and the viewer are connected and that neither of you has blocked the other.

One exception, which you control by choosing to share it: an invite link plays your most recent stare to whoever opens it. If you would rather it did not, do not share the link.

Deleting things

You can delete any stare, and you can delete your account from inside the app in three taps. Deleting your account removes your profile, your stares, the image files behind them, your friendships and your device tokens.

Reports that other people have filed about you are kept, with you removed from them. We keep those because a safety record that can be erased by the person it concerns is not a safety record.

The six usage facts are deleted with your account, so past figures change when someone leaves — which is the right way round. Crash reports are kept with your account removed from them: what is left is a stack trace and an iOS version, which is about the app rather than about you. Usage facts are deleted after 180 days in any case, and crash reports after 90.

Where the data lives

On Supabase, in the EU. Friends' copies of a stare expire after 30 days; your own diary is kept on your phone and stays readable with no network at all.

Children

STARE is not intended for anyone under 13.

Contact

Support, for anything at all, including a copy of your data.