Privacy Policy
Last updated: September 19, 2026
The short version
ScreenDumb is a screen-time app for adults, mostly college students, and a website at screendumb.com. There are no accounts and no analytics. Your plan, your budgets and your usage live on your phone and nowhere else. Two things leave the phone: the email address you give us so we can send you codes, and — only if you use screendown — anonymous timings that let a group see one shared clock.
The ScreenDumb app
- Everything about your plan stays on the device. Your daily budgets, the apps you limit, downtime, sessions, budgeted days, lock-in dates and history exist only on the phone they were created on. We run no accounts, no profiles and no database of users.
- One email, one purpose. Changing your plan takes a code sent to your email. The address you give is stored on your phone. When a code needs sending, the address is processed transiently by our infrastructure providers (Cloudflare and Resend) and is not kept in any account, list or marketing database. You can change the address at any time in the app.
- Codes are short-lived and never stored in plain text. Each code expires within minutes, is single-use, and is stored on our side only as a keyed hash until it expires.
- No analytics, no ads, no tracking SDKs. The app contains no advertising or behavioural-tracking code of any kind. It does not phone home. The only network calls it makes are to request and verify codes and, if you use screendown, to keep the group clock.
- Apple's Screen Time. Limits are enforced with Apple's Family Controls and Screen Time frameworks. Their privacy design means ScreenDumb cannot read which specific apps you use or build a browsing history; it can only enforce the budgets you set.
- Deleting the app deletes your plan. Your email and your commit date live in the device's Keychain, which Apple preserves across app deletion so a reinstall can honour a lock-in you chose. They stay on your phone; nothing is kept on our side.
Screendown
Screendown is the optional group feature: one person shows a QR code or shares a link, others open a page on screendumb.com, and everyone puts their phones down together against one shared clock. To keep that clock, a small service on Cloudflare stores, per space:
- a random space id and, for a hosted space, a hashed host key;
- when a sitting started and ended;
- when each participant joined and tapped out, keyed by a random token the page generates — no name, no email, no device identifier, no account;
- for a zone (a poster in a café, a lecture hall, a park), the venue's name and, if we set it, its location. That is information about a place, not about you;
- running totals of person-hours.
Participant tokens are deleted within 24 hours of a sitting ending; only the totals remain. If you leave a comment on the results page, it is emailed to us and not stored on the server. We may quote comments on this website without any identifying information.
The "money kept from the attention economy" figure is an estimate at a fixed rate ($0.40 per hour, explained on the calculator page). It is not a measurement of anything about you.
This website
- No accounts, no forms, no analytics. The calculator runs entirely in your browser; the numbers you enter are never sent anywhere. Your last-used mode is remembered in your browser's local storage, which you can clear at any time.
- Server logs. Like nearly every website, our host (Netlify) keeps standard server logs — IP address, browser type, pages requested — for security and operations. We do not use them to identify or profile visitors.
- Cookies. We set none. There are no tracking or advertising cookies.
- Get the app links go to Apple's TestFlight, which is governed by Apple's privacy policy.
What we will never do
- Sell or share your email address with anyone.
- Send you marketing. The only emails the app sends are the codes you request.
- Collect which apps you use, how long you use them, or anything else Apple's Screen Time knows.
- Add analytics or tracking without updating this page first.
Third-party services
We use three infrastructure providers, each processing data on our behalf under its own privacy policy:
| Provider | What it does |
|---|---|
| Netlify (policy) | Hosts this website. |
| Cloudflare (policy) | Runs the small service that issues codes and keeps the screendown clock. Codes are stored briefly as keyed hashes; screendown data is as described above. |
| Resend (policy) | Delivers code emails and forwards screendown comments to us. |
Security
- Everything is transmitted over HTTPS.
- Your email and commit date are stored in the device's Keychain.
- Codes are single-use, expire within minutes, and are stored on our side only as keyed hashes.
- Host keys for screendown spaces are stored only as hashes.
Your rights
- Change the email the app uses, at any time, in the app.
- Delete everything by deleting the app: there is nothing on our side to delete except codes that expire on their own and anonymous screendown totals that were never linked to you.
- Ask us anything about your data, or ask us to remove a screendown space or a quoted comment, at privacy@screendumb.com. We reply within 48 hours and act within 30 days.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will tell you the next time it asks for a code, and the date at the top of this page will change. We keep a habit of writing this page before we change what the app does, not after.
Contact
Email: privacy@screendumb.com · general questions: hello@screendumb.com