Legal — 02

Privacy policy

Last updated · September 23, 2026

This is the privacy policy for Unplug, an iOS app that helps you cut down your screen time, and for the website that goes with it. It is written to be read, not to be survived. If something here is unclear, write to us and we will fix the wording.

The short version

01Who is responsible

Lukas Brehmer
Kelterweg 3
55545 Bad Kreuznach

Email: support.unplug@gmail.com

Under the GDPR, this person is the "controller" for the data described here.

02What stays on your phone

This section matters more than the rest, so it comes first.

Screen Time data

Unplug uses Apple's Screen Time API (Family Controls) to block apps and to show you how long you spent in them. That includes:

• —which apps and categories you chose to block
• —how long you spent in those apps
• —how often a shield appeared

None of it ever leaves your iPhone. It is not sent to us, it is not stored on our server, and it never appears in a shared image or a leaderboard.

That is not us being generous. Apple's Developer Program License Agreement (§ 3.3.3(P)) forbids sending Screen Time data anywhere, and the data is technically sealed off as well: the part of Unplug that can read per-app minutes runs in a separate, sandboxed process that Apple does not allow to make network requests. So even if we wanted to, we could not.

We think that is a feature. An app that fights your phone habit should not be the thing collecting the evidence.

Health and motion data

If you turn on Apple Health as your step source, Unplug reads your daily step count. Your steps are used on your device to work out how many bonus minutes you earned, and the step count itself is never uploaded. Only the bonus minutes you earned end up on our server, as part of your progress.

The same goes for the iPhone's built-in motion sensor if you use that instead.

We only ever read step data. We never write anything to Apple Health.

Your date of birth

Onboarding asks for your date of birth. It is used for exactly one thing: the Reality Check screen works out how many years you have left at your current usage. It is stored on your phone and is never uploaded.

A few other things that stay local

• —Whether the adult content filter is on, and the websites you add as exceptions to it. Neither leaves your phone: they are not in your profile, not in anything a friend can see, and not in anything sent to an AI. We are naming the switch itself and not just the exception list, because deciding to filter adult content says something about you.
• —Your conversations with the coach, as a chat history (but see section 5 — the messages themselves are sent to a model to get an answer)
• —Plans an earlier Recovery Coach wrote for you, if you still have any. Plans from Lumis are stored on our server (section 3); these are not.
• —Your clean-day counter in the Recovery tab

03What we store, and why

When you create an account, the following is stored on our server.

If you use the corresponding features, we also store:

• —Habits and goals you created, with their streaks and progress
• —Journal entries, including the text you wrote and the mood you picked
• —Calendar events and to-dos you added, including their reminder times
• —Plans from Lumis, the general coach — the title and the list of steps. Plans from the earlier Recovery Coach are not included. That feature is gone, but if plans from it are still on your phone they stay there and are never uploaded: a plan about pornography recovery says something about your sex life, and that is a special category of data under the GDPR. They do not follow you to a new phone, and logging out removes them.
• —Focus sessions (how many minutes, and when)
• —Friend requests, friendships, and your friend code
• —Messages you send friends — we store the ID of the pre-written message you picked, not free text, because there is no free text to send
• —Challenges you started or accepted, and their points
• —Milestone events (a streak or rank you reached) so a friend gets told once and only once
• —Reports you send about another user — who you reported and which of four reasons you picked, never free text. The person you report is not told, and cannot see the report.
• —Accounts you block — we store that you blocked them, so they cannot send you a friend request again. They are not told either.

Your journal is personal. We store it so that it is still there after a reinstall. It is never shown to anyone else and never sent to an AI model.

04What other people can see

Some of Unplug is social, and it would be dishonest to hide what that means.

Visible to everyone using the app, on the global leaderboard: your username, profile picture, level, rank, streak and XP. The leaderboard shows the top 100.

Visible to your friends, in addition: your quests this week, your focus sessions, your weekly XP, your badges and trophies, and your lifetime stats.

Visible to nobody but you: your email address, your journal, your goals, your habits, your calendar, your Screen Time, your steps, your date of birth, your clean-day counter, and your coach conversations.

Your profile picture is stored in a public bucket — anyone who has the exact link can open it, even without an account. Don't use a photo you would not want to be publicly reachable.

You can turn friend notifications off in Settings. That switch works in both directions: you stop getting them, and you stop sending them.

05When something is sent to an AI model

Four things in Unplug send data to Anthropic (the company behind Claude) to get an answer back. All four are listed here, and there are no others.

Quest photo check

When a daily quest asks you to photograph something, the photo is sent through our server to Anthropic's API together with the one-line task description. The model answers with a single word — approved or rejected — and that is all we get back.

The photo is not stored. Not by us, not in our database, not in a bucket. It exists in the request and is gone afterwards. What Anthropic does with it on their side is governed by their own terms; see section 6.

Lumis, the coach

When you write to the coach, your message and the recent conversation are sent to Anthropic, along with a block of your numbers: your name, level, streak, best streak, total XP, days active, focus sessions and minutes, habits completed, journal entry count and goals completed.

Your actual screen time is not in that block — we do not have it (see section 2), and the coach is explicitly told it cannot see it.

Recovery Coach — removed

Unplug used to have a second coach for pornography recovery. When you wrote to it, your message and your clean-day counter were sent to Anthropic the same way the general coach's messages are.

That feature has been removed. There is no longer any way to reach it from the app, and nothing sends that kind of information anywhere. We are leaving this paragraph here rather than deleting it, because it did exist and messages did go out while it did — pretending otherwise would make this page wrong.

Under the GDPR, information about your sex life is a special category of personal data, and we would rather not process it at all than ask you to trust us with it. That is why the feature is gone instead of improved. If you used it and want to know what happened to what you wrote: the chat history was stored only on your phone and is deleted by the update that removed the feature, and we never stored the messages on our own server.

Weekly analysis

The Weekly Report can generate a written analysis. It sends your streak, best streak, focus minutes, habits completed, days you stayed within your daily limit, and the daily limit you set. The "time reclaimed" number is included and marked as your own estimate — because that is what it is: it comes from what you told us in onboarding, not from a measurement.

Your coach conversations are not stored on our server. They live on your phone. So do any plans left over from the earlier Recovery Coach. A plan you save from Lumis is the one thing from a coach that reaches our server — see section 3.

06Who processes data for us

We have data processing agreements (Art. 28 GDPR) in place with all processors listed above.

For transactional emails (e.g. purchase confirmations), we use a private Google Mail account. No separate data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is in place with Google for this purpose.

Supabase stores your data in Zurich, Switzerland. Switzerland is recognised by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of data protection, so no additional safeguards are required for this storage. Supabase Pte. Ltd. itself is based in Singapore; transfers to the company are covered by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (Implementing Decision (EU) 2021/914).

Anthropic, RevenueCat, Expo and Netlify are based in the United States. Transfers to them are covered by the same Standard Contractual Clauses. Anthropic stores inputs and outputs for 30 days. Expo receives only a push notification token, and only if you enable notifications.

Apple processes payment and subscription data as an independent controller under its own privacy policy.

There is no analytics tool in Unplug. We checked the code, not just our memory: there is no Firebase, no Sentry, no Amplitude, no Mixpanel, nothing of that kind. There is exactly one piece of advertising software, described next, and it only runs if you agree.

Measuring our ads with Meta — only if you say yes

We advertise Unplug on Facebook and Instagram. To find out which of those ads actually lead to people installing the app, Unplug contains Meta's software development kit (the "Meta SDK").

The SDK stays switched off until you agree. It is part of the app, but it does not start, collect or send anything until you tap Allow in the iOS dialog that asks whether Unplug may track you ("Allow Unplug to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?"). We ask once, and never during onboarding. If you tap Ask App Not to Track, or if tracking is switched off for all apps on your iPhone, the SDK never starts and nothing is sent to Meta.

If you tap Allow, the SDK sends the following to Meta:

• —your device's advertising identifier (IDFA)
• —the fact that Unplug was installed, and when it is opened
• —if you buy a subscription in the app: that a purchase took place, which subscription, its price and currency
• —the technical information the SDK needs to do this: device model, iOS version, app version, language and time zone setting, and your IP address, from which Meta can derive an approximate location such as your country

Meta compares this with the ads it has shown — including to you, if you use Facebook or Instagram — and gives us back aggregated reports only, for example "this ad led to 40 installs". We never receive anything from Meta that identifies you, and we do not upload any list of our users (email addresses or similar) to Meta.

What Meta never gets: your Screen Time data or your blocked apps, your step count or anything from Apple Health, your date of birth, your journal, anything from the Recovery tab, your username, email address or progress, or anything else you do inside Unplug. The app sends Meta no information of its own — only what is listed above.

Who is responsible. Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, Merrion Road, Dublin 4, D04 X2K5, Ireland. For collecting this data in the app and transmitting it to Meta, we and Meta are joint controllers (Art. 26 GDPR). Meta's [Controller Addendum](www.facebook.com/legal/controller_addendum) sets out who does what: Meta is responsible for informing you about its own processing and for handling your rights regarding the data it holds. You can still contact either of us, and we will pass on anything that is Meta's to answer. What Meta does with the data once it has received it is Meta's own responsibility — see Meta's [privacy policy](www.facebook.com/privacy/policy), which also explains that Meta uses such data to improve its advertising systems.

Transfers to the USA. Meta may process the data at Meta Platforms, Inc. in the USA. Meta Platforms, Inc. is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, so the transfer rests on the European Commission's adequacy decision of 10 July 2023 (Art. 45 GDPR).

Legal basis. Your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, and — for reading the advertising identifier from your device — § 25(1) of the German Telecommunications Digital Services Data Protection Act (TDDDG). Giving consent is voluntary. Unplug works exactly the same without it.

Withdrawing consent. At any time, in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, or in Settings → Unplug → Allow Tracking. From the next time Unplug starts, the SDK no longer starts. Withdrawing does not undo what was sent before; to have that deleted, contact Meta through its privacy centre, or write to us and we will forward your request.

Apple's SKAdNetwork. Separately from your choice, Apple itself may tell Meta — anonymously, delayed and only as a count — that an ad led to an install. That is Apple's system, not the Meta SDK, and it contains nothing that identifies you or your device.

07Why we are allowed to do this (legal bases)

• —Your account, your progress, the social features, your subscription — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR: we need this to give you the app you signed up for.
• —Apple Health, notifications, camera and photo library — Art. 6(1)(a): your consent, given in the iOS permission dialog. You can withdraw it at any time in iOS Settings, and the rest of the app keeps working.
• —Measuring our ads with Meta — Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and § 25(1) TDDDG: your consent, given by tapping Allow in the iOS tracking dialog. Withdraw it in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking (section 6).
• —Keeping the service working and stopping abuse (for example the daily cap on AI photo checks) — Art. 6(1)(f): our legitimate interest in not having the service broken or run up a bill.

08How long we keep things

The short answer: as long as your account exists, and after that not at all.

• —Your account and everything attached to it — profile, progress, journal, habits, goals, calendar, focus sessions, friendships, challenges — stays for as long as the account does. Deleting the account deletes all of it (section 9). Nothing expires separately before that.
• —Quest photos are never stored. They exist inside the request that checks them and are gone afterwards.
• —Friend messages disappear from the app the next day, but the row stays in the database — hidden, not removed. It goes with the account.
• —Milestone events (a streak or rank your friends were told about) are kept for the life of the account on purpose: they are what stops the same milestone being announced a second time.
• —The daily counter for the AI features is one row per day and feature, holding a number. It goes with the account.
• —Data sent to Meta (only if you allowed tracking) is not stored by us at all. We only ever see aggregated reports. How long Meta keeps it is set out in Meta's privacy policy (section 6).
• —We hold no purchase records. Apple sells the subscription and Apple holds the receipt. What we store is a single row saying which plan you are on, which product it came from and when it runs out — and every update overwrites it, so there is no purchase history on our side at all.

09Deleting your account

Settings → Delete account. It asks once, and then it is done.

When you tap it, a server function deletes your rows from every table that holds them — friend_nudges, friend_activity_events, friend_requests, friends, challenges, calendar_events, focus_sessions, diary, habits, goals, plans, ai_usage_daily, entitlements, leaderboard and profiles — then removes your profile picture from the storage bucket, and finally deletes the login itself.

The list is written out in the function rather than left to the database's own cascade rules, so that it can be read and checked. Where a row belongs to two people — a friendship, a request, a challenge, a nudge — both sides are deleted, so nobody is left with a row pointing at an account that no longer exists. Anything that fails is reported back rather than swallowed.

Two things you should know either way:

• 1Deleting your account does not wipe your phone. Your streak, your journal and your settings stay in the app's local storage until you delete the app itself. If you want everything gone, delete the account and then delete the app.
• 2Your subscription is not cancelled by deleting your account. Apple runs the subscription, not us. Cancel it in iOS Settings → your name → Subscriptions.

Account & data deletion by email

To have your account and all associated data deleted, write to us at support.unplug@gmail.com. We delete your data within 30 days.

10Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to:

• —tell you what we have about you (Art. 15)
• —correct it if it is wrong (Art. 16)
• —delete it (Art. 17) — the fastest route is Settings → Delete account
• —restrict what we do with it (Art. 18)
• —hand it over in a machine-readable file so you can take it elsewhere (Art. 20)
• —object to processing based on legitimate interest (Art. 21)
• —withdraw consent at any time, without it affecting what happened before (Art. 7(3))

For the data sent to Meta (section 6), Meta and we are joint controllers. You can exercise these rights against either of us (Art. 26(3) GDPR).

Write to support.unplug@gmail.com. We answer within one month.

You can also complain to a data protection authority. The one responsible for us is:

Der Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit Rheinland-Pfalz
Hintere Bleiche 34
55116 Mainz
poststelle@datenschutz.rlp.de

11Notifications

Unplug sends few notifications on purpose — an app about attention should not be the thing grabbing yours.

• —Reminders you set yourself (a to-do, an event) are scheduled on your phone. They never reach our server, and tapping them does not open anything.
• —Friend milestones ("your friend hit 30 days") are sent through our server. These do open the app, because the only useful reaction is to go and say something.
• —We never put a badge on the app icon for either kind.

All of it can be turned off in Settings, and none of it works at all unless you allowed notifications in the first place.

12Age

Unplug is not for children. You must be at least 18 years old to use it — the reasoning is in section 3 of the Terms.

We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below that age. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will delete it.

13This website

Everything above is about the app. The website you may be reading this on — unplugapp.net — is a much smaller thing, and this is all of it.

No cookies, no analytics, no tracking. The site stores nothing in your browser and counts nothing. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Nothing loads from anyone else. Every file a page needs comes from this server: the text, the images, the one font, and the script. Nothing is fetched from Google, from a CDN, or from anywhere else, so opening a page tells no third party that you were here.

The pages do carry a script, and here is what it is. It moves things: it smooths out scrolling and fades sections in as you reach them. It is built from two open-source animation libraries, GSAP and Lenis, which are bundled into our own file rather than loaded from someone else's server. The only thing it reads about you is whether your system asks for reduced motion — and if it does, it switches itself off and nothing moves. It measures nothing, counts nothing, stores nothing, and sends nothing anywhere. There is no request in it at all.

Hosting: Netlify. Netlify, Inc., 512 2nd Street, Suite 200, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA, delivers these pages for us. Like every web server it writes a short access log: your IP address, the page you asked for, the time, your browser, and the page you came from. We use it to keep the site up and to notice attacks — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in a working site. We do not build profiles from it, and we cannot connect it to your Unplug account. Netlify is a processor under Art. 28 GDPR, and the transfer to the USA rests on the Standard Contractual Clauses named in section 6.

14Changes to this policy

If we change how the app handles your data, we change this page and update the date at the top. If the change is significant, we will say so in the app rather than hoping you re-read this page.

15Contact

Lukas Brehmer
Kelterweg 3
55545 Bad Kreuznach

Email: support.unplug@gmail.com