This isn't a scare-tactic post. It's just information most people were never given a chance to sit down and read — because it's usually buried in a terms-of-service document nobody opens.
When people hear "my app is tracking me," they often picture something dramatic. In reality, it's usually quieter and more routine than that: the app is recording what you do inside it, sometimes what you do on other apps, sometimes your location in the background even when you're not using it, and building a profile out of all of it. That profile gets used for targeted ads — or, in a lot of cases, sold or shared with data brokers you've never heard of and never agreed to deal with directly.
The numbers are more common than most people expect. Research from app-analytics firm 42matters found that over 80% of iOS apps track some form of private user data, and free apps are roughly four times more likely to collect your data than paid ones — which is worth sitting with, because "free" often means the app itself isn't the product. You are. Social media, food delivery, and shopping apps tend to be the heaviest collectors, often gathering close to twenty distinct data points per user: location history, contacts, browsing habits inside the app, device identifiers, and more, depending on what you've allowed.
And most people genuinely don't know the extent of it. Surveys consistently find that fewer than one in four Americans feel like they're actually in control of what happens to their personal data online, while roughly nine in ten say online privacy matters to them. That gap — high concern, low control — is the whole problem in one sentence.
Downloaded apps often request broad permissions up front: contacts, location, camera, background activity, and more, sometimes buried in a single "Allow" prompt you tap through in three seconds. Once granted, many of those permissions keep working quietly in the background, well beyond the moment you were actually using the app.
Every planner and tracker we build is a PWA, and that comes with a structural difference, not just a policy promise: there's no app-store account required to use it, no background permission harvesting, and no third-party ad network embedded in the product collecting your behavior to resell. Your planner data lives in the app and in your own connected Google Drive if you choose to back it up — nowhere else. We don't have a data-broker relationship to disclose, because we don't have one.
You don't need to become a privacy expert overnight. A few things that make a real difference: check your phone's privacy settings and see which apps have background location or contact access they don't actually need for their core function (both iPhone and Android let you review this by app). Favor apps that tell you plainly how they handle your data instead of burying it. And ask, when something is free, what's actually paying for it.
We'd rather you know exactly what you're getting with our apps: no tracking, no selling, no surprise. If you ever have a question about how a specific app handles your data, our feedback page is the fastest way to ask us directly.
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