Privacy policy

This policy covers the Epoch mobile app for iOS and Android, published by RBen ("we", "us"). It is written to be read, not to be survived. If anything here is unclear, write to the address above.

1. The short version

• You do not need an account to use Epoch. The app creates an anonymous account for you on first launch so your streak and preferences have somewhere to live.
• We do not ask for your name, email address, phone number or location, and we do not have them unless you choose to sign in.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising beyond what the advertising SDK in section 3 does with your consent.
• You can delete everything, from inside the app, in three taps.

2. What the app stores about you

The birthday shortcut in Settings is stored on the device and is never transmitted. We never learn your date of birth.

What is public, and only if you choose it. Two switches in Settings, both off by default: showing your name on the weekly streak board, and showing it on the supporters wall. If you signed in with Google, your profile picture is shown beside your name there. A display name is capped at 24 characters and is reviewed when reported. Nothing else about you is ever shown to another user — never the amount of a purchase, never what you read.

3. Advertising

Epoch shows a small number of ads to people who have not paid to remove them.

• Advertising SDK: Google AdMob (Google Mobile Ads SDK), provided by Google LLC. Google's own privacy policy applies to the data it collects: https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
• Formats: a "Sponsored" card inside the feed, and a video you may choose to watch in exchange for 24 hours of full access. There are no interstitials, no banners, no ads on launch, and no ads anywhere you have not scrolled to.
• What AdMob collects: an advertising identifier, approximate (IP-derived) location, device and app information, and interaction with the ads shown — impressions, clicks and completions. We do not receive any of this; it goes to Google. We receive only aggregate revenue figures.
• Consent. In the EU, the UK and Switzerland we present Google's UMP consent form before any ad is requested, and Settings → Ad and tracking choices reopens it at any time. On iOS we ask through Apple's App Tracking Transparency dialog; if you decline, ads are still shown but are non-personalised. Declining changes advertising only — never the app.
• People who have paid see no ads at all. No ad SDK request is made for them: not an empty slot, not a request that fails to fill. None.

4. Purchases

In-app purchases are processed by Apple or Google, never by us. We never see your card details.

RevenueCat (RevenueCat, Inc.) sits between the stores and our database to validate receipts. It receives your anonymous account id, the product bought and the receipt — nothing else. https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy

Refunds are handled by Apple or Google, not by us. Deleting your account does not refund a purchase, and the account-deletion screen says so before you confirm.

5. Notifications

If you turn them on, you get one notification a day, at a time you choose, containing something that happened on that date. There is no second notification for any reason, and nothing about streaks, marketing or "we miss you". Delivery uses Expo's push service, which passes the message to Apple or Google: https://expo.dev/privacy

Turning them off in Settings or in your device settings stops them immediately.

6. Content

Historical events come from Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. Attribution appears in the app, on every share card, and on Settings → Content and licences. Wikipedia is not involved in this app and receives nothing about you.

7. Analytics and crash reports

Epoch has no third-party analytics SDK. No Firebase Analytics, no Amplitude, no Mixpanel, no attribution SDK, no session recording. Product decisions are made from the data in section 2, which is the data the app needs in order to work.

Crash reports: Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.), in its EU region, in Germany. When the app crashes, or catches an error it did not expect, or a feature such as notifications or sign-in fails, it sends a report: what went wrong and where in the app's code, the steps just before it (which parts of the app were tapped and which requests were made — never what you read or typed), and the phone's details at that moment, such as its model, system and app version, free memory and storage, battery level, network type, language, time zone and screen size. Sentry adds a random identifier for the installation, so one phone's repeated crash counts once. No name, email address, account id, screenshot or recording is sent. Like any server, Sentry sees the IP address a report comes from; it is set to keep neither that address nor any location worked out from it. The reports are used only to find and fix faults. https://sentry.io/privacy/

8. Children

Epoch is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. The content is encyclopaedic and historical, which means it includes wars, disasters and crimes as they are recorded; both store listings are rated accordingly.

9. Your choices

Deleting your account removes your profile, streak history, interests, entitlements, push tokens and any public listing, immediately and permanently. A purchase record is kept with your identity removed, because tax law requires a transaction record and because it is what lets a future "Restore purchases" work if you come back.

Under the GDPR and the UK GDPR you may also request access, correction, portability or erasure by writing to the contact address; we answer within 30 days. Under the CCPA/CPRA you may request disclosure or deletion by the same route. We do not sell personal information.

10. Where the data is

Our database and server functions run on Supabase in the EU, and crash reports are stored by Sentry in the EU. Data may be processed in other countries by the services named above — Google, Apple, RevenueCat and Expo — under their own terms.

11. Retention

Account data is kept while the account exists. An anonymous account (one never linked to Google or Apple) that has not been opened for 12 months is deleted automatically, with everything in it, unless a purchase was made on it. A push token not seen for 60 days is no longer used, and is kept only with an error reason for diagnosis. Purchase records are kept for seven years, with the identity removed once the account is deleted.

12. Changes

If this policy changes materially, the app will say so before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.