Privacy policy — THRESHOLD

Last updated 2026-09-27.

The short version

THRESHOLD does not collect anything about you, does not have a server, and does not know you exist. Every recording, transcript, note and reading stays on your phone until you choose to share it.

There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no automatic crash reporting and no third-party SDK of any kind. The app was built without them on purpose: it is used to record inside people's homes and workplaces, and audio taken in a stranger's house is not data that should be leaving anyone's phone by default.

What the app records, and where it stays

Audio. THRESHOLD records from the microphone while a take is running, and saves the preceding 15, 30 or 60 seconds when you press GRAB, whichever length you have chosen. Recordings are written to the app's own storage on your device. They are never uploaded.

Transcripts. Speech recognition runs entirely on your phone using a model shipped inside the app. Nothing you say and nothing the app hears is sent anywhere to be transcribed.

Sensor readings. Magnetometer, motion, and — where the phone has them — pressure, temperature, light and proximity readings are sampled while a take runs, and the ones near a saved capture are written into that capture's record. They stay on the device with the recording.

Notes. Anything you type against a capture is stored with it, on the device.

The night log. From the moment the rig is powered on until it is powered off, the app keeps a plain-text list of every event it scored — a timestamp, which instrument triggered it, and the sensor readings around it. There is no audio in it and it is never uploaded. It exists because a file containing only the moments somebody pressed GRAB is a selected sample: without a record of the quiet hours there is no way to know how often the same reading happens when nothing is going on. The board's answers and the site name you type go in as well, so the account of the night is complete. It is written to the app's own storage, the newest thirty nights are kept, and SETTINGS has a control that hands one over to whatever you choose to send it with.

No photographs, and no camera. THRESHOLD does not ask for the camera permission and does not declare it, so it cannot open one. If a way of attaching photographs is ever added it will go through the system picker, which asks for nothing, and this section will describe it before it ships.

Location, only if you allow it. If you grant location permission, THRESHOLD reads the phone's last known position when a take begins and uses it to give the capture a recognisable place name, so a season of captures can be grouped by site. Two things about this are worth stating plainly:

• The app stores the place name and the coordinates with the capture. If you share or export that capture, the place goes with it. That is the point of the feature, and it is also the thing to think about before sharing a capture recorded in someone's home.
• Turning coordinates into a place name uses Android's own geocoder, a service built into the phone. On most devices that service is provided by Google and resolving a place name may involve contacting Google's servers, under Google's privacy policy rather than ours. THRESHOLD never sends your location anywhere itself, but it cannot see inside the system service it asks. If you would rather that never happened, do not grant location permission — the app works fully without it and simply saves captures with no place on them.

Nothing else. No contacts, no identifiers, no device fingerprint, no usage statistics, no diagnostics beyond the crash note described below, and no photographs — neither the ones you already have nor any of its own.

When the app uses the internet

Once, for one thing: downloading optional voice packs. These are public-domain human speech recordings, used as the source material the instrument sweeps through, and they are fetched from the public online archive that hosts them. Downloading one is a plain file request, which that site sees the way any website sees a download, under its own privacy policy. THRESHOLD sends no identifier, no account and no information about you along with it.

If you never download a voice pack, THRESHOLD never uses the network at all.

What leaves the phone, and when

Only what you send. SHARE and EXPORT hand files to Android's share sheet, and where they go from there is your choice and the receiving app's business. An export bundle can contain audio, transcripts, your notes, sensor readings, timestamps and — if location was granted — the place and coordinates the capture was made at. Read what you are sending before you send it, particularly if the capture was recorded somewhere you were a guest.

Crash reports

If THRESHOLD crashes, it writes a short technical note to its own storage on your phone: the error and where in the app it happened, the app version, the phone's make and model, and the Android version. It contains no audio, no transcripts, no sensor readings, no location and no notes, though an error message can occasionally include the name of a file inside the app.

Nothing is sent automatically. The next time you open ABOUT, it offers to send the note or discard it. Sending opens your own email app with the note in the message, addressed to threshold@jrfitz.com, so you can read exactly what it says before you decide. We use crash reports only to find and fix the fault, and delete them once it is fixed. Discarding deletes the note from your phone.

Separately, if you have allowed your phone to share usage and diagnostics with Google, Android itself may tell Google Play that the app crashed. That is part of Android, under Google's privacy policy, and THRESHOLD has no part in it.

Deleting things

Every capture can be deleted from the app's own list, individually or several at once. Deleting a capture deletes its audio, its transcript, its notes and its readings. Uninstalling THRESHOLD removes everything it ever stored. There is nothing held anywhere else to ask us to delete, because there is nowhere else.

Children

THRESHOLD is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, of any age.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the change will be described in the app's release notes rather than made quietly.

Contact

Questions about this policy: threshold@jrfitz.com