Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 22, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how BS Meter ("BS Meter," "we," "us," or "our"), a product of The Pocket App Company, collects, uses, and protects information when you use the BS Meter application and related services (the "Service"). By using the Service, you agree to the practices described here.

1. The short version

Audio is turned into text on your phone. The speech recogniser runs offline, on the device. Audio is never uploaded and never stored.
The text is uploaded, because checking a claim is what the app is for.
There is no account by default, and there is no advertising identifier. Signing in with Google does not collect an email address. Signing in with an email address and password does keep that address, because it is what you sign in with.
There are no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDKs in the app. Not configured off — not present.
We do not keep a record of what you personally checked. What the server caches is keyed by the content of a claim, not by who asked about it.

2. What the app collects on your phone

Audio from the video being checked

To check a video the app has to hear it. There are two routes, and they capture different things.

Sharing or pasting a link (the main route). The app opens the video's own published embed inside its own window, plays it silently, and listens to its own player. Nothing else on the device is part of that audio path. No screen recording and no system audio capture is involved.

The floating meter (optional). This route uses Android's playback-capture API, which requires your explicit per-session consent through the dialog Android itself shows. It is restricted at the operating-system level to the specific social apps the meter supports, so audio from any other app — a music player, a call, anything else — never reaches the recorder.

The microphone is never recorded. The app declares the RECORD_AUDIO permission because Android requires it for playback capture, but no part of the app ever opens a microphone input.

Audio never leaves the device and is never written to storage. It is converted to text as it plays and then discarded.

Text, findings and history

Transcripts and the verdicts produced from them are stored on your phone, so that your past checks are available and so a check can be exported if you contact us for support. Deleting a check, or uninstalling the app, removes them.

Nothing else

No contacts, no location, no photos, no calendar, no device advertising identifier, and no list of your installed apps. The app asks the system about the handful of social apps the meter supports, and about nothing else.

3. What is sent to us

When you run a check, the app sends:

Sent	Why
The transcript text of the video	It is what gets fact-checked
The platform and video id	Used as a cache key, so the same video is not paid for twice
A credential: a per-install token, or an account id if you signed in	Metering and abuse control
For an image check, the image	It is what gets checked

Your name, phone number, contacts and location are not sent, because the app never has them.

Your email address is sent on exactly four requests, and only if you use the email-and-password sign-in: creating the account, confirming it with the mailed code, asking for a password reset, and signing in. It is not attached to a check, so nothing joins it to a video you looked at.

Your password is sent on those same requests over HTTPS and is never stored as you typed it — what we keep is a scrypt hash, which cannot be turned back into the password.

4. What we store

Every table in our database is listed here. There is no other storage.

Stored	What is in it	Tied to you?
Cached analyses	A completed analysis, keyed by a hash of the video reference	No
Claim verdicts	A checked claim's text and its verdict	No — keyed by the claim's content
Claim evidence	Sources gathered for a claim	No
Scan log	One row per check: platform, counts, cost. Never content	No
Installs	A SHA-256 hash of the install token, platform, timestamps, a count	Pseudonymous
Accounts	The sign-in provider and that provider's id for you	Pseudonymous
Email accounts	An email address, a `scrypt` hash of the password, and whether the address has been confirmed	Yes — an address identifies you
Quota usage	A caller identity and a monthly count	Pseudonymous

These consequences are worth stating plainly, because they are the whole point:

The caches are keyed by content, not by person. A verdict about a claim is stored once and reused for everyone who encounters that claim. There is no record anywhere joining a person to the videos they checked.
Your install token is never stored. Only its SHA-256 hash. The token itself exists in one response and thereafter only on your phone.
Signing in with Google does not collect your email address. Google offers one; we store the provider's stable id for you and discard the rest.
Signing in with an email address does collect it, and there is no version of that feature which does not. It is what you sign in with. The password is never stored as you typed it — only a scrypt hash of it. Deleting your account deletes the address, in the app under Settings or at the deletion page.
The confirmation code is not stored either — only a hash of it, for up to 20 minutes, with a count of wrong guesses.

The one place an IP address can be stored

The quota record notes who spent a check. In the published app that is a non-reversible fingerprint of your credential, not an address. If the Service is ever run without authentication, that field falls back to recording an IP address — and an IP address is personal data in the EU and UK. It is named here rather than omitted because it is a real branch in the code.

Ordinary web-server request logs at our hosting provider also contain IP addresses, as they do for every website.

5. Who else sees your data

We are not the only system involved in answering a check.

Who	What they receive	Why
Anthropic (model provider)	Transcript text and claim text	Extracting and checking claims
A web search provider	Individual claims, as search queries	Finding evidence
Render (server hosting)	Everything in transit, plus request logs	Runs the server
Supabase (database hosting)	The records listed above	Stores them
Google	Only that you chose to sign in	Sign-in, and only if you use it
Google Workspace	Your email address and a 6-digit code	Sending the confirmation and password-reset emails, and only if you use the email sign-in

Data is not sold, and is not shared with advertisers or data brokers. There are none involved.

6. How long things are kept

Audio	Never stored. Discarded as it is transcribed.
On-device history	Until you delete a check or uninstall the app.
Cached analyses and verdicts	Indefinitely, as a shared cache. Not linked to you.
Scan log	Indefinitely. Contains no content and no identifier.
Install and account records	Until the install is revoked or the account deleted.
An email address and password hash	Until the account is deleted. Deleting it removes the row.
A confirmation or password-reset code	20 minutes, as a hash.

7. Your rights and how to use them

Wherever you live, you can:

Delete your history — in the app, per check or all at once.
Delete everything — uninstalling removes all data held on the device. To delete your account and its records from our servers, use Settings → Delete your account in the app, or follow the deletion page.
Use the app without an account — anonymous is the default, not a concession.

If you are in the UK, EU or EEA, UK GDPR and GDPR give you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection. The lawful basis for processing a check is performance of a contract — you asked for the check — and for the caps and counters it is legitimate interests, specifically keeping the Service's costs from running away.

If you are in California, the CCPA/CPRA give you rights to know, delete and opt out of sale. There is no sale to opt out of.

To exercise any of these, write to the address in Section 11. If you signed in with an email address, write from that address. Otherwise we hold no address for you, so a request will need the install or account identifier the app can show you, or it cannot be matched to anything.

8. Children

BS Meter is not directed at children under 13, and no part of it is designed for them. No age is collected. If you believe a child has provided personal information, write to the address in Section 11 and it will be deleted.

9. Other people in the videos you check

A video you check contains someone else's speech, and that transcript is processed and cached. Two rules bound what the app does with it, and both are enforced in the software rather than merely promised here:

Verdicts are stated about claims, never about people. What a person is is never ruled on, in either direction — clearing somebody is as much a public judgement as accusing them.
A refusal is never reported as an open question. Where the evidence does not support saying something, the app says the check was withdrawn, rather than leaving an insinuation standing in its place.

Please do not use the app on private recordings of people who have not published them.

10. Security

Traffic is HTTPS end to end.
Secrets are held as environment variables at the host, and are not in the app or in our source code.
The install token is stored only as a hash, so disclosure of the database could not yield a working credential. Passwords are stored the same way, as a scrypt hash.
Database row-level security is applied at start-up, and a failure to apply it is reported rather than passing silently.

No system is perfectly secure, and this one is maintained by a very small team.

11. Contact us

For questions about this Privacy Policy or your information, contact:

The Pocket App Company
Email: support@thepocketappcompany.com

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date above and, where they change what is collected, in the app's release notes. The version that applies is the one published at this address.