Privacy Policy
Counter — the social habit counter.
Last updated 11 August 2026. Version 1.0.
Who is responsible
Counter is operated by Artem Bahniuk. For anything in this policy, or to exercise any of the rights below, write to dawdawich@gmail.com.
The short version
- Counter stores your name, your avatar emoji, your email address, and the counts you tap.
- It has no advertising, no third-party analytics, and no tracking across other apps or websites.
- Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone except the hosting provider that runs the service.
- You can delete your account, and everything in it, from inside the app at any time.
What Counter collects, and why
| Data | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Email address, from Google or Apple when you sign in | Identifies your account, and is how an invitation reaches you | Performance of the contract |
| Account identifier | Ties your counts and categories to you | Performance of the contract |
| Display name, avatar emoji, optional nickname | How other members of your categories see you | Performance of the contract |
| Categories, sub-themes, and every count you tap, with its time | The purpose of the app — these are shown to the other members of that category | Performance of the contract |
| Who invited you, and who you invited | Registration is invitation-only, and your friends list is derived from it | Performance of the contract |
| A salted SHA-256 hash of an address you send an invitation to | Counts how many invitations an address holds, without storing the address | Legitimate interest in operating an invitation-only service |
If you use Sign in with Apple
Apple lets you hide your real address and give Counter a relay address instead. That works normally here — the relay address is the only one Counter ever sees, and it is treated exactly like any other.
Invitation addresses
When you invite someone, their address is used once to send the mail and is never written to the database in readable form. What is stored is a salted hash, which can confirm that a particular address was invited but cannot be turned back into the address.
What Counter does not collect
- No advertising identifiers, and no advertising of any kind.
- No location, contacts, photos, microphone, or health data.
- No tracking of your activity in other companies' apps or websites.
- No uploaded images — every icon and avatar in Counter is an emoji.
Counter does not use your data for tracking as the App Store defines it, and does not share it with data brokers.
Who else sees it
- Other members of your categories. That is the point of the app: everyone in a category sees everyone else's counts for it. Nobody outside a category can see anything in it.
- Google, as our processor. Counter runs on Google Firebase (Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Messaging). Google processes the data on our instructions in order to run the service, under its own privacy and security terms.
Nothing is sold, rented, or handed to advertisers. Data is disclosed to anyone else only where the law requires it.
Where it is stored
Your counts, categories, profile, nickname and friends list are held
in the European Union — Google's eur3 multi-region, which
replicates across data centres in Belgium and the Netherlands. The
servers that act on them run in Belgium.
There is one exception, and it is worth stating plainly. The account record itself — the email address you sign in with, and its identifier — is held by Firebase Authentication, which stores that data in the United States. That is a property of the service and not a choice we can configure.
That transfer, and any access Google's support and operations staff have from outside the EU, is governed by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and by the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework, under which Google LLC is certified. Both form part of Google's terms as our processor.
How long it is kept
- Your account and your counts are kept until you delete your account.
- Unredeemed invitation hashes expire after 30 days and are then removed.
- Deleting your account removes everything described in Deleting your account, immediately and permanently. Backups age out within 30 days.
Your rights
You can ask for access to your data, correction, deletion, a portable copy, or restriction of processing, and you can object to processing. Name, nickname, avatar and address are editable in the app on the profile screen; deletion is on that screen too. For anything else, write to dawdawich@gmail.com and you will get an answer within 30 days.
If you think Counter has handled your data badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority.
Children
Counter is not intended for children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and it will be removed.
Security
All traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to your data is enforced server-side by security rules, not merely by what the app chooses to show: someone outside a category cannot read it even with a modified client.
Changes
If this policy changes materially you will be told in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.