Welcome to Symbols.
Your privacy greatly matters to us, which is why we only collect and use the bare minimum of user data. We have also decided to forgo intrusive third-party services that are commonly found on many other apps, such as the use of major advertisement networks, because they tend to collect and mine user data. Not with us.
Please read our privacy policy and understand that Symbols is a new app, and so, our privacy policy will likely change in the future. We tried to make this somewhat future-proof, but we will almost certainly change it in the future, as circumstances change, new features are added, and as we try to anticipate the needs and wishes of our users. When this happens, we will notify you through our app, website, or by sending you an email.
Done.
Currently, the only way to identify your account with us is through your email address when you login or sign-up. This means if you purchase a paid subscription (or any other item or service that we may offer for sale in the future) from us, we need to identify you to make sure you get access to what you purchased.
Thus, we store your email account for general authentication and registration purposes and to guarantee that you have full access to any paid material within the scope of your purchase.
It is a good way to determine if a user account is active or inactive.
In the future, we would also like to have a system that uses this information to notify users who have been inactive for a long period of time of whether or not they still want an active account with us.
NOTE: We currently do not collect this information, because we are very cheap and want to keep data usage and its associated costs to a minimum, so we can in turn pass said savings to you; but in the future, we will likely collect and store this data, so just assume that it is already is being collected, as it normally is collected and stored for the purposes of authentication and gauging user activity.
If you signed up with us using the standard "email and password" method, then we do not have your name. You can check on this by going to the Settings page in the app, there is a field titled "Name". If the field does not have a name and says something like "Add name (optional)", then we do not have your name and you may add one if you want to (it is optional). If you add one, we will store it alongside your email, and the Settings page will reflect his change under the "Name" field.
Storing your name can help us personalize any emails we may have to send to you in the form of notifications, but it is entirely optional.
If you signed up with us using some third-party social media login, such as through your Apple or Google account, then we may have your name depending on what you included in said account and the policies of the third-party login provider. We currently do not offer third-party social media login, but in the future, when we might offer it, we will consider adding some way so that you can decide to remove your name.
All emails are stored with us indefinitely or until our cloud bill becomes too expensive.
Kidding.
To delete your account, go to the Settings page, and use the “Delete Account” button.
After you delete your account, we will delete all data associated with your account from our databases, including your email.
There is no way to "undo" this, so be certain you want to delete your account before doing so. Furthermore, make sure any paid subscriptions that you may have with us are also canceled.
If you do decide to delete your account, we will greatly miss you, whoever you were. If you decide to come back at a later date, we will start anew, meaning for the first few weeks we might not even be on a first name basis (check the "Do you store my name?" section for the punchline of this joke).
Regardless, you can rest assured that we did all we could to maximize your privacy and minimize your costs.
Any data used to mark your progress in any Symbols Activity is stored on a local database that is local to your device. We neither store this data outside of our device nor do we access it directly. It is specific to your account and your device.
This means that uninstalling and deleting the app will delete this data and no device but your own stores it (if you use some kind of cloud service that backs up your app data, it may be on there too, but for the purposes of this document, that is still considered "your device").
A consequence of this decision is that when users delete the app, all of their progress will be wiped clean. Frustrating? Perhaps, but otherwise we would need to write another section to this document, and who wants to read that?
In all seriousness, we anticipate that users will use Symbols primarily to study or review the relevant subject matter, and so, if they uninstall the app, they will likely only reinstall for a quick refresher. Thus, starting from the beginning will be useful.
We understand that this is a tradeoff and some users may want us to store this data. So, in the future we may have an "opt-in" service just for this scenario. However, currently, we do not store this information in any database outside your device.
All payment information and related transactions are handled by the respective store(s) that Symbols can be downloaded from, which are (or will be in the future):
Thus, we do not directly deal with or handle any transactions, so we do not collect, store, or have access to your payment information. If you have any questions related to how said stores maintain your payment information or handle transactions, we can only direct you to their websites for help. Please familiarize yourself with the aforementioned stores; as we are not a part of them and cannot assist you with any matters directly related to them.
We only use one third-party service: Google Firebase--without Google Analytics. If you would like to know their privacy policy, please go and read it, but please understand that we do not use any of their "analytics" tools. Firebase allows us to "opt-in" to any services that collect user data, and we have only opted-in to collect and store the data that we have previously outlined in this document.
While we reserve the right to use any other third-party in the future, we will give you a reasonable notice through our app, website, or by notifying you through email. We will also look into the policies of any prospective third-party tool or service that we may use in the future and ensure that it aligns with our values of protecting your privacy.
Thank you for reading and please make it a habit to check back for any updates.