Muriel Privacy

Summary

• The microphone is used to measure how loud it is, and for nothing else. Audio is never recorded, never written to disk and never sent anywhere.
• Your levels, sessions and exposure history stay on your devices. Muriel has no accounts and no server.
• There is no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind.

What we collect

Nothing reaches Thrice Woven. The app keeps the following on your device:

• Sound levels. A measurement several times a second, reduced immediately to a number in decibels. The numbers are what the app stores; the sound they were derived from is discarded in the same moment.
• Sessions. A start time, an end time, an average and a peak level for each stretch the app judged loud, plus your daily and weekly totals.
• Your settings. The exposure standard you chose, the warning thresholds, whether the Watch app may tap you, and any calibration offset you have set.

What we don't collect

• No audio. Muriel does not record, buffer to disk, transcribe or transmit sound. It cannot tell you what was said near it, because nothing that could answer that question is kept.
• No name, email address, date of birth or any other account detail.
• No device identifiers, advertising identifiers or fingerprinting of any kind.
• No location. Muriel never requests location access, so a session records how loud it was and not where you were.
• No analytics, usage statistics, session recording, crash telemetry or A/B testing.
• No contacts, calendar, photos or motion data.

Where data lives

In the app's private container on your iPhone, and in the Watch app's container on your Apple Watch. The two exchange sessions directly with each other over the link Apple provides between your own paired devices; the data does not pass through us and we could not read it if it did.

If you have iCloud enabled for Muriel, history syncs through your own private iCloud database so a new phone starts where the last one stopped. That is governed by your agreement with Apple. Deleting the app removes the local copy; removing Muriel's data in iCloud settings removes the synced one. There is no account for us to delete, because there is no account.

Third parties

Muriel contains no third-party SDKs, no analytics library, no advertising network and no crash reporter. The app makes no network requests at all, other than to Apple's iCloud service on your behalf and only if you have turned that on.

Apple provides us with anonymous, aggregated App Store statistics such as download counts by territory. We cannot connect those to any individual, and they are produced by Apple rather than by anything in the app.

Permissions

• Microphone. Required. Used only to compute a sound level, on the device, in memory. Measurement continues in the background while a session is running so that exposure is not undercounted; you can stop it at any time, and the app shows plainly when it is listening.
• Notifications. Optional. Used for the warnings you set — a level held too long, a budget nearly spent, a session left running. We do not send marketing or announcements.
• Health. Optional, and off unless you turn it on. See below.

Declining the optional permissions leaves the app fully usable. Declining the microphone leaves nothing to measure, so the app will say so rather than pretend.

Health data

If you allow it, Muriel writes environmental audio exposure to Apple Health, so that its measurements sit alongside the ones your Apple Watch takes on its own. This is a write, and it is optional: the app asks separately, the permission can be withdrawn in Health at any time, and everything else keeps working without it.

Health data written by Muriel is yours and lives in Health, under Apple's protection and your control. We do not read your Health data back, do not use it for anything, and never transmit it. Health data is never used for advertising or shared with anyone, which is also what Apple requires.

Children

Muriel is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. Because the app collects no personal information at all and requires no account, there is nothing for a child to submit to us. A parent using it to watch a child's exposure holds that data on their own device, as with any other. Questions can go to the address below.

Changes

If this policy changes, the effective date at the top changes with it and the previous version is superseded. If a change ever meant that Muriel began collecting data it does not collect today, the app would ask you before it did so.

Contact

Thrice Woven, an independent software studio. Questions about this policy or about Muriel: hello@thricewoven.com.