Privacy Policy

Effective: May 14, 2026 · Last updated: May 31, 2026 (v3)

Student Focus ("we", "our", "us", or the "Service") is operated by an individual developer based in Quebec, Canada. This Privacy Policy explains, in plain language, what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how it is used and shared, and the rights you have over it. It is written to comply with Canada's PIPEDA, Quebec's Law 25 (the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, as amended), California's CCPA/CPRA, and the U.S. federal COPPA.

The short version: We collect your school email for sign-in. Your block settings (the apps you chose to block, your time windows, and daily limits) sync to our backend so they follow you to a new phone. Your usage stats and block-attempt counters stay on your device. We do not show ads, do not sell your data, do not run analytics, and do not track you across other apps for advertising.

1. Who We Are & Privacy Officer

The data controller is the developer of Student Focus, based in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

Under Quebec Law 25 we are required to designate a person responsible for the protection of personal information. That person is:

Privacy Officer: the developer of Student Focus
Email: livefonam@gmail.com

You can use this address for any privacy-related request, complaint, or question.

2. What Personal Information We Collect

We collect only what is needed for the Service to work. Categories (CCPA §1798.110 framing):

Category	Examples	Where it lives
Identifiers	Your school email address	Supabase (US) + your device
Authentication state	Session token	Encrypted secure storage on your device
Accountability code	4-digit code you set during onboarding, required to raise a Self Control limit	Encrypted secure storage on your device (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore). Never uploaded.
Electronic activity on your device	Time spent in other apps (Screen Time / Usage Stats), once you grant permission	Your device only, never uploaded
Preferences / inferences	The short opaque app identifiers you chose to block (e.g. 'tt', 'ig'), your daily limit, your time window, your override method (Friend Control or Self Control), your enforcement mode (strict or gradual), and the time you completed setup. We never see the names of the apps, only these short opaque identifiers.	Supabase (US) and your device, so the setup follows you to a new phone
Friend Control pairing data	A random 10-character "invite code" you generate, the Supabase user-ID of any friend who accepts your code, approval/revocation timestamps. If you act as someone else's accountability friend, their invite code is stored on your device (encrypted) so you can show them rotating override codes.	Supabase (US); your local copy of any friend's invite code lives in encrypted secure storage on your device. Two-party data: each row is readable by you AND the friend named on it.
Local counters	Number of block attempts, sessions completed, streak days	Your device only

3. Sources of Information

Directly from you (email, the settings you choose).
Automatically from your device, only after you grant the relevant permission (iOS Screen Time / Android Usage Access).
We do not purchase or receive personal data from data brokers or third parties.

4. Why We Collect It (Purposes & Legal Bases)

Data	Purpose	Legal basis
School email	Verify your identity, create your account, sign you back in	Necessary to perform our contract with you
Usage stats from your device	Enforce the limits you set, show your own stats	Your explicit OS-level permission + our legitimate interest in delivering the feature
Block settings & counters	Run the app and show your history	Necessary to perform our contract with you

If you ever gave consent that you want to withdraw, email the Privacy Officer. Withdrawing consent will end your ability to use parts of the Service that depend on that data.

5. Who Else Sees Your Data (Third-Party Service Providers)

Student Focus relies on three third-party services. Each receives only what is necessary for its narrow job:

Service	What it receives	Where it processes
Supabase	Your email, session token, and the block settings you configured (which apps, time windows, daily limits, override method, enforcement mode, and the time you completed setup). Block settings are synced so you can recover them on a new phone. If you use Friend Control, also: your 10-character invite code (TEXT), the Supabase user-ID of any friend who paired with you, and approval/revocation timestamps. Real-time channel events for these rows fire to keep your inbox updated. Apple Screen Time / Android Usage Stats data is NOT sent to Supabase.	United States. See privacy policy
Expo	Used as the app's build and update toolchain. The app requests local notification permission only; it does not generate or transmit a push token, and no remote push notifications are sent in this version.	United States. privacy policy
GitHub Pages (raw.githubusercontent.com)	A request to fetch a public list of university domains (used to validate your email). Your email is not sent in this request.	United States. privacy policy

We do not work with any analytics SDKs, trackers, or advertising networks, and the App contains no advertising SDK. The Self Control override includes a fixed waiting period before a block can be lifted; this is a timer only, not an advertisement.

6. What We Do Not Do

We do not sell your personal information.
We do not share your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.
We do not show advertisements. The App contains no advertising SDK; the Self Control override is a plain timed waiting period.
We do not use analytics SDKs (no Firebase Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Amplitude, etc.).
We do not use crash-reporting SDKs that send data off-device.
We do not request Apple's IDFA (advertising identifier) or show the App Tracking Transparency prompt.
We do not access your contacts, photos, camera, microphone, or precise location.

7. Cross-Border Transfer of Personal Information

Supabase, Expo, and GitHub are all based in the United States. When you sign in, your email, session token, and your block settings are processed in the U.S.

Under Quebec Law 25 §17, we must assess whether sending data outside Quebec gives it adequate protection. We have considered:

Necessity: Authentication is core to the Service and there is no Quebec-based provider that offers an equivalent secure, school-email OTP service.
Proportionality: Only the minimum needed (email + token) is sent.
Security: All transit is encrypted (HTTPS). Data at rest at Supabase is encrypted. Sessions are stored on your device using OS-level encrypted storage (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore).
Legal risk: U.S. law (including the CLOUD Act) may allow lawful-access requests by U.S. authorities. We will challenge any overbroad request to the extent legally possible.

By using the Service, you acknowledge this cross-border transfer.

8. Your Rights. Canada & Quebec

If you live in Canada, including Quebec, you have these rights:

Access: Ask us what personal information we have about you.
Rectification: Ask us to correct inaccurate information.
Deletion / Cessation of dissemination: Ask us to delete your account and the personal data we hold for you.
Data portability (Quebec Law 25 §27): Ask us for a copy of your data in a structured, commonly used technical format.
Withdraw consent: At any time.
Complaint: If you are not satisfied with how we handled your request, you may complain to:
- Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec. cai.gouv.qc.ca
- Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. priv.gc.ca

We will respond within 30 days of receiving a verified request.

9. Your Rights. California (CCPA / CPRA)

If you live in California you have:

Right to know what personal information we collect and how it is used.
Right to delete personal information we hold about you.
Right to correct inaccurate personal information.
Right to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is nothing to opt out of, but you have the right anyway.
Right to limit use of sensitive personal information. We do not use sensitive PI for inferring characteristics, so this right is effectively already honored.
Right to non-discrimination: we will not deny you the Service or charge a different price for exercising any of these rights.

To exercise any of these rights, email livefonam@gmail.com. We will verify your request (typically by confirming control of the email on file) and respond within 45 days as required by CCPA. An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with your written permission.

10. Data Retention

Your email, authentication session, and synced block settings remain at Supabase while your account is active. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete all of those rows within 30 days and instruct Supabase to do the same.
Local data on your device (settings, stats, attempt counters, PIN) is deleted as soon as you uninstall the app or use any "reset" action inside Settings.
Authentication logs at Supabase (sign-in attempts, IP addresses they may record) are retained per Supabase's policy.

11. Children (COPPA & Quebec Law 25 §14)

Student Focus is intended for students with a valid school email. Elementary schools generally do not issue school emails to children under 13, so the school-email check is our practical age gate. We do not separately collect a date of birth. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we will delete it. Quebec residents aged 14 to 17 may consent on their own behalf under Quebec law because the App is intended for high-school and post-secondary students.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child under 13 has created an account, please email us and we will delete it.

12. Security

We take security seriously, but no system is perfect.

All network traffic is over HTTPS / TLS.
Your authentication session is stored on your device in encrypted secure storage (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore) via expo-secure-store.
Your settings, email, and counters are stored using your device's standard app storage (AsyncStorage). This is sandboxed to the app and not encrypted at rest by us, but the data never leaves your device.
At Supabase, data is encrypted at rest using AES-256.

If a security incident affects your data, we will notify the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec and affected users within 72 hours of becoming aware, where required by Quebec Law 25.

13. iOS Screen Time & Android Usage Access

To enforce limits and show you real stats, the Service needs to know how long you have spent in other apps. This is read from your device's system APIs only after you grant the appropriate permission:

iOS: Apple's FamilyControls, ManagedSettings, and DeviceActivity frameworks (collectively, the Screen Time API). You will see Apple's own permission prompt the first time we ask. The list of apps you choose to block is selected via Apple's system FamilyActivityPicker, which returns an opaque, on-device token. We never see the names or bundle identifiers of the apps you blocked, only a token Apple's framework uses to apply the shield. ManagedSettings then displays Apple's shield over those apps when a focus session is active. You can revoke the permission any time from Settings → Screen Time → Apps that Can Access Screen Time or directly within Settings > Student Focus.
Android: The Usage Access permission and Accessibility Service. The Accessibility Service runs in the background and watches for window-state-change events; when the foreground app matches your blocked list it launches Student Focus on top to redirect you. The service receives the package name of every foreground app you open, but only the package name; it does not read on-screen text or window contents. You grant both permissions manually in Android Settings and can revoke either at any time.

This data is read on your device and used on your device. The opaque app-selection token, your daily-usage counters, and your block decisions stay on your device. They are not sent to our servers and are not visible to us.

14. Friend Control (Optional Feature)

If you enable Friend Control, you can ask one trusted friend to be your accountability partner. When you do:

What we share: Your randomly generated 10-character invite code, and a single row in our friend_pairings table that links your Supabase user ID to the friend's Supabase user ID once they accept. Approval and revocation timestamps are written when you tap Approve or Reject on an incoming request.
What the friend sees: Only the existence of a pairing with you (the row's existence) and a rotating 6-digit override code that is computed locally on their device from the shared invite code using a one-way hash. The friend does NOT see your blocked-apps list, your stats, your email, or any of your usage data. They cannot read your other rows.
What you see: Pending and historical pairing requests in your "Incoming requests" inbox, including the last four characters of the friend's Supabase user ID and the request timestamp. You do not see the friend's email or any other personal data about them.
How rotating codes work: The 6-digit override codes are derived locally on both phones from the same shared invite code plus the current hour. No code, attempt, or successful override is ever sent to our servers. The verification happens entirely on your phone. Codes rotate every hour, and the system accepts codes from the current hour plus the adjacent hours on either side (a 3-hour window) to absorb clock differences between phones. Your 10-character invite code itself is stored once in the friend_pairings row at Supabase, protected by row-level security. It is the trust root for the override system.
Real-time updates: When a friend claims your invite code, Supabase's real-time channel notifies your phone so the inbox banner appears immediately. The notification contains only the changed row.
Revoking: Reject or revoke a pairing in your inbox at any time. The row is marked revoked_at and the friend can no longer generate valid override codes.
Deleting: When you delete your account, all rows where you are user_id or friend_user_id are deleted, regardless of approval state.

Friend Control is opt-in. You can use the app entirely without it (Self Control via 10-second hold + 4-minute waiting period).

15. Push Notifications

If you allow notifications, your device registers a local notification permission with the OS. Student Focus uses notifications only for local in-app prompts (for example, the Friend Control approval banner) and to alert you with a single local "Focus session complete" reminder at the end of each focus session. The notification permission prompt appears the first time you complete onboarding; you can revoke it any time in iOS Settings. We do not send remote push notifications, and no device token is uploaded to our servers. You can revoke notification permission at any time in your device's OS settings.

16. Account Deletion

You may delete your account and all associated data at any time:

In-app: Settings → "Delete my account". This signs you out, clears local data, and triggers server-side deletion of every row keyed to your Supabase user ID (your profile, block settings, and friend pairings on either side). Your authentication record at Supabase is also removed. Your on-device data, including your session history and counters, is cleared from the device at the same time.
By email: If you cannot access the in-app option, email livefonam@gmail.com from the account address and we will perform the same deletion within 30 days.

Account deletion is irreversible. We retain authentication logs (sign-in attempts, IP addresses) at Supabase only for the period required by their policy, after which they are aged out.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top. If the change is material (for example, adding a new third-party service or starting to show ads), we will notify you inside the app before it takes effect, and you will have the opportunity to delete your account if you do not agree.

18. Contact

Questions, complaints, or requests about your data: livefonam@gmail.com

Back