This is the short version, written for you rather than for a lawyer. Everything here is also in the full privacy policy, which is the one that counts if the two ever disagree. Nothing on this page is a summary that leaves out something you would mind.
What the app is doing
It listens for the sound of a gunshot. If it hears something that might be one, it checks whether other phones nearby heard it too. If enough of them did, it warns the people you are paired with.
It is a research prototype. It cannot call the police, and it cannot call your school. In an emergency, call your local emergency number yourself.
Your phone never sends the sound anywhere
This is the most important thing on the page, so it gets its own section.
The microphone is on while the app is armed, but the sound is checked inside your phone and then thrown away. It is never recorded, never saved to a file, and never sent to us or to anyone else. Nobody — not your school, not your parents, not us — can listen to anything your phone heard. There is nothing to listen to, because it was never kept.
If you have ever wondered whether an app like this is really a way of listening to you: this one is not, and that is checked automatically every time the app is built.
What it does share, and with whom
Your location, sealed so that only the people you have paired with — normally a parent or guardian — can read it. It passes through our relay on the way, locked; we cannot open it, and neither can your school or other students.
And only while you are inside your school's boundary, during the hours that were agreed. Walk off the school grounds and your phone stops sharing where you are. It does not follow you home, to a friend's house, or anywhere else.
There are two exceptions, and they are both deliberate. If there is a real alert, your phone shares its position so you can be found. And if someone you are paired with opens their app to look at the map, your phone shares with that one person for fifteen minutes — and while that is happening, your phone shows a notice saying so that cannot be swiped away. You will always know when it is on.
What we can see
Almost nothing. Messages between your phone and the people you paired with are locked before they leave your phone, with a key only those phones have. We pass the locked message along without being able to open it.
You do not have an account with us. We have no name, no email address, no phone number and no password for you.
How long anything is kept
On our side, everything expires on its own, whether or not anyone asks:
- A position, or a note that you reached school — fifteen minutes.
- An alert that has not been delivered yet — ninety minutes.
- The record that lets your phone be reached at all — ninety days after the last time it was used.
On your phone, things stay until you delete them or remove the app.
What you can do about any of it
- See who you are paired with. It is on the main screen. There are no hidden connections — if someone can see your location, they are in that list.
- Unpair. This stops the sharing with that person completely.
- Turn the microphone off. The app stops listening.
- Delete everything. On your phone, without asking anyone's permission first. How to delete your data explains it.
If an adult set this up on your phone, you can still do all of these. Turning protection off is visible to the people you are paired with, because an app that could be silently switched off would not be much use in an emergency — but nothing stops you.
How we decided how old you are
We asked, and we believed the answer. That is the whole method.
The app is for people aged 13 and over, and an adult has to accept the terms on your phone before it will do anything. We do not check anyone's age against a document, we do not ask for your date of birth, and we do not try to guess it from how you use the app. We are telling you this because you are entitled to know how a decision about you was made, and in this case the honest answer is that it rests on trust.
If something goes wrong
If information about you is ever exposed, we will tell you and your parent or guardian, and we will tell the National Privacy Commission within 72 hours.
Asking us something
Write to contact@shotdetect.com. It reaches a real person, and our Data Protection Officer is named in section 12.7 of the full policy.
You do not need a parent's permission to write to us, and you do not need one to ask what we hold about you or to ask us to delete it.
Things this app is not good at
You should know these, because the people selling safety technology usually do not say them.
It raises far more false alerts than it is supposed to, and that is the main problem its makers are still working on. It has never detected a real gunshot outside a test. It needs at least two phones that heard the same thing before it will warn anyone, so on its own your phone will not raise an alarm.