BFG Watch Faces — Privacy

The short version

BFG Watch Faces is a watch face designer for Wear OS. It is free, has no adverts, and there is nothing to buy. You do not need an account to design faces, save them, send them to your watch, or browse and install what other people have shared.

Nothing leaves your phone unless you choose it. Designing, saving and sending a face to your own watch all happen on your devices. There is one thing that sends data off your phone, and it is optional: publishing a design to the community gallery.

Photos stay on your phone

You can use one of your own pictures as a watch dial. That picture never leaves your phone. It is copied into the app’s own storage, drawn into the dial image on your device, and sent only to your own watch over Bluetooth.

A face made from your picture cannot be published to the community gallery. The app hides the option and the service refuses it, so there is no way for a photo to reach us even by accident.

Choosing the picture uses the Android photo picker, which requires no permission and shows the app only the single image you pick. The app cannot see the rest of your photo library.

If you publish a design

Publishing is optional and everything else works without it. When you publish, two things are stored:

• The design itself — the pattern, colours, layout and which readings you put in each slot, plus the name you gave it. This is a description of a drawing, not of you, and it is public by design: that is the point of publishing.
• An anonymous code for your account. Publishing requires signing in with Google so that a design can be withdrawn later by the person who published it. We store a one-way hash of your Google account identifier and nothing else. Your email address and your name are never written down.

You can withdraw a design at any time from the app. Withdrawing removes it from the gallery and deletes the anonymous code stored with it.

Reporting a design

Anyone can report a published design without signing in and without an account. A report records the design and the reason, and nothing about the person reporting.

What we never do

• No analytics, and no tracking of any kind.
• No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
• No selling or sharing of data with anyone.
• No access to your location, contacts, calendar, microphone or camera. The app does not request those permissions.
• No reading of your health or fitness data. A face can show your step count or heart rate, but the watch draws those onto the dial itself — the app never receives them.

Service logs

The community gallery is rate-limited to prevent abuse. To do that it stores a salted, one-way hash of your network address inside a short expiring time window. Your address itself is never stored, and the hash cannot be turned back into it or used to recognise you later.

Children

The app is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone. Designs published to the gallery are reviewed before they appear.

Open source

The app and the gallery service are open source, so every claim on this page can be checked against the code rather than taken on trust: github.com/miopea/bfg-watchfaces.

Questions, and deleting your data

To ask about this policy, or to have anything you published removed, email info@bfgsolutions.net.