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.

Cycle day, and your health data

A watch face can show the day of your cycle, and a card on your watch can show a little more. This is the only health feature in the app, it is entirely optional, and everything else works without it.

What is accessed. With your permission, the app reads one record type from Health Connect — the period dates you already keep there — covering the past year. It reads nothing else from Health Connect, and it never writes to it. The permission is asked for on the screen where the feature is set up, with an explanation of what it is for, and the app works normally if you say no.

What is worked out, and shown. From those dates the app derives the day of your cycle, the day of your period while one is ongoing, how long your last period lasted, and the average gap between your recent periods. Those are shown to you, on your own phone and your own watch. The watch tile also estimates when your next period will start, by averaging your own logged cycles. The app does not estimate a fertile window or ovulation, and it gives no health advice of any kind.

Where it goes. No health data, and nothing derived from it, is ever sent to us or to anyone else. The records stay in Health Connect. Your phone sends four values — the start date of your most recent period, its end date, the average gap in days, and a count of periods so the tile can tell whether enough have been logged for an estimate — straight to your own paired watch over Bluetooth, and the watch works out what to display from those. A design using this feature cannot be published to the community gallery: the app hides the option and the service refuses it.

On the watch, the day number is offered as a standard Wear OS complication, which is how any watch face displays a value. That means another watch face installed on your own watch can read that number if you point it at this app. No period dates are exposed this way — only the single day count, and only on your own device.

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 step count, heart rate or other fitness data. A face can show those, but the watch draws them onto the dial itself — the app never receives them. The one health feature the app does have is cycle day, described above, and it is optional.

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.

How long anything is kept

• Your designs and your photos stay on your own devices for as long as you keep them, and are gone when you delete them or uninstall the app. We never hold a copy.
• Cycle dates are held only on your own phone and watch. They are replaced each time the app refreshes them, and erased when you withdraw the Health Connect permission, delete the records there, or uninstall the app. We never hold a copy.
• A published design is kept until you withdraw it. Withdrawing deletes it and the anonymous code stored with it.
• A report is kept as a moderation record after it has been dealt with, so decisions can be checked later. It contains nothing about the person who made it.
• The rate-limiting hashes described above expire by themselves within a short window.

Questions, and deleting your data

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