We are software engineers and know how ridiculously easy it is to collect your data. Adding a tracking library to an app takes about four lines of code and one afternoon. Your phone then reports to a stranger's server every time you tap a button. It's in the template. Everybody does it.
That's the problem. After years of watching "everybody does it" turn into headline after headline, we decided to build apps the other way round. This post explains why, in plain words, with no jargon we can avoid.
A short, incomplete history of "oops"
You probably remember some of these. Each one sounded like a one-off at the time.
- 2018, Cambridge Analytica. About 270,000 people took a personality quiz on Facebook. Through their friend lists, the quiz quietly scooped up data on up to 87 million people, which was then used for political targeting (Wikipedia). Facebook later paid a $5 billion penalty in the US. Most of those 87 million never touched the quiz.
- 2018, Strava. The fitness app published a pretty "heatmap" of where its users jog. It also showed the outlines of secret military bases, because soldiers jog too.
- 2020, Muslim Pro. The popular Muslim prayer app was found sending its users' location data to the data broker X-Mode, whose customers included US military contractors. People installed it to find prayer times.
- 2021, 533 million phone numbers. Phone numbers and names of over half a billion Facebook users turned up on a hacker forum. The data had been scraped through a "find your friends" feature.
- 2023, a record fine. Meta was fined €1.2 billion in the EU for shipping Europeans' data to the US. At the time, that was the largest GDPR fine ever.
- 2025, Gravy Analytics. Hackers broke into a location-data broker. The leak listed thousands of ordinary apps (games, dating apps, fitness trackers) whose users' locations had ended up there, often without the app makers knowing. The data had leaked out through the ad system.
- 2025, the localhost trick. In a study called "Local Mess", researchers found that Meta's tracking code on websites was passing information to the Facebook and Instagram apps on the same Android phone. That let Meta link "anonymous" browsing to your real account, even in private mode.
You don't need to remember the details. The pattern is the point: data that gets collected eventually gets used, sold, leaked, or fined. Usually more than one of those.
Want the long version? The US Federal Trade Commission keeps a list of its privacy and security enforcement cases, the law firm CMS runs the GDPR Enforcement Tracker with every publicly known fine under European privacy law, and Wikipedia keeps a running list of data breaches. Fair warning: all three are long.
The flashlight problem
Here's our favourite example, because it's so small. Back in 2013, the US Federal Trade Commission went after a hugely popular flashlight app, Brightest Flashlight Free. A flashlight. It was sending its users' precise location and device ID to advertising networks.
From an engineer's point of view, this is absurd. On a modern Android phone, switching on the torch doesn't need a single permission. There's no technical reason for a flashlight to know where you are, who your contacts are, or what else is on your phone.
But data is worth money, so apps ask for it anyway. The weather app wants your location around the clock, not just when you check the forecast. The game wants your contacts. The keyboard wants "full access". Most of the time it isn't for the feature. It's for someone's data collection, and the more the better, since that raises its value for advertisers and others.
How it happens (it's rarely a villain)
To be fair to our colleagues in the industry: most of this isn't done by cartoon villains. It happens one reasonable-sounding decision at a time:
- "Let's add analytics so we know which buttons people use."
- "The ad library pays the bills, and it's just one line."
- "Let's log everything, just in case we need it later."
- "Let's make people sign up, so we can send them updates."
Each step makes sense on its own. Add them up, and you have a company sitting on a pile of personal data it doesn't really need, guarded by whoever had time to configure the server that week. Every database is a future leak waiting for its date.
So we wrote ourselves some rules
When we started with mobile apps at EiBPM, we wrote down what we'd do instead. Ten rules, no exceptions. Here they are, grouped by what they're for.
You're the customer, not the product
- No Ads. When we charge for an app, that price is the whole business model. Nobody is paying us on the side for your attention.
- No Trackers. No analytics libraries, no fingerprinting, no quiet calls to third parties. Those four lines of code from the intro? We don't write them.
Nothing to hand over means nothing to leak
- No Accounts. No signup, no email address, no password to forget or to have stolen. Install it and it works.
- No Data Collection. Your data stays on your device, because we don't run a server for it to go to. We can't lose what we never had.
- No Location Spying. If an app needs your location, for example to work out when the sun rises where you are, the maths happens on your device. We never see the answer.
The internet is the exception, not the rule
- Offline as Default. Our apps work without a connection. They only go online when a feature truly can't work otherwise, and then they say so.
- Privacy by Default. We only ask for a permission when a feature really needs it. Anything optional starts switched off, and you switch it on.
Respect your device and your time
- Clear Design. Honest layouts, readable text, no dark patterns nudging you towards the "accept all" button.
- Low Power. Code that sips, not gulps. On a watch, battery life is a feature, and an app that isn't constantly phoning home uses a lot less of it.
- No Companion App. Our watch apps stand on their own. A forced phone app is one of the classic ways to collect data the watch alone would never have handed over.
"Can't" beats "won't"
This is the engineering idea at the heart of all of it. A privacy policy is a promise: we won't misuse your data. Promises get broken. Companies get bought, budgets get cut, servers get hacked, policies get "updated".
So we went for architecture instead of promises: we can't misuse your data, because we don't have it. And we really do mean nothing. We don't even have a customer list. When you buy one of our apps, Google Play handles the payment, and all that reaches us is an order number, the country it came from and, in some countries, a postcode for tax purposes. No name, no email address, no idea who you are.
If someone broke into our systems tomorrow, they'd walk away empty-handed. There's nothing to sell, nothing to leak, nothing to subpoena.
What it costs us (honestly)
This isn't free for us, and we won't pretend otherwise.
- We don't know which features you use most. When we want to know, we have to ask you, like it's 1995.
- When something breaks, we often only learn about it when you tell us. (Google Play shows every developer anonymous crash counts. That's Google's system, not something we built in, and it's as far as it goes.)
- We can't send you "we miss you!" emails, because we don't have your email address. We consider that a feature.
- And we have to charge actual money, because we refuse to make it back by selling you.
We think that's a fair trade. You may or may not agree, but at least you know exactly what the trade is.
Three things you can do today about the data economy, with any app
You don't have to be an engineer to push back a little:
- Ask "why does this need that?" When an app asks for a permission, ask whether the feature you want actually needs it. A flashlight doesn't need your location. A calculator doesn't need your contacts. If in doubt, tap "Don't allow" and see whether the app still works. Usually it does.
- Check the "Data safety" section in the Play Store before installing. It's not perfect, but a long list of "data shared with third parties" tells you a lot.
- Be a little suspicious of "free". Not every free app is selling you, but someone pays for the servers and the developers. If it isn't you, it's worth wondering who it is.
The short version
As app users we got tired of being the product, so we decided not to make anyone else into one. EiBPM apps do their job, on your device, and then leave you alone. No ads, no trackers, no accounts, no server full of your life.
And honestly, none of this should be special. Apps that respect you should be the norm, not a niche for the privacy-minded. Your heartbeat, your sleep, where you went this morning: that's your life. It belongs on your device and under your control, not on someone else's server waiting for the next "oops".
Every app built on principles like the ten above hands a little of that control back to you. We'd love the whole industry to follow. Until it does, we'll keep building apps that prove it can be done. Our ten principles live on the home page.
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