Beacon privacy policy

1. Who we are and what this covers

Beacon is a reminders app for iPhone and Android. It reminds you at the right time, when you arrive at or leave a place, when your phone changes network, or when you press a button you set up. Beacon is made by Novacraft Engineering Studio Limited (“Novacraft”, “we”, “us”), 54b Adeniyi Jones, Oba Akran, Ikeja, Lagos 100282, Nigeria. We are responsible for the personal data described here.

This policy covers the Beacon app, the Beacon server that syncs it, and the account deletion page. Our website has its own privacy policy. Questions about Beacon and your data go to [email protected].

2. Beacon works without an account

You can use Beacon without signing in. Your tasks, lists, notes, costs, signals, places, buttons and settings are then kept only on your phone. Nothing from them is stored on our servers. A few features reach an outside service even without an account, such as address search and app updates; each is described below.

Deleting the app deletes this data. Settings, Your data, Erase data removes it without deleting the app.

3. What we keep when you sign in

Signing in is optional. It keeps your lists on every phone you use and backed up. You sign in with your email address and a 6-digit code we email you, or with a password if you choose to set one in Settings. When you are signed in, our server keeps:

• Your email address, to send sign-in codes, list invites, a notice when a new device signs in, and confirmation when your account is deleted.
• What you put in Beacon: tasks, lists, notes, costs and actual spend, signals and their conditions, buttons, place names and their coordinates, Wi-Fi network names you attach to places, and the settings that sync between phones (such as currency and brief times).
• Signed-in devices: for each phone, its name or model, operating system version, Beacon version and when it signed in and was last active. You see this list under Settings, Devices.
• Purchases: records of Beacon Pro purchases from the App Store or Google Play (product, store reference, status and renewal date), so Pro follows your account.
• Push token (Android): a Firebase Cloud Messaging token for each signed-in Android phone, so we can deliver shared list and account alerts and refresh your briefs. It is removed when that phone signs out.
• Brief schedule: your time zone and morning and evening brief times, so the server can wake your Android phone to prepare briefs.

We use this data only to run Beacon for you: syncing, sign-in and security, Pro access, shared lists and the alerts you turn on.

4. Location

Place reminders and network signals need your location. Beacon asks for it only when you set up something that uses it, and explains why before your phone asks.

• Location readings stay on your phone. Beacon uses them to rank your saved places by distance and to check whether you are at a place. We do not record where you go.
• Geofences run on your phone. Arrive and leave alerts are watched by iOS or Android on the phone itself. Our server is not told when you arrive or leave.
• Saved places sync only when you are signed in. A place you save (its name, coordinates, radius and attached Wi-Fi names) is sent to our server only to sync it to your other phones.
• Background location (“Always” on iPhone, “Allow all the time” on Android) is used only so place reminders and network signals fire while Beacon is closed. It is not used for anything else.
• On iPhone and Android, reading the name of the Wi-Fi network you are on requires location permission. Beacon uses the network name only for network signals, on the phone.

You can change or withdraw location permission at any time in your phone's settings. Place reminders pause until it is back.

5. Searching for places

Address search. As you type an address, Beacon sends the words you have typed so far directly from your phone to Photon, an OpenStreetMap address search run by komoot GmbH (Germany). To favour nearby results it also sends your position, rounded to about 110 metres. When you drop a pin, Beacon sends the pin's position, rounded the same way, to Nominatim, the address lookup run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Both services receive your IP address as part of the request and handle it under their own privacy policies. Recent searches are cached in the app's memory and cleared when Beacon closes.

Beacon on the web. If you sign in at beacon.novacraft.africa/app, your lists and settings are kept in your browser's storage on that computer and sync with your account; signing out clears them. A secure, HTTP-only cookie keeps you signed in and is only sent to our server. The place map loads map tiles from OpenFreeMap, which receives your IP address and the area of the map you are looking at.

Nearby places. For signals like “near any pharmacy”, Beacon sends the kind of place and your position, rounded to about 110 metres, to our server. Our server looks up places of that kind from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass service and caches the results by area for up to 7 days. We do not keep your position or link it to your account, and Overpass does not receive your account details.

Maps. Maps in the app are drawn by Apple Maps on iPhone and Google Maps on Android, which receive the map area being shown under their own privacy policies.

6. Shared lists and nearest-person alerts

When you share a list, the people you invite see the list's tasks, who added or took each one, and the email address of each member. Invites are sent by email from our server.

Nearest-person alerts tell the member of a shared list who is closest to a place on that list. They are off until you turn them on. While they are on, your phone sends your approximate area, rounded to about 1 kilometre, to our server from time to time. The server keeps only your latest area, uses it only to decide who gets the alert, and deletes it when you turn the feature off or delete your account. This works on Android today and is coming to iPhone.

7. Brain dump

Brain dump turns a paragraph you type into separate tasks. It is optional, needs an account, and Beacon asks for your agreement before the first one is sent. When you use it, the text you typed and the names of your lists and places are sent to our server, which uses Anthropic's Claude to draft tasks and returns them for you to review. Anthropic processes the text as our service provider and does not use it to train its models. We do not store the text; we keep only a count of how many brain dumps you used that day.

8. Google Tasks

You can connect Google Tasks to bring your lists into Beacon. You sign in with Google only for this; it does not sign you in to Beacon. Beacon requests one Google permission, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/tasks, and talks to Google Tasks directly from your phone.

• What Beacon reads: the Google account email you connect, your task lists, and the tasks in the lists you pick, with their titles, notes, due dates, completion and subtasks.
• What Beacon writes, only if you turn on two-way sync: it creates one list called Beacon in your Google Tasks, adds tasks to it, and marks tasks there as done when you finish them in Beacon. Without two-way sync, nothing changes in Google Tasks.
• Tasks you import become Beacon tasks. If you are signed in to Beacon, they sync to your account like any other task. Your Google sign-in is never sent to our server.

Beacon's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Data from Google Tasks is used only to import and sync your tasks in Beacon. It is not used for advertising, it is not sold, it is not used to train AI models, and no person at Novacraft reads it unless you ask us to and agree, it is needed for security, or the law requires it. You can disconnect Google Tasks in the app at any time, or remove Beacon's access in your Google Account's security settings.

9. Apple Reminders

On iPhone, Beacon can import from Apple Reminders. With your permission it reads your reminder lists and reminders on the phone; none of this is sent to us unless the tasks are synced to your account after import. Mirror mode keeps checking Reminders each time you open Beacon and copies changes into Beacon. Beacon never writes to Apple Reminders.

10. Dictation and photo to task

Dictation uses your phone's own speech recognizer and asks it to run on the device where the phone supports that. Beacon receives only the resulting text and never stores or sends the audio.

Photo to task reads the text in a photo you pick using on-device text recognition (Apple's Vision on iPhone, Google's ML Kit on Android). The photo is not sent to us.

11. Notifications, app lock and updates

Reminders are scheduled on your phone and do not depend on our server. On Android, account and shared list alerts arrive through Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google), which needs the push token described in section 3. iPhone does not receive push alerts from Beacon yet.

App lock is set on the phone and never synced. Face ID, Touch ID and fingerprint checks are done by your phone and never reach Beacon. If you set a Beacon PIN, only a salted hash of it is kept, in the iPhone Keychain or the Android Keystore, and it never leaves the phone.

App updates to Beacon's app code are delivered by Pulsar, Novacraft's own update service. Pulsar receives an install identifier, the app and platform version, and whether an update installed or failed.

12. Payments

Beacon Pro is bought through the App Store or Google Play. Apple or Google take the payment; Beacon never sees your card or bank details. We receive a receipt from the store to confirm the purchase and keep the record described in section 3.

13. No ads, no tracking, no selling

Beacon shows no ads. It does not track you across other apps or websites, does not use the advertising ID on Android or the IDFA on iPhone, and has no advertising or attribution software. We do not sell your personal data or share it for advertising.

14. Services we use

We share data only with these providers, and only for the purposes above:

• Hetzner Online (Germany) hosts the server and database that run Beacon.
• Cloudflare carries traffic to our server and stores our encrypted database backups.
• Vela, Novacraft's own email service, sends sign-in codes, invites and account emails and keeps a delivery log of them. It sends through Amazon Web Services.
• Anthropic drafts tasks for brain dump, only when you use it.
• Google: Firebase Cloud Messaging for Android alerts, Google Sign-In and the Google Tasks API when you connect Google Tasks, Google Maps and ML Kit on Android, and Google Play billing. The Google Maps and ML Kit components may send Google basic diagnostics and usage data about the map and text recognition.
• Apple: App Store billing, Apple Maps, and the on-device features of iOS.
• komoot (Photon), the OpenStreetMap Foundation (Nominatim) and the Overpass service, for address and place search.
• OpenFreeMap, for map tiles in Beacon on the web.
• Pulsar, Novacraft's own update service.

We may also disclose data if the law requires it, to protect people's safety or our rights, or as part of a sale or reorganisation of our business, in which case this policy continues to apply.

15. Why we process your data

We process your data because it is needed to provide Beacon to you (syncing, sign-in, purchases, shared lists), because you agreed to it (location, brain dump, nearest-person alerts, Google Tasks, notifications), or for our legitimate interest in keeping Beacon secure and working, such as sign-in alerts and limits on abuse. You can withdraw consent at any time by turning the feature off or changing the permission in your phone's settings.

16. Where your data is stored

Beacon's server and database run in Germany, in the European Union. Our providers may process data in other countries, including the United States. When data leaves Nigeria or the European Union, we rely on the safeguards the law allows, such as contracts with standard data protection terms.

17. Security

All traffic between the app and our server uses HTTPS. Sign-in codes and session tokens are stored on the server only as hashes, and sign-in codes expire after 10 minutes. If you set a password, we keep only a salted scrypt hash of it, never the password itself; you can change or remove it in Settings, and we email you whenever it changes. Database backups are encrypted at rest. Access to production systems is limited to the people who run Beacon. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

18. How long we keep data

• Account data and synced content are kept until you delete them or your account.
• Tasks you delete stay in Recently deleted so you can undo, until you remove them for good or delete your account.
• Nightly database backups are encrypted and expire within 30 days, so deleted data is gone from backups within 30 days.
• Your nearest-person area is replaced each time it is sent and deleted when you turn the feature off.
• Brain dump text is not kept. Address searches are cached on the phone only until Beacon closes; nearby place results are cached on the server by area for up to 7 days.

19. Deleting and exporting your data

In the app: Settings, Your data, Delete account. This deletes your account and everything synced to it from our servers, and we email you when it is done. You can choose to erase the phone's copy too.

On the web: for a phone you no longer have, go to beacon-api.novacraft.africa/account/delete, enter your email and the code we send you.

Deleting your account does not cancel a Beacon Pro subscription; cancel it in the App Store or Google Play first.

Export: Settings, Your data, Export your data saves your tasks, lists and the rest as JSON or CSV.

20. Your rights

Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and, where it applies, the GDPR, you can ask to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your personal data, object to or restrict how we use it, and withdraw consent. Most of this you can do in the app; for anything else, write to [email protected] and we will reply within 30 days.

You can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, or to the data protection authority where you live.

21. Children

Beacon is not directed to children under 13, or under 16 where local law sets a higher age. We do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

22. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update the effective date above. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

23. Contact

Novacraft Engineering Studio Limited, 54b Adeniyi Jones, Oba Akran, Ikeja, Lagos 100282, Nigeria. Email [email protected]. Help with the app is at Beacon support, and the rules for using it are in the Beacon terms of use.