Privacy statement

LAST UPDATED 2026-08-06 · APPLIES TO THE STUDY GUARDIAN WINDOWS BETA

Study Guardian is built to be local-first and private by design. This page explains, plainly, what it does and does not do with your data. The exact same statement ships inside the app (Privacy in the sidebar), so there is no separate web version with different fine print.

The short version

• Everything runs on your own device. There is no cloud, no account, no login, and no telemetry.
• Nothing you generate is transmitted to the developer or any third party.
• Raw webcam frames are never stored or sent — they are analysed in memory and discarded.
• You can delete your stored data at any time from within the app.

What is processed on your device

Webcam (optional, only while you turn it on)

• Frames from your camera are read into memory, converted to a focus signal, and then discarded.
• No image, video, screenshot, or thumbnail is written to disk or sent anywhere.
• What is derived and stored is a timeline of focus states with timestamps and durations: present, no face, and — when full face-landmark tracking is available on your machine — looking away and drowsy. When landmark tracking is unavailable, sensing degrades to presence-only and says so in the app.
• This derived focus timeline is stored locally like your other data and can be erased at any time with Settings → Delete stored webcam history.

Activity (only while a study session is active)

• The foreground application name, the window title, and your idle time are sampled to categorise on-task vs. distraction time.
• Window titles are OFF by default. If left off, only the app name and category are stored. You can opt in under Settings.
• No screenshots, keystrokes, clipboard contents, browsing history, or file contents are ever captured.

What is stored, and where

• Your sessions, activity segments, focus events, and settings are stored in a local SQLite database in your per-user application-data folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%), on your device only.
• The database is not encrypted. Anyone with access to your Windows user account could read it, so treat it like any other local file.

Your controls

• Turn the webcam off — use app + idle sensing without a camera at all.
• Keep window titles off (the default) or opt in explicitly.
• Delete stored activity history — Settings → Delete stored activity history.
• Delete stored webcam history — Settings → Delete stored webcam history.
• Uninstall — removing the app (and ticking Delete application data) removes your local database.

Network

Study Guardian's backend binds only to your local loopback interface (127.0.0.1) and is protected by a per-launch token. The app makes no outbound network connections to send your data anywhere, and never contacts the internet in the background.

There is exactly one network action, and you trigger it by hand: the Check for updates button in Settings → About fetches a small file from this website containing the latest version number. Nothing is sent with that request — no identifier, no usage data, nothing about you or your sessions — and the app never checks on its own.

(Windows itself may fetch the WebView2 runtime from Microsoft during installation if it isn't already present.)

This website

This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. If you join the macOS waitlist, your email address is stored for exactly one purpose — a single release announcement — and the list is deleted after it is sent.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Open an issue at github.com/jiaming1145/study-monitor.