Digital Wellbeing Initiative

We're working together with the University of Augsburg and its Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing to advance our understanding of how activity and your habits can contribute to a healthy home screen.

📝 Participating is voluntary, not the default, and you can leave anytime. We want to be as transparent as possible about the initiative. Since Niagara Launcher v1.8.6, you can also join and leave the initiative through this link.

🔽 How to request your data: If you are participating in the initiative, you can request your data anytime, and it only takes a few seconds. Open Niagara Launcher's settings > Advanced > Analytics > Digital wellbeing initiative > Request my data. Here's a guide on what the requested data will look like.   

🛑 How to stop participating: You're only participating if you explicitly opted in. To stop participating, open Niagara Launcher's settings > Advanced > Analytics > Digital wellbeing initiative and turn off "How you use your device" and "Your physical activity."

Types of data we collect

Here's an overview of what we collect for our digital wellbeing initiative.

📱 How you use your device: Information about your app launches, notifications (without revealing their content), home screen, and the phone unlocks.

🏃 Your physical activity: Your movement and sleep times without tracking your location.Update: We're not analyzing physical activity anymore.

You can also dive deeper and explore what we collect in detail here.

Our privacy principles

1. No Misuse

We solely use this data for scientific research and to improve our app. This also means we neither sell your data nor do we use it for marketing/advertising purposes.

2. Identity Protection

We added the following safety mechanisms to protect your identity:

Auto-Deletion of Personal Information

We delete your personal information three months after we logged it. We may keep statistics about that data in an anonymized form (for example, by publishing statistics) that is not associated with any identifier and does not reveal your identity.

Omitting Sensitive Data

We explicitly want to mention a few types of data we do NOT include:

  • Non-resettable identifiers such as your name, email, phone number, or hardware identifiers. Instead, we associate your data with a random ID (that is unique per installation). It can be reset by turning your digital wellbeing analytics off and on again or clearing Niagara Launcher's data. We do not reset this identifier automatically because we already delete any data attached to it if it's older than 90 days.
  • Uncommon apps: You might use an app that was specifically designed for the local community you're living in or the company you're working for. Including these apps in our logs could partially reveal the identity of some of our users. That's why we don't include any data in our records from uncommon apps. Here's how we achieve that: First, we check for every app if it is publicly available on an app store. If it is, we check its popularity based on how many users downloaded it. If the app is popular (it has to have at least 100.000 downloads), we include any events related to it (notifications and app launches).
  • Your location: We do not track your location.
  • The content of your notifications (e.g., chat messages or images): We only log metadata of your notifications, such as sender app, type, and post/removal time.
  • Data that could reveal your contacts / with whom you're chatting with

3. Transparency and control

We treat all your data collected by our digital wellbeing initiative as personal information under the GDPR. You have the right to object to its data collection, i.e., never participating in or leaving the initiative, the right to request your data, and the right to have it deleted at any time. We're offering an automated data export function. To access it, please follow the guide at the beginning of this article.

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