Digital Wellbeing Initiative
We want to explore unhealthy phone usage, its underlying causes, and ways to encourage healthier habits, which made us start the Digital Wellbeing Initiative.
Volunteers may opt into the initiative and offer their phone usage data for us to analyze. We share our findings on our help page: Digital Wellbeing Initiative • Results.
Transparency and Control
We want to be as transparent as possible towards our users and respect their privacy, which is why you have to explicitly opt-in, can leave the initiative at any time, and can request all of your data with a simple button press.
How to join and leave
Again, participation is voluntary, not the default, and you can leave anytime, but we would appreciate your help in understanding healthy phone usage.
You can join and leave the initiative through this link or by going to Niagara Settings > Advanced > Analytics > Digital Wellbeing Initiative.
Summary of what data we collect
We know not everyone has the time and energy to read the terms and examine the exact data, so here is a quick summary of the data we collect through the initiative. All personal data we collect is anonymized and deleted automatically from our servers after 90 days after we receive it. In the next section, you can read more about how we keep your data private.
The data we collect is about how you use your device:
| Data | Details |
|---|---|
| App sessions | How long you use which app |
| Phone unlocks | When and how often you use your device |
| Home screen | How you set up Niagara Launcher, for example, what favorites you have |
| Notifications (without content) | Check which notifications distract you throughout the day |
| Device metadata | Android version, manufacturer, and model to identify faulty data caused by device specifics |
| Survey answers | To get your opinion or judgment, like how satisfied you are with your current phone usage |
| Country | To identify cultural bias and compare our data to publicly available studies. We do not track your location at a more precise level. |
You can find all the information in Data We Collect as Part of the Digital Wellbeing Initiative.
How to request your data
If you are participating in the initiative, you can request your data anytime: open Niagara Launcher's settings > Advanced > Analytics > Digital wellbeing initiative > and tap Request my data.
We also created a comprehensive guide on interpreting this data.
Data Principles
1. No Misuse
We solely use collected 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 on our servers 90 days after we receive 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:
- We do not track permanent 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). This ID can be reset by leaving and re-joining the Digital Wellbeing Initiative or clearing Niagara Launcher's data. We do not reset this identifier automatically because we already delete any personal data attached to it if it's older than 90 days after we receive it.
- We do not track your usage of uncommon apps. You might use an app 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 from uncommon apps in our records. We determine how common apps are by counting how many of our users have installed the app in question or by using public data on the web, such as the install count on Google Play.
- We do not track 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.
- We do not track data that could reveal your contacts or with whom you're chatting.
3. Full control
We treat all your personal information collected by the Digital Wellbeing Initiative under the General Data Protection Regulation (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 offer an automated data export function in Niagara Launcher's settings: Open Niagara setting > Advanced > Analytics > Digital wellbeing initiative > and tap Request my data.