Spectre was designed specifically to minimize collection and persistence of sensitive personal information.

Due to our zero-PII (personally identifiable information) policy, Spectre will never:

  • Send your name, passwords or contact information
  • Send any information which could identify you

It is for these reasons that:

  • You do not hold an account with us
  • We can not recover any forgotten credentials
  • We do not directly process payments or refunds
  • We may require your collaboration when you report a bug
  • We have nothing to disclose to authorities on your usage of the app

Collection

With the important bit out of the way, the Spectre app does collect or transmit some information.

Device Logs

Transparency and self-empowerment are important values at Spectre. To help you keep track of what is happening in the background, to enable you to investigate unexpected behaviour and to ensure you are the gatekeeper when you recruit our assistance to diagnose a problem with the app, we collect logs during the app's execution.

Logs can be viewed by you at any time. Logs are not saved to disk and disappear as soon as the app is quit. Logs are not sent to us and we can only access them by asking you to relay them to us.

Identifiers

To enable scrubbing of personally identifiable information while retaining their diagnostic potential, Spectre performs one-way cryptographic encoding of any personal information prior to exposure.

Note that these identifiers are not shared unless you do so manually or enable Spectre's built-in diagnostics features as detailed below.

Crash Monitoring

It is important to us that your experience using the app is as flawless as possible.  To that end, Spectre has hooks in place designed to take action should the app crash for any reason.

Crash monitoring is disabled by default but enabled if the user agrees to engage the app's built-in diagnostics feature.


When the app crashes, the software will make a best-effort attempt to write to disk some information that will assist in determining the cause of the crash.  This information is commonly referred to as a "crash report".

When the app is started next, Spectre will find this crash report on disk and attempt to send it to our crash monitoring service.  Once there, our developers will be notified and investigate the cause of the crash.  With this information, they should be able to apply changes to Spectre's code to prevent the crash from occurring in the future.  These changes would roll out to your app via an app update.

Metrics

As part of recording a crash event, Spectre discloses the following details:

  • The device's model, identifier, resolution and pixel density
  • The operating system's name and version
  • The application's version
  • The active language and carrier name
  • Spectre identifiers as described above

Note that as a result of our zero-PII policy, this information cannot uniquely trace back to you.

All we know is, eg. "there exists an iPhone out there that is running iOS 14.0 which crashed in this part of the code".

Analytics

To ensure we are adequately serving the needs of our many users, avoid creating confusing user experiences and build our features such that they are helpful to people of all abilities, we use analytics to build statistical models of how our aggregate user-base interacts with the user interface.

Analytics are disabled by default but enabled if the user agrees to engage the app's built-in diagnostics feature.


As users navigate through the app, an aggregate statistical model is built to determine how large populations interact differently with the app. Using this information, our product managers are able to validate their assumptions or make corrections to resolve bottlenecks and make your usage of the app simpler and smoother.

Metrics

As part of building a statistical model, Spectre discloses the following details:

  • The device's model, identifier, resolution and pixel density
  • The operating system's name and version
  • The application's version
  • The active language and carrier name
  • Spectre identifiers as described above

Note that as a result of our zero-PII policy, this information cannot uniquely trace back to you.

All we know is, eg. "7% of our users are having issues logging in with FaceID, 35% of them are using an iPad".

Communication

To keep our users appraised of significant developments in digital security and raise awareness of relevant important events, Spectre users can opt-in to receiving one-way notifications in their app.  If security information needs to be communicated, such as a critical bug in the app or a widely used website has been compromised, Spectre may use notifications to appraise and advise its user-base.

Notifications are disabled by default but can be enabled from within the app by the user.

Metrics

To facilitate participation in Spectre's notifications, Spectre discloses the following details:

  • The device's push notification identifier
  • The device's model, identifier, resolution and pixel density
  • The operating system's name and version
  • The application's version
  • The active language and carrier name

Note that as a result of our zero-PII policy, this information cannot uniquely trace back to you.