Privacy Policy
Effective 10 August 2026 · Version 1.0
In plain English
Guardian has no accounts, no login, and no server. Your settings and history live only on your phone.
We do not read, log, or transmit which apps you use or which sites you visit.
The one thing that does leave your device: while protection is on, your DNS lookups are routed through a third-party filtering service (CleanBrowsing) so adult content can be blocked. See §3.
If you subscribe, Google Play and RevenueCat handle the payment. They see a purchase receipt, never your Guardian data. See §4.
Uninstalling the app deletes everything Guardian ever stored about you.
01. Who this policy covers
This policy describes how Guardian (“the app,” “we,” “our”) handles information when you install and use it on an Android device. Guardian is developed by Muhammad Ali, an individual developer based in Pakistan.
Guardian is a self-directed content- and app-blocking tool built for people working to reduce or quit compulsive pornography use. It has no user accounts and no backend server — there is nowhere for your personal data to be sent, because we haven’t built anywhere for it to go.
02. Data we store on your device
Guardian stores the following directly on your phone, using Android’s standard local app-storage mechanism. None of it is copied to us, to the cloud, or to any third party.
What / Why
Whether protection is currently on — So the app and its background service know your current state
Your commitment-lock timer, if set — So a lock you set while clear-headed can’t be undone early — the app’s core feature
The list of apps you’ve chosen to block — So the blocker knows what to cover with a block screen
Activation/deactivation timestamps — Powers your streak and protected-time stats, shown only to you
Whether you have an active subscription — So the app knows whether to show the paywall
None of this is a photo, a browsing history, a list of sites visited, or any content — it’s small structured state (booleans, timestamps, a list of package names) needed to run the features you turned on. Deleting the app deletes all of it.
03. Data that leaves your device
There is exactly one flow of data off your phone in the current version of Guardian:
DNS filtering. When you turn protection on, Guardian starts a local VPN tunnel that routes your device’s DNS lookups through CleanBrowsing’s Family Filter resolvers, so adult-content domains resolve to nothing. This means CleanBrowsing — not Guardian — sees the domain names your device looks up while protection is active, the same way any DNS resolver you use (including your carrier’s default one) does. Guardian does not log, store, or have access to this traffic; it only configures the tunnel. Review CleanBrowsing’s own privacy policy for how they handle DNS queries.
Guardian does not currently include any analytics, advertising, or crash-reporting SDK. If that changes in a future version, this policy will be updated first, and the update will be reflected in the in-app version history.
04. Payments & subscriptions
Guardian offers an optional paid subscription. When you subscribe, the purchase is processed entirely by Google Play Billing — Guardian never sees or stores your payment details. We use RevenueCat to check whether your Google Play account has an active entitlement, so the app knows whether to unlock. RevenueCat receives a purchase/entitlement record (product purchased, purchase date, renewal status) tied to an anonymous device identifier — never your blocklist, lock history, or any other Guardian data. See RevenueCat’s privacy policy and Google Play’s terms.
Because Guardian has no accounts, your subscription is tied to the Google account on your device. Restoring a purchase on a new device uses Google Play’s own restore mechanism.
05. Permissions we ask for, and why
Android requires each of these to be granted explicitly. None of them are used to collect data about you beyond what’s needed to run the feature listed.
Permission / Used for
Usage Access — Detects which app is currently open, live, so a blocked app can be covered with a block screen. Not logged or stored as history.
Display over other apps — Draws the block screen on top of a blocked app when you open it.
Device Admin — Adds friction to uninstalling Guardian while a commitment lock is active — the mechanism behind the app’s core promise.
VPN — Runs the local DNS-filtering tunnel described in §3.
Foreground service & notifications — Keeps protection running reliably in the background, with a persistent “Guardian is active” notification, as Android requires for any always-on service.
Run at device startup — Resumes protection automatically after a restart, if it was on before.
Query installed apps — Lists your installed apps so you can choose which ones to block. The list is read at the moment you open that screen, not monitored continuously.
06. What we don’t do
We don’t require an account, email, or phone number to use Guardian.
We don’t run advertising or ad-tracking SDKs.
We don’t sell, rent, or share your data — we don’t have any to sell, since we don’t collect it.
We don’t know which sites you visited, which apps you opened, or when — the app checks these things locally, in the moment, to decide whether to block, and doesn’t keep a record.
We don’t have a customer database, because we don’t have customers with accounts — only installs.
07. Children
Guardian is intended for users 18 years of age or older. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has used Guardian and provided information covered by this policy, contact us at the address in §11 and we’ll address it — though as described above, there is generally no personal information for us to hold in the first place.
08. Your rights & how to delete your data
Because your data lives only on your device, you are always in direct control of it:
To reset it: Settings → Reset All Data, inside the app (unavailable only while a commitment lock is actively running, by design — see the Terms & Conditions).
To delete all of it: uninstall the app. Android removes its local storage along with it.
If you’re in the EU/UK, GDPR gives you rights of access, correction, deletion, and portability over personal data a controller holds about you. Because Guardian doesn’t hold a copy of your data anywhere outside your own device, there is nothing on our end to request, correct, or export. If you subscribe, RevenueCat and Google act as independent controllers for your purchase record — contact them directly, or us, and we’ll help route the request.
09. Data retention
Local app data persists for as long as Guardian remains installed, or until you reset it from Settings. We retain nothing server-side, because nothing is sent to a server we operate. DNS queries handled by CleanBrowsing during active protection are subject to CleanBrowsing’s own retention policy, not ours.
10. Changes to this policy
If Guardian’s data practices change — for example, if we add optional anonymous analytics to understand which features are used — we’ll update this policy first, note the change in the app’s release notes, and update the version stamp at the top of this page.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy or your data: alykayimkahni@gmail.com
This document is provided for transparency about Guardian’s data practices and does not constitute legal advice. See also our Terms & Conditions.