Privacy Policy: ADA (Acoustic Drone Alert)

Last updated: 2026-10-29 Applies to: ADA: Acoustic Drone Alert for Android Contact: aimotioncoach@gmail.com

The short version

ADA analyses drone-like sound on your phone while you have armed it.

• Ordinary microphone audio is analysed in memory and discarded. Save alert clips locally is optional and off by default; when enabled, ADA saves a short clip for a real microphone alert.
• Save detection location is independently optional and off by default. When enabled and permitted, ADA saves this phone's position with observations during an armed session.
• Map displays saved detection locations using Google Maps. Opening it contacts Google, which processes map requests and SDK/device information. My location separately asks for location permission when needed and displays the current device position while Map is in the foreground. It does not enable incident location tagging or Telegram sharing.
• Telegram alerts are independently optional and off by default. If enabled, new acoustic alert facts, the phone model and a random ADA installation ID are sent to the bot destination you configure. Coordinates and map links require separate Include observation location consent and local location tagging. Attach technical detection report is another optional, default-off choice. Audio is never attached.
• Where monitoring access features are enabled in your installed version, ADA keeps local session/usage records and checks optional ADA Pro purchases through Google Play. Opening the app or monitoring can check Play access without starting a purchase. Internet also supports explicit Telegram setup/tests and enabled delivery. Google Play separately handles reviews you choose to submit. ADA has no developer-operated upload service, advertising, developer analytics or ADA account. Google Maps has its own SDK data processing, described below. Google may back up a minimal free-session used count according to your device's Backup settings; detailed monitoring history remains local.
• You can deliberately export clips or a selected observation point, copy coordinates, or open the point in another app. Those actions transfer the selected data to the destination you choose.

What ADA accesses, and why

ADA does not request background location ("Allow all the time"), broad storage access, contacts, photos or phone identity. Internet and network-status access are normal Android permissions. Optional Telegram delivery is controlled by the app's settings; its opt-out does not disable independent Google Play access checks or Google Maps when you open Map. Exports use the document location you explicitly select or a temporary, read-only grant for the selected KML file.

Armed sessions and optional location

You arm ADA deliberately. It can continue with the screen off, another app visible, or its card removed from Recents. Android shows foreground-service status while the session is active. Disarming ends microphone monitoring and armed-session location tagging. Android's Active apps Stop or Force stop also stops the app; ADA does not promise to restart after process termination.

Detection-location tagging runs only during an armed session with tagging enabled and permission available. Opening History or Map, or granting permission alone, does not start this tagging. The separate My location action can display the live device position while Map is foregrounded, including when ADA is disarmed, as explained below. Denying or revoking location permission does not disable microphone detection. A location fix may be unavailable, stale or approximate; ADA does not replace a missing historic fix with today's position. Demo observations do not receive real phone coordinates.

A saved point is the phone's observation location, not the drone's position. ADA does not infer source direction, distance, altitude or a flight path from it.

Google Maps and My location

Opening the Map tab loads Google Maps over the internet. Roads, Satellite and Terrain are Google map views. Map imagery and service availability depend on Google, connectivity and device support; ADA does not offer a downloadable offline map. Saved incidents remain available in History if Google Maps cannot load.

ADA reads saved incident details locally to draw its markers and clusters. It does not operate a server that collects your incident database. Viewing the map still involves Google: requests for the area you view and map interactions are processed by Google's map components. It is not a network-free or Google-free view of your saved locations.

Google documents collection of request/device metadata, Maps SDK version information, SDK crash metrics, IP address, a Maps-specific pseudonymous identifier, and map interactions such as panning and zooming. These are processed to operate and improve Google services. The Maps identifier is separate from ADA's installation ID used for optional Telegram reports. See Google's Maps SDK data disclosure and Google's Privacy Policy for Google's processing.

Tap My location to display Google's blue position marker and center on this phone or tablet. ADA requests foreground location permission if it is not already granted; approximate location works. The position is processed through the device location system and Google's My Location feature. This is optional: you can view saved detection markers without granting location access.

My location uses a temporary position for display and recentering. ADA does not save it as an incident, observation or Telegram message, and it does not enable Save detection location. Its live-location layer and outstanding requests stop when Map leaves the foreground. Leaving the Map destination ends that map-view session; opening it again requires another My location tap. Separately enabled armed-session tagging can continue under its own controls. Location accuracy and availability vary; the blue marker identifies this device, not a drone.

What is stored on your device

ADA stores local incident records: times and duration, detector confidence and decisions, acoustic measurements, possible model resemblance, settings, and whether an event was a demo. New incident, pass and observation records also retain the device-configured time zone and UTC offset at their start. Older records can have no recorded zone. Model/time-filter selections and the display/filter time zone are stored locally; selecting a zone does not rewrite the incident time or infer a geographic location. Map camera position is kept in memory, not as a saved location history. It also stores observation snapshots so that a merged History incident can retain its separate observations. When enabled and available, a snapshot includes coordinates, reported accuracy, fix time and age, and whether permission was approximate or precise. If a fresh position is missing at a real first alert, ADA may request one for up to ten seconds while the authorized session continues. History shows acquisition pending. A position measured afterward retains its actual time and is labeled as obtained after detection, not an exact position at detection. Disarm, location disable/revocation and deletion end or invalidate this acquisition. An observation saved before an interrupted session may be retained even when no final incident was completed. Telegram can create location-free alert snapshots with local tagging off. New observation snapshots are created only when local tagging or Telegram alerts are enabled.

Observation metadata is limited to the most recent 10,000 observations. Removing older observation metadata does not remove its parent History incident; its location details may therefore no longer be available.

Optional alert clips contain a short microphone window from a real alert and any review label you choose. Clips are retained within the app's limits of 30 days, 500 clips or 100 MB, with oldest clips removed first. Clip saving is separate from location tagging. Neither option enables automatic sharing or model training.

Incident and observation data, clip files, and these settings are excluded from Android cloud backup and device transfer. They remain in app-private storage. Temporary KML files prepared for Google Earth contain only the selected point; ADA removes older temporary exports when preparing new ones and clears them when you delete saved locations or History.

Telegram credentials and destination metadata are encrypted with Android Keystore-backed authenticated encryption in private storage excluded from backup and transfer. A missing or invalid key requires reconnecting; ADA does not fall back to plaintext storage. Tokens are not included in alert payloads or diagnostic messages. Disconnect removes the credential.

The private delivery queue contains text projections and optionally a technical JSON document, immutable once delivery is attempted, destination/consent generations, retry state and optional Telegram receipts; it never contains a bot token or audio attachment. Pending delivery is limited to 200 messages / 5 MB and a 15-minute alert lifetime, with up to eight attempts for eligible temporary failures. Delivery status can be sent, queued, cancelled, expired, failed or uncertain. An uncertain delivery is not retried automatically. Queue metadata is linked to observations and removed with them.

Monitoring usage and Google Play purchases

These features apply when free-session accounting and ADA Pro are available in your installed version. A version without those features enabled does not begin a purchase merely because these documents describe them. Accepting the documents or the free-session explanation does not subscribe you or enable optional saving/sharing.

Local monitoring records

ADA stores a local usage total, run/unit identifiers, a current-run marker, successful-start state, observed start/end times with time-zone context, measured duration and stop/interruption reasons. It also records which free units were counted or left uncharged after confirmed Pro or an eligible manual cancellation before 30 seconds. Cancelled runs retain their timestamps, duration and cancellation outcome with zero free sessions used; earlier usage is preserved. These are monitoring records even when no drone-like sound was detected. They are separate from incident History and review-invitation statistics, and contain no microphone samples.

The purpose is to show remaining free sessions, explain usage changes and reconcile interrupted monitoring without double-counting. If an interruption prevented recording an exact end time, ADA labels that uncertainty; reopening does not mean monitoring continued while the phone was off. It also saves whether the one-time free-session explanation was acknowledged. That flag is separate from legal agreement, microphone permission and usage.

Detailed monitoring runs have no automatic age/count expiry. Clear completed monitoring history removes completed display details and keeps any active run, the minimal accounting records and used/remaining totals. It does not restore free sessions. Delete all history in Privacy concerns detection incidents and their observations/clips; it does not erase the separate free-session ledger. The retained minimal ledger can therefore exist without older visible run details. It remains until app-private data is removed, for example by clearing storage or uninstalling.

The local monitoring database and detailed history are excluded from Android cloud backup and device transfer. Separately, when free-session accounting is enabled, ADA uses Google Play services Block Store to keep a minimal used-count recovery copy: format version, allowance and number used, with a corruption-detection checksum. It contains no account identifier, run identifier, timestamps, detailed history, audio, location, Telegram data or purchase/access token. Google Play services protects access by app package and signing certificate; ADA does not need your Google account identity or an ADA login. No installation-specific decryption key is needed.

ADA requests Google-managed backup of this minimal usage counter through Block Store. Google may periodically back it up according to your device's Backup settings and restore it through supported reinstall, cloud or device-transfer flows. Google associates backups with your Google account; ADA does not receive that account identity or require a separate sign-in. The counter payload itself contains none of the identifying or session details listed above. Google protects Block Store data with encryption, with end-to-end encryption where available; ADA does not promise that every device supports that protection. A successful local save/read does not confirm a cloud upload or immediate synchronization. Same-device uninstall/reinstall retention is documented with Android Backup enabled and supported Google Play services. ADA does not change Backup settings. Disabled Backup, Clear app storage, Play services resets and other restore conditions can remove or prevent recovery; this is not an unresettable record or a live cross-device allowance service. ADA never clears this copy when completed monitoring details are deleted. Recovered usage can raise, but never reduce, valid local usage. Earlier run details are not reconstructed; the UI explains their absence. An unavailable or unreadable recovery copy does not reset valid local usage and is not overwritten with a new lower count.

The saved Pro verification state below remains in private no-backup storage. If neither valid local usage nor valid recovered usage exists, ADA initializes the free allowance; it does not claim that the person has never used the app. No developer server is involved. Recovery of paying access remains a separate Google Play flow. Google's processing is governed by Google's Privacy Policy.

Purchase processing and access checks

Google Play handles checkout, the purchasing Google account and payment processing under Google's Privacy Policy. ADA does not receive payment-card numbers or create an ADA login. Through the Play Billing Library, ADA receives product/price information and purchase data needed to check eligibility, including purchase tokens, signed purchase payloads/signatures, purchase state, acknowledgement and renewal/suspension indicators. It uses tokens through Google Play to acknowledge a completed purchase or request an explicitly chosen plan change. These purchase-processing values are held in process memory, not saved by ADA as a local purchase-history file or sent to a developer backend.

When Billing is enabled, ADA can query Google Play when the app opens/returns to the foreground, after a purchase callback or Restore action, and periodically while monitoring remains active. A check may contact Google or use information cached by Google Play; ADA does not promise a fresh server response each time. Google independently maintains purchase/account/payment records under its policies. A purchase cannot be erased or cancelled by deleting ADA's local monitoring history.

For its best-effort offline policy, ADA saves only a local confirmation time, clock checkpoints, remaining verification budget and a confirmed-ineligible marker. This minimal record contains no Google account name, purchase token, signed purchase payload, selected plan or guessed expiry date. Device-clock checks are used to age that record; they are not an authoritative subscription expiry service. The app does not send its monitoring ledger, microphone audio, saved locations, Telegram credentials or technical reports through the Billing purchase/access requests.

Restore purchases uses the Google Play account that purchased ADA Pro. No ADA account or recovered free-session history is required. Google Play can restore eligible paid access even when this installation has no older monitoring details. See the Terms of Use for the free-session, subscription and seven-day verification-window rules. Your independent location, clips, local reports and Telegram choices remain unchanged when you buy, restore or cancel Pro.

Optional Telegram delivery

You configure your own dedicated bot and a private chat, group or channel through a guided setup. Validate bot explicitly contacts Telegram to check the token. After you start a chat with the bot or add it to a channel/group, Find chats reads recent bot updates to discover destination names, types and numeric chat IDs. Incoming message text is not retained. This lookup runs only when requested during setup; ADA does not continuously read your chats or change a bot webhook. You select a named destination, or optionally enter its ID/username manually. Selecting it contacts Telegram to validate and save the destination. Send test explicitly posts a labeled setup message with no real detection, position or audio. Neither action turns automatic alerts on; the master toggle is separate. Enter credentials only on the phone.

When enabled, ADA sends a real first acoustic alert without waiting for final History merging or clip saving. Text includes observation time from the phone's clock, the local uncalibrated score, an optional model-resemblance hypothesis, a short event identifier, the reporting phone's manufacturer/model and a random ADA installation ID. This ID is the same as the optional report's origin ID and distinguishes installations even on phones of the same model. It is not an Android ID, hardware serial, advertising ID or the phone's personal name. It persists across app restarts and updates, is excluded from backup/device transfer, and resets when app data is cleared or ADA is reinstalled. Device identity is included even with location sharing and technical reports off. It does not verify that a physical drone exists. Coordinates, accuracy and a map link are included only when location sharing was allowed at capture and remains allowed at dispatch. If coordinate sharing is enabled and acquisition is pending, the unattempted Telegram alert may wait up to ten seconds for that bounded acquisition; otherwise it sends without coordinates. Retrying never substitutes the phone's current location for the saved observation point. Demos, demo-attributed windows, cached or warm-up results, quietly stored events and suppressed repeats are excluded.

Attach technical detection report optionally replaces the plain alert with one JSON document and an alert caption. It applies only to newly captured real alerts; enabling it does not attach reports to older queued alerts. A report contains available spectral/harmonic descriptors, signal quality and log-mel summary statistics, local/model scores, a bounded sequence of up to 12 fresh measurements leading to the alert, an optional model-class embedding vector, detector settings, app/model/configuration identifiers and hashes, a random installation report identifier, phone manufacturer/model and Android API version. No raw audio, full log-mel arrays, hardware serial, Telegram token, chat history or contact list is included. The random identifier attributes reports from this installation; it is not a hardware identifier or individual-drone identity. Missing or invalid measurements are explicitly unavailable. Embeddings and model hypotheses do not identify an individual drone; this version performs no automatic peer matching.

Report coordinates, altitude, accuracy and fix timing obey the same separate location-sharing choice as the caption. Coordinates are never hidden in acoustic report fields. If enabled sharing awaits acquisition, the report waits under the same ten-second bound and marks missing locations on timeout. The detached acoustic evidence is stored with its local observation, subject to the 10,000-observation limit and History deletion. Turning Telegram report attachments off cancels pending report messages and stops capture for Telegram. Independent local report saving can continue; already stored local evidence remains until History is deleted or retention removes it. Already delivered Telegram documents cannot be recalled.

Delivery workers run only while the user-armed service is active or the app is visible. Disarmed background delivery waits for a later permitted session and may expire. ADA does not add a boot receiver or an always-on Telegram service. Telegram notifications work with location denied/off and clip saving off. Disabling Telegram resets location and report sharing and cancels pending messages. Disabling local tagging or losing location access resets location sharing and cancels pending coordinate publications. Changing the bot/destination cancels old pending work; it is not redirected.

Telegram and the destination's participants receive and may retain sent messages under their own policies. The developer does not receive them through an ADA server. Requests already accepted by Telegram cannot be recalled by local opt-out, deletion or uninstall. Delivery can be delayed, missed, duplicated or uncertain; local detection does not depend on successful delivery. This version does not read peer observations, match other phones' detections or triangulate a drone.

Local technical reports

Settings → Privacy → Save technical reports locally is optional and off by default. It saves the same bounded, detached acoustic evidence described above for future microphone alerts, without configuring Telegram or requiring location. It does not save audio. Local and Telegram capture choices are independent; either can retain alert evidence while enabled. Changing this setting does not reconstruct measurements for older incidents. Existing evidence follows the observation retention limit and Delete history; turning capture off does not erase it.

Exports and other apps

Opening a saved point in an external map app or Google Earth deliberately passes that saved position to the selected app. This differs from the embedded Map tab described above. Export KML saves the selected point and its observation time and accuracy to a file you choose. Copy coordinates places the selected coordinates on the system clipboard. Export alert clips creates an archive with the saved clips and review metadata.

History → detection details → Save detection report / Share detection report exports a JSON document of available saved incident facts, repeat passes and captured acoustic evidence. Reports also work without Telegram. Older incidents export available facts with missing acoustic evidence marked explicitly; demo records are labeled. Include saved phone location is off by default for each detection and independent of Telegram coordinate-sharing consent. Only this explicit export choice adds already saved coordinates; no current location is acquired and no location permission is requested for exporting. Exports are bounded to four observation windows and 100 repeat passes, with omitted counts recorded. The selected destination controls any network transfer. Sharing uses a private cache file and a read grant for the selected document; files older than 24 hours are removed during subsequent shares, and History/location deletion clears temporary report exports. Saved or shared external copies cannot be recalled.

The chosen app, file provider, clipboard and any copies you make are outside ADA's private storage. They may have their own network access, retention and privacy policies. ADA cannot remove those copies when you delete local data or uninstall it. Optional Telegram delivery is described separately above; peer exchange is not included in this version.

Feedback, app sharing and Google Play reviews

Send feedback opens an editable email draft to the support address. It prefills the app and model-registry versions, Android version, and device manufacturer/model for troubleshooting. You can edit or remove those details and choose whether to send through your email provider. ADA does not send the email itself or attach audio, observation locations, History, logs or unique device identifiers. The support recipient and your email provider receive what you send. If no email app is available, ADA copies only the support address to the clipboard.

Share ADA passes a short app description and Play Store link to Android's sharing menu. It does not include your detection data. The app you choose handles the message under its own policy.

Rate ADA opens Google Play. ADA may also request Google's standard in-app review card after several completed listening sessions. Local session counts and invitation timestamps are stored only to limit invitations; they are not analytics and are not uploaded to the developer. Google decides whether its card appears. ADA cannot tell whether you submitted a rating. Ratings and review text you submit are handled by Google Play: public for public releases, or shared privately with the developer during closed testing. These actions do not share audio, locations or incident records. You can dismiss the review card and continue using ADA.

Your control over your data

• Turn off location tagging: Settings → Privacy → Save detection location stops new detection-location capture. Existing saved points remain until deleted. It is separate from My location.
• Stop live map location: leave Map or move ADA to the background. This ends foreground map location use; it does not disarm an independently armed monitoring session.
• Delete saved locations: removes saved coordinate/fix fields and pending fixes, while keeping incident facts and clips. Coordinate-bearing delivery payloads are removed too. Fresh future observations can receive locations if tagging stays on.
• Delete all history: removes local incidents, their observations, interrupted observations and associated alert clips. New observations from later events may be saved while armed.
• Clear completed monitoring history: in Monitoring access → Monitoring sessions, removes completed monitoring display details while preserving free usage, minimal accounting and the active run. It is separate from incident History deletion.
• Delete all alert clips: removes stored audio and review labels without deleting incident facts.
• Turn off Telegram technical reports: cancels pending report messages and stops capture for Telegram; independent local report saving can continue. Previously saved evidence follows History retention/deletion.
• Turn off local report saving: stops capture for local exports; separately enabled Telegram report attachments can continue. Existing evidence remains until History deletion or retention removes it.
• Turn off Telegram: cancels pending messages and resets location and report sharing; the encrypted connection can be retained for later explicit use. Disconnect also forgets the credential.
• Uninstall: removes app-private data. Exported copies and other apps' data are unaffected. Uninstalling does not cancel a Google Play subscription or erase Google's purchase records; manage or cancel it in Google Play.

Drone model names

A model name reports acoustic similarity to recordings, not the identity of an individual physical drone or its operator. Location tagging does not change this limitation.

Children and open data

ADA is not directed at children. The app does not automatically send personal data to the developer. Feedback email and closed-test reviews contain only the information you choose to submit, as described above. The bundled detector, demo recordings and reference photographs use public datasets credited under Settings → Data sources & credits. Local microphone clips are not automatically uploaded or added to training data.

Changes and contact

Changes to data handling update this policy and its version. The app asks for agreement again when a material document change is shipped. Questions: aimotioncoach@gmail.com