Privacy policy

The short version

Who we are

Specter is published by Seventh Planet Global Industries ("we", "us"). For any privacy question or request, contact developer@seventhpla.net. We are the data controller for the limited processing described below.

What stays only on your device

The following never leaves your phone. We cannot see it, and it is not backed up to us:

Deleting the app deletes all of it. We have no copy and cannot recover it for you.

Location — how it actually works

If you grant location permission, Specter reads your position once at the start of a session and uses it for two things.

1. Matching known haunted sites — entirely on your device. Your position is compared against a list of publicly known haunted locations that ships inside the app. That comparison happens on your phone, and your precise coordinates are never sent to us or to anyone else. We never receive your location, at any accuracy.

2. The outdoor temperature — sent coarsened, to a weather service. The EMF screen shows an ambient temperature. To get a realistic starting figure, the app asks Open-Meteo, a free weather API, what the current outdoor temperature is where you are.

Before that request is made, your coordinates are rounded to two decimal places — about a kilometre. Only the rounded figures are sent. That is enough to identify your weather, and not enough to identify your street, building, or the site you are standing in. Nothing else accompanies the request: no identifier, no device information, and nothing about your session. Open-Meteo receives no account or app identifier of any kind and cannot connect the request to you or to any other request.

We never receive your location in any form — precise or coarsened. The weather request goes from your phone straight to Open-Meteo and does not pass through our servers.

Location permission is optional. Declining it means the encounter experience is not tailored to your location, and the temperature readout uses a plausible indoor baseline instead — no weather request is made at all.

Microphone and screen recording

The microphone is used to record EVP sessions and narration, and the screen-recording feature captures your screen, both only while you have a recording running. The resulting files are stored locally as described above. We never receive your audio or video, and it is never transcribed, analysed, or uploaded by us.

What is sent off your device

1. The temperature reading

The coarsened, roughly-one-kilometre position described under Location above, sent directly to Open-Meteo. Nothing else — and nothing that identifies you or your device.

2. Ovilus words and encounters — nothing is sent

The Ovilus does not send anything off your device. The words it surfaces, and everything that happens during an encounter, are generated on your phone. There is no question to type and no text is transmitted. Encounters work with the app fully offline.

3. Conversational spirit replies — not currently active

An earlier version of Specter let you type a question and had it answered by an AI language model. That feature is not in the app. There is no way to submit a question, and no question text is sent anywhere.

The capability may return in a future version. If and when it does, it would work like this, and we are telling you now so that nothing about it is a surprise:

• the question you typed and the recent conversation in that encounter would be sent to our server, which would forward them to Anthropic to generate the reply;
• along with a random number used to vary the spirit's personality, which stage the encounter is in, and — if you were at one — the short identifier of a known public haunted site (a slug such as eastern-state-penitentiary). That identifier names a public landmark, never your position, and could only ever be one of the sites already bundled in the app;
• your question text would not be written to our database.

We will not enable this without updating this policy first, and we would tell you in the app before any question of yours was sent anywhere. If it is ever active, treat a spirit question like a message to a stranger and do not type anything personal, sensitive, or confidential into it.

4. Requests to our server

When the app does contact our server — for email verification or unlock codes — our server sees your IP address, because every internet request carries one. We do not log it in readable form: it is immediately converted to a one-way hash and used only to count requests for rate limiting and abuse prevention. Those hashed counters are deleted automatically after two days.

5. Email verification (optional)

Used only so that a purchase or unlock code can follow you to another device. If you choose to link an email:

• Your address is sent to Resend, our email provider, for the sole purpose of delivering a 6-digit code.
• Our database stores a one-way hash of the address (HMAC), never the address itself. We cannot read your email address out of our own database.
• That same hash produces a stable anonymous identifier (for example e_7f3a…) which acts as your account id with RevenueCat.

Verification codes expire after 10 minutes, allow 5 attempts, and are themselves stored only as hashes.

6. Purchases and subscriptions

Purchases are processed by Apple or Google and validated by RevenueCat, our subscription provider. We never see your card and receive no payment details. RevenueCat processes purchase and receipt data, the anonymous identifier described above, and technical information such as device type, country, and app version. Apple's and Google's own privacy policies govern the payment itself.

7. Unlock codes

If you redeem a promotional unlock code, we store the code, the time it was claimed, and the anonymous identifier that claimed it, so that a single-use code cannot be reused.

What we do not collect

To be explicit, Specter does not collect and does not contain: your name, your contacts, your photos, your calendar, your health data, your browsing history, device advertising identifiers, analytics or usage telemetry, crash reporting, ad networks, social-media SDKs, or any cross-app or cross-site tracking.

We never receive your location at all — not precisely, and not in the coarsened form sent to the weather service, which goes from your phone directly to Open-Meteo without passing through us.

Service providers

Not currently used: Anthropic would receive spirit-question text if the conversational feature described in section 3 above were ever enabled. It is not enabled, so Anthropic currently receives nothing about you. We would update this policy before that changed.

These providers process data on our behalf, or as independent controllers in the case of payments. They may store data outside your country, including in the United States. Where personal data is transferred internationally we rely on the safeguards in our agreements with them, such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

How long we keep things

A scheduled job runs every day and enforces these limits automatically:

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict your personal data, to object to processing, and to withdraw consent. You have the right not to be treated differently for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Because we hold almost nothing about you, most of this is immediate and in your hands:

• Your recordings, settings, and location data — delete the app, or delete individual recordings inside it. We hold no copy.
• Your email link — write to developer@seventhpla.net from the address you linked and we will delete the hashed identifier and any associated records. We need you to tell us the address, because we cannot read it from our own database; we verify it by hashing the address you write from.
• Your purchase history — held by Apple or Google and by RevenueCat. Contact us and we will pass a deletion request to RevenueCat.

We respond within the time your law requires (30 days in most cases, 45 days under the CCPA). You may also complain to your local data protection authority.

Children

Specter is not directed to children and is not intended for anyone under 13, or under the minimum age of digital consent where you live if that age is higher. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with information, contact developer@seventhpla.net and we will delete it.

The app contains atmospheric horror themes and is rated accordingly on each store.

Security

Email addresses and verification codes are stored only as keyed one-way hashes. The email verification token is kept in the device's Keychain or Keystore rather than in ordinary storage. All network traffic uses HTTPS. API keys and prompts are held on our server rather than inside the app binary. No system is perfectly secure, but we hold so little that there is very little to lose.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date above and, for material changes, give notice in the app before the change takes effect. The current version always lives at this URL.

Contact

Seventh Planet Global Industries — developer@seventhpla.net