Privacy Policy

01 In short

Your photos

Stay on your phone. We never upload them.

Your account

There isn't one. No sign-up, no profile.

Our servers

None. We operate no backend at all.

Advertising

No ad networks, no ad identifiers.

Photos, videos, addresses and coordinates are processed on your device and saved to your device. The app has no server of its own and no way to receive your pictures.

Three things do leave your phone, and all three go to Google rather than to us: your coordinates, when the app asks for a street address or a map image; anonymous usage events; and crash reports. Sections 6 to 10 describe each one precisely, including the specific limits the app enforces on what it will send.

02 Who this covers

This policy applies to the Android application Timestamp Camera: Photo Proof (package com.gpscamera.timestamp.location), published by G P Technoedge — referred to below as "we" or "us".

It does not cover the other apps on your phone that you might send a photo to, the gallery app that displays your saved pictures, or Google's own services. Once you share a photo out of Timestamp Camera: Photo Proof, the receiving app's policy governs what happens next.

For the purposes of the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, G P Technoedge is the data controller for the limited processing described in sections 9 and 10. Everything else described here happens entirely on your own device, under your control, and we never receive it.

03 Permissions the app asks for

Android requires your explicit approval for each of these. You can withdraw any of them at any time in Settings → Apps → Timestamp Camera → Permissions, and the app is built to degrade rather than break when you do.

The app deliberately does not request background location. It reads your position only while the camera screen is open and in front of you, and stops as soon as you leave it.

04 The data ledger

This is the complete list. Anything not on it, the app does not touch.

05 Photos and videos

When you press the shutter, the image is captured, the stamp is drawn onto it, and the finished file is written to your device's own media store under DCIM/TimestampCamera. It appears in your normal gallery app alongside your other pictures. The whole sequence happens on your phone.

We never receive your photos or videos. There is no upload, no cloud sync, no backup to us, and no server that could accept them.

Location written into the file

If Write EXIF is enabled in the app's advanced settings, the app writes the standard location tags into the saved photo — GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude, GPSAltitude and their reference tags — exactly as most camera apps do. This metadata travels with the file. Anyone you send the photo to, and any service you upload it to, can read it.

Temporary files

Each capture is written briefly to a private temporary folder inside the app's own storage while the stamp is applied, then deleted. Anything left behind by an interrupted capture is cleaned up automatically the next time the camera opens.

06 Location

Location is the heart of what this app does, so it is worth being precise about it.

How your position is obtained

The app uses Google Play services' fused location provider — the same system service other apps use — and only while the camera screen is open and in the foreground. It requests no background location and holds no location permission you have not granted.

Refusing to stamp a position it cannot stand behind

Because a stamped photo is often used as evidence, the app will not print a location it does not trust. Before every capture it checks the fix and, if anything is wrong, drops the location lines entirely rather than printing something plausible but false. The reasons it will refuse are: the position is mocked by another app, the fix is stale, its accuracy is too coarse, location permission is missing, or location is switched off device-wide. The camera screen tells you which of these applies.

The compass

If you enable the compass, the app reads your device's magnetometer to work out which way the camera is pointing. That reading is a sensor value, not a position; it is used only to draw the heading onto the photo and is never transmitted.

What we receive

Nothing. Your coordinates are used on your device and, for the two lookups in sections 7 and 8, sent to Google. They are never sent to us, and we have nowhere to put them if they were.

07 Turning coordinates into an address

To print a street, city, state or country on your photo, the app asks Android's built-in geocoding service to turn your coordinates into an address.

On most Android phones that service is provided by Google Play services and resolves the address over the network, which means your coordinates are sent to Google as part of the lookup. This is Google's processing, governed by the Google Privacy Policy, and it happens whether or not we receive anything — we do not.

Resolved addresses are cached briefly on your device so that several photos taken in the same spot do not each trigger a fresh lookup. If the lookup fails or you are offline, the app falls back to printing the raw coordinates and carries on.

To avoid this lookup entirely, turn off every address component in Settings → Location & map, or decline location permission.

08 The map image

When Show map is on, the app fetches a small static map picture centred on your position from the Google Maps Static API. The request sends your latitude and longitude, the zoom level, the map style and the image size to Google over HTTPS.

Nothing else is sent — no identifier, no photo, no address. Google's handling of the request is governed by the Google Privacy Policy.

Fetched map tiles are cached on your device, keyed by a coarsened position, so that repeated photos in one place reuse a tile already downloaded instead of requesting it again. You can erase that cache at any time with Clear map cache in the app's advanced settings.

Switch Show map off and the app makes no map requests at all.

09 Usage analytics

The app uses Google Analytics for Firebase to understand how people actually use it — where they get stuck, which permissions get declined, whether captures succeed. Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, none of it is collected until you have been asked and have agreed: analytics and crash reporting both stay switched off until a consent choice is recorded, and you can change that choice at any time from App settings → About → Privacy & consent.

The rule the app enforces on itself

Every analytics call in the app goes through a single wrapper that exists to enforce one constraint: no event parameter ever carries a latitude, a longitude, an address, a file path, a filename, or any other content you created. This is a hard rule in the source, not a policy aspiration.

Where location has to be described at all, it is reduced before it is sent. A successful fix is reported as a verdict plus an accuracy bucket — a coarse band, never the measured number. A refused fix is reported only as the reason it was refused.

What the events look like

Events cover: opening the app and its screens; requesting, granting and denying permissions; whether a location was trusted or not, and why; starting and saving a capture; whether the photo carried a location and a map; and failures in the capture pipeline. Parameters are values like photo, video, true, false, or a reason such as LowAccuracy.

What Firebase itself collects

Separately from our events, the Firebase SDK collects its own standard telemetry: a randomly generated app instance identifier, device model, operating system version, app version, language, and a coarse country or region derived from the network address the request arrives from. This is Google's collection, not ours, and is described in Firebase's privacy documentation. The app instance identifier is not your advertising ID and is reset if you clear the app's data or reinstall.

Where the law requires consent for this collection, we rely on the consent mechanism presented to you; where it permits a legitimate-interest basis, we rely on our interest in diagnosing and improving the app. You can stop it entirely by uninstalling, and see section 15 for the controls available while it is installed.

10 Crash reports

The app uses Firebase Crashlytics. If it stops unexpectedly, a report is sent to Google containing the stack trace, the app and OS version, the device model, and the state of the device at the moment of the crash — free memory, orientation and similar. Each installation carries a random Crashlytics identifier so that repeated crashes from one device can be grouped together.

The app attaches no custom data of its own to these reports. It does not add your coordinates, your addresses, your filenames, or anything you typed.

Crash data is retained by Google under Firebase's terms. We use it only to fix defects — the image-processing paths in particular, which can fail on devices we have never been able to test on.

11 Google Play services

Two small Play features are built in, and both talk to the Play Store rather than to us:

• In-app updates — checks whether a newer version is available and offers to install it.
• In-app review — after you have used the app a while, offers Google's own rating card. Whether a card is shown, and what you write in it, is entirely between you and Google Play; we never see whether you were asked or how you responded.

Both are governed by Google's privacy policy. The app also uses Google Play services for location, as described in section 6.

12 What is stored on your device

All of the following lives in your phone's own storage. None of it is transmitted anywhere by the app.

13 Device backup and transfer

The app participates in Android's standard backup and device-transfer system. Its settings and its capture history database are included, which means they may be copied to your own Google account backup and restored onto a new phone.

Your photos and videos are backed up, or not, according to your gallery and cloud-photo settings, exactly like every other picture on the device. That is outside this app's control.

14 Sharing and printing

When you share a photo, the app hands the file to whichever app you choose through Android's standard share sheet. When you print, it hands it to Android's print system. In both cases the file leaves with everything in it, including the visible stamp and any EXIF location tags.

What the receiving app or print service does with it is governed by their policies, not this one.

15 Your controls

Everything described here can be switched off from inside the app or from Android settings.

16 Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the processing of your personal data, to withdraw consent, and to data portability. Under the UK and EU GDPR you also have the right to complain to your national supervisory authority.

Because the app has no accounts and no server, the practical position is unusual and worth stating plainly:

• Data on your device — you already hold it and can inspect or erase it yourself at any time using section 15. We cannot access it, so we cannot produce or delete it for you.
• Analytics and crash data — this is held by Google on our behalf and is not linked to your identity, so we generally cannot single out your records from anyone else's. If you contact us with enough detail to identify an installation, we will make reasonable efforts to locate and delete it, and will tell you honestly if we cannot.

If you are a California resident: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising. There is no financial incentive attached to any of this, and we will never discriminate against you for exercising a right.

To make a request, use the contact details in section 21. We will respond within the period your law requires — one month under the GDPR, forty-five days under the CCPA — and we may need to ask you for information to verify the request.

17 How long things are kept

• Photos, videos and capture history — until you delete them or uninstall the app. We impose no expiry.
• Cached addresses — held briefly in memory and discarded when the app closes.
• Cached map tiles — expire automatically after a set age and are capped by total size; oldest first.
• Analytics events — retained by Google under the retention window configured for the Firebase project, subject to Google's own limits.
• Crash reports — retained by Google under Crashlytics' standard retention.

18 Security

App settings, the capture history and the tile cache live in the app's private storage, which Android isolates from other apps. Every network request the app makes — address lookups, map images, analytics and crash reports — uses HTTPS.

The app holds no credentials of yours, because it has no account to hold credentials for. It holds no payment information, because it takes no payments.

Your photos are saved to your shared gallery so that other apps you choose can open them. That is the normal, expected behaviour of a camera app, and it means their security is your device's security: a screen lock and an up-to-date Android version are the meaningful protections.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. What we can say is that the design keeps the sensitive material on your device, where the smallest number of parties can reach it.

19 Children

Timestamp Camera: Photo Proof is a general-purpose tool intended for adults and is not directed to children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age where you live). We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete what we can.

20 Changes to this policy

We will update this page when the app changes what it does with your data. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version.

If a change materially affects how your information is handled — a new third-party service, a new category of data, or any transmission of content that today stays on your device — we will say so prominently in the app before the change takes effect, and obtain your consent where the law requires it.

21 Contact