Last updated: August 29, 2026 · Version 2.0
Countrol is a tracker for alcohol, smoking and other substances. What you record in it is some of the most sensitive information about you there is, so the app is built so that we never receive it. This policy explains exactly what that means, what the few optional features do send somewhere, and what the countrol.app website records when you visit. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
The summary is here for orientation. The sections below are the accurate version, and they are what governs.
Countrol (“we”, “us”, “our”) is an independent app developed and operated from Switzerland. For the limited processing described in this policy — the referral ledger, the website and email you send us — we are the data controller under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and the UK GDPR. You can reach us at the address in section 29.
For everything you track in the app, there is no controller to name: the data never reaches us. It is held on your device, under your control, and we have no technical means of access.
This policy covers the Countrol mobile app on iOS and Android, the optional Countrol+ subscription and referral programme, and the website at countrol.app including its blog and support pages.
It does not cover Apple, Google or any other company's own handling of your data, which is governed by their policies, or third-party websites we link to. Your use of the Service is also governed by our Terms of Use.
The honest one-page answer, before the detail:
| What | Where it goes | Can we see it? |
|---|---|---|
| Your consumption entries, goals, settings | Your device only | No |
| iCloud sync, if you switch it on iOS | Your own private iCloud account | No |
| Device backup, if enabled in the OS | Your own Apple or Google backup | No |
| Referral code and redemption, if you take part | A ledger we operate on Apple CloudKit or Google Firebase | Yes — a code, an ID and a timestamp. Nothing you track |
| Countrol+ purchase | Apple or Google | No payment details, ever |
| Visiting countrol.app | Cookieless, aggregate analytics and standard server logs | Aggregate page counts only |
| Emailing us | Our mailbox | Yes — whatever you write to us |
Countrol stores the following locally on your device:
None of this is transmitted to us. We run no server that receives it, and there is no API for it to be sent to. It is written to the app's private storage area, which the operating system keeps separate from other apps.
To be explicit, the Countrol app never collects any of the following:
The app contains no advertising SDK, no analytics SDK and no crash-reporting SDK. We do not sell, rent, trade or share personal data with anyone for their own purposes, and we have not done so at any time.
What you track — how much you drink, smoke or use — is health-related information, and under the GDPR it is a special category of personal data deserving extra protection. Our answer to that is structural rather than procedural: we designed the app so that this data never leaves your control, so there is no processing of it by us to safeguard, restrict or breach.
We never receive it, never store it, never analyse it, and never disclose it — not to advertisers, insurers, employers, data brokers, researchers or anyone else. No part of the referral programme, the subscription or the website is linked to what you track, and none of them could be: the two never touch.
If you switch on iCloud sync in Settings, your Countrol data is synchronised across your Apple devices through your own personal iCloud account, in a private database that only you can access. This is handled end-to-end by Apple and governed by Apple's Privacy Policy. We do not have access to it, cannot read it, and receive no copy or notification of it.
Sync is off unless you turn it on, and turning it off stops further syncing. Removing the data already in iCloud is done through your device's iCloud settings (see section 22).
Your phone's own backup system may include Countrol's data, in the same way it includes other apps. This is worth knowing, because it is a case where your entries leave the device without us being involved.
These backups belong to you and to the platform, not to us. They are governed by Apple's and Google's privacy policies, and you can disable them in your device settings.
This is the one part of the app where data about you reaches a service we operate. Taking part is entirely optional; if you never open the referral screen and never install through a friend's link, nothing in this section applies to you. Nothing you track is ever involved — the ledger holds codes and identifiers, and has no field that could hold a consumption entry.
Referrals use Apple CloudKit in a public database inside our iCloud container. Three kinds of record are written, each exactly once:
The identifier is the opaque per-app user record ID that CloudKit issues. It is not your Apple ID, your name or your email address, and it cannot be used to identify you outside our container. Apple does not give us your Apple ID, and we never ask for it.
Referrals use Google Firebase (Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore), operated by Google as our processor:
Google's handling of this data is governed by the Firebase privacy documentation and Google's Privacy Policy.
We can see referral codes, the opaque identifiers that own or redeem them, and the times. We use them for one purpose only: to count referrals correctly, to grant the rewards that were earned, and to prevent fraud and abuse of the programme. We do not use them for advertising or profiling, and we do not share them with anyone outside the platform providers above. Deleting referral data is covered in section 22.
Countrol offers an optional Countrol+ subscription. All payment processing happens on the store platform:
Purchases managed via Apple StoreKit. All transaction data is handled by Apple under Apple's Privacy Policy.
Purchases managed via Google Play Billing. All transaction data is handled by Google under Google's Privacy Policy.
We never receive, see or store your name, card number, billing address or any other payment detail. Your subscription status is verified on your device against the store; there is no purchase server of ours for it to be reported to. Apple and Google provide us with aggregate sales reporting, which does not identify individual buyers.
If you enable reminders, notifications are scheduled and delivered entirely on your device by the platform's own system (iOS UNUserNotificationCenter, Android AlarmManager). There is no push server, no device token sent to us, and no notification content leaves your device. The same is true of home-screen widgets, which read the local database directly.
If you enable the app lock, authentication is performed by the operating system's biometric or passcode system. We never receive your biometric data — the app is only told whether the check succeeded.
This section is about the website only. The app contains no analytics of any kind, as described above.
To understand how many people find countrol.app and which pages they read, the website uses Umami, a privacy-focused analytics service. It records the page visited, the date and time, the approximate country, the referring website, and the browser and device type.
Umami sets no cookies, does not assign you a persistent identifier, and does not follow you across other websites. Umami states that it does not collect personally identifiable information and anonymises the data it collects; your IP address is used to derive an approximate country and is not retained as part of the analytics data. Because no personal data is involved, no cookie consent banner is required.
This is aggregate traffic measurement. It tells us that a page was read; it can never tell us who read it, and it is not connected to anything you track in the app. If you would rather not be counted at all, any content blocker that blocks analytics scripts will stop it, and the site works exactly the same without it.
The website sets no cookies — not for analytics, not for advertising, not for anything. It stores two small values in your browser's local storage, purely so the site behaves the way you left it:
countrol-theme — whether you chose the light or dark theme.countrol-lang-dismissed — that you dismissed the suggestion to read the site in another language, so it stops appearing.Both are strictly necessary for a preference you expressed, never leave your browser, and are readable only by countrol.app. Clearing your browser storage removes them. The site never redirects you based on your IP address or your browser language.
The website is a set of static files served by GitHub Pages (GitHub, Inc.). Like any web server, the hosting infrastructure processes the technical data needed to deliver a page — including your IP address, the requested URL, the time and your user agent — and may retain it briefly in security and abuse logs. We do not have access to those logs and do not use them. GitHub's handling of them is governed by its own privacy statement. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interest in serving and securing the website (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).
If you write to us for support, to report a bug or to exercise a right, we receive your email address, whatever you put in the message and anything you attach. We use it only to answer you and to fix what you reported. We do not add you to a mailing list, and there is no mailing list to add you to.
Please do not send us details of your consumption or your health unless they are genuinely necessary for the question — the app is built so that we never see them, and an email is the one way around that. Correspondence is kept while it is useful for support and then deleted, generally within 24 months.
Where the GDPR, the UK GDPR or the Swiss FADP applies, we rely on the following legal bases for the limited processing we actually carry out:
| Processing | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Running the referral programme for someone who takes part | Performance of a contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Preventing fraud and abuse of the referral programme | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — keeping rewards fair |
| Cookieless, aggregate website analytics | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — knowing whether the site is read |
| Serving and securing the website | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Answering your email | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)), or a contract where it concerns your subscription |
| Storing preferences in your browser | Strictly necessary for a service you asked for |
| Keeping records we are legally required to keep | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and concluded the processing is limited, expected and low-risk. You can object at any time (see section 20). No processing described here involves special-category data, because what you track never reaches us.
We are a very small operation and we use a small number of established providers. Nobody receives your data to use for their own purposes:
Beyond that, we disclose personal data only where we are legally compelled to — a binding order from a competent authority — or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. Given the design of the app, a request for what someone tracks is one we could not comply with even if we were ordered to: we do not hold it. If Countrol were ever transferred to a new owner, personal data could pass to them as part of that transfer, and you would be told before it took effect.
We are based in Switzerland. The providers above operate globally, so the limited data described in this policy may be processed outside your country, including in the United States. Where such a transfer involves personal data protected by the GDPR, the UK GDPR or the FADP, it takes place under a lawful transfer mechanism — typically the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses together with the providers' own data processing terms, an adequacy decision, or a certification scheme where one applies. You can ask us for more detail about a specific transfer.
Under the GDPR, the UK GDPR and the Swiss FADP you have the right to: access the personal data we hold about you; have it corrected; have it erased; restrict or object to processing based on legitimate interests; receive it in a portable format; and withdraw consent where we relied on it, without affecting what was done before.
You can exercise any of these by emailing us at the address in section 29. We answer within one month, and we do not charge for it. There is one honest limitation worth stating plainly: for what you track, there is nothing for us to give you, correct or delete — not because we refuse, but because we hold none of it. Exercising those rights over your entries means using the app's own export and delete functions, which give you complete control without going through us.
To act on a referral request, we generally need the referral code concerned, since the identifiers in the ledger are opaque to us and it is the only way to locate the right records without collecting more data about you.
If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia or another US state with a comprehensive privacy law, the following applies in addition:
You have full control, and most of it does not involve us at all:
Deletion of local data is immediate and irreversible. We cannot restore it, because we never had it — export anything you want to keep first.
The strongest security measure here is architectural: data that is never transmitted cannot be intercepted, and a database we do not have cannot be breached. On top of that:
No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Your device is the important part of this: use a passcode, keep the operating system updated, and be careful about who has physical access to it. If we ever become aware of a personal data breach affecting you, we will notify you and the competent supervisory authority as the law requires.
Countrol is intended for adults only and must not be used by anyone under 18 (see the Terms of Use). We do not knowingly collect personal data from children, and the app's design means we collect almost none from anyone. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data through the referral programme or by email, contact us and we will delete it.
We do not profile you, score you, segment you or make any decision about you by automated means, and none of the processing described here produces legal or similarly significant effects. The charts and insights in the app are calculated on your device, from your own entries, for you alone to read.
Our App Store privacy label and Google Play Data Safety declaration describe the practices set out in this policy: the core app collects no data, and the optional referral programme handles an identifier and a code, which are used only to run the programme and never to track you across apps or websites.
If you ever find a difference between a store label and this policy, this policy is the accurate description of what the app does, and we will correct the label.
Countrol is a self-tracking tool, not a medical device, and nothing in it is medical advice. The full disclaimer — including why you should speak to a healthcare professional before changing what you consume — is in section 4 of the Terms of Use. If you are in crisis or in a medical emergency, call your local emergency number.
We may update this policy as the app changes or the law does. The current version is always at countrol.app/privacyPolicy with the date at the top. Where a change materially affects how your personal data is handled, we will give notice through the app or the website before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the updated policy.
Questions about this policy, or a request about your data, go to . We read everything, and we answer.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled it, you have the right to complain to a supervisory authority: in Switzerland, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC); in the EU or the UK, the data protection authority of the country where you live or work. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.