Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

We collect only what a challenge needs to run, and we would rather hold less of it than more.

• Account details: your email address, display name and profile photo if you set one.
• Fitness data: daily step totals for the days a challenge covers, and the tracker you chose for that challenge.
• Challenge activity: which challenges you joined, which days you met, rest days used, and whether a participation settled met or missed.
• Payment details: a payment method saved with our payment processor, along with the last four digits and card brand so you can tell your cards apart. We never see or store your full card number.
• Location, for solo promise challenges only: a single position fix at the moment you tap "I am here", compared against the place you chose. We do not track you in the background and we do not keep a location history.
• Technical data: device model, operating system version, app version and crash reports, so we can fix what breaks.

2. What we do not collect

Your tracker knows a great deal more about you than we ask for. We do not read heart rate, sleep, workouts, weight, menstrual or reproductive health data, blood glucose, or any other health metric. We do not read your contacts, your photos or your calendar. We do not run background location.

3. Why we use it

Every piece of data above exists for one of four reasons:

• To score a challenge: comparing your daily steps against your goal is the entire product.
• To charge correctly: settling a challenge means charging the players who missed, once, for the amount they chose.
• To keep your account working: signing you in, syncing between your devices, and letting you delete everything.
• To fix faults: crash reports and sync failures, which is how a missed day caused by a bug gets found.

We do not use your data to build an advertising profile, and we do not sell it. There is no version of this product where selling your step history makes sense.

4. Health and fitness data

Step data reaches us in one of two ways: from Apple Health or Health Connect on your device, after you grant permission; or from Fitbit or Garmin, after you connect that account.

We request read access to step counts only. You grant that permission per platform, and you can withdraw it at any time in the Health app, in Health Connect settings, or by disconnecting the tracker in Earnest. Withdrawing it stops new steps arriving; a challenge already running will stop scoring, so disconnect between challenges rather than during one.

We do not share health data with advertisers, data brokers or analytics providers, and we do not use it for anything other than scoring the challenges you joined.

5. Payments

Card details are handled by our payment processor and never touch our servers. When you add a card, the processor stores it and gives us a token; we keep the token, the card brand and the last four digits.

Joining a challenge moves no money. If a challenge settles and you missed your goals, the amount you chose when you joined is charged once to that saved card. If you kept your goals, nothing is taken and there is nothing to refund.

We keep a record of charges that actually happened. Those records are part of a payment and we are required to retain them, so they survive account deletion.

6. Who else sees your data

We share the minimum needed to run the service, with providers who are contractually bound to use it only on our instructions:

• Our payment processor, to save a card and settle a charge.
• Our hosting and database provider, which stores your account and challenge data.
• Crash and error reporting, so a fault that costs somebody a day can be traced.

Other players in a challenge see your display name, your profile photo, and whether you met each day - that is what a shared challenge is. They never see your email address, your card, your location or your raw step counts.

We will disclose data if the law requires it, and we will tell you when we are allowed to.

7. How long we keep it

Step data is kept for the challenge it belongs to, and for a short window afterwards so a settlement can be checked or appealed. Account details live as long as your account does. Charge records are kept for as long as tax and payment rules require, which is typically seven years.

8. Your choices

You can, at any time:

• See and edit your profile in Account settings.
• Disconnect a tracker, which stops any further health data reaching us.
• Remove a saved card, provided no challenge you joined is still running.
• Delete your account from Account settings. This removes your profile, your step history and your challenge participations. Records of charges that already happened are kept, as described above.
• Ask for a copy of your data, or ask us to correct it, by writing to us.

Depending on where you live you may also have rights to object to processing or to lodge a complaint with a data protection authority. Write to us first and we will try to sort it out.

9. Children

Earnest is not for people under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children, and if we learn we have, we delete it.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or why, we update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes are announced in the app before they take effect.

11. Contact us

Questions about your data, or a request to see or delete it: privacy@earneststakes.app. We answer every one.