Privacy in Quiet Meter

There are two entirely separate data stories in this app. The microphone, which is read on the device while the meter is running and produces a number, never a recording anyone can listen to. And advertising in the free version, which talks to Google's servers and is never told anything about the sound around you.

1. The microphone

When it is on

Only when you tap Start. Permission is requested at that tap and not before, the audio session is torn down the moment you stop the meter, and it is torn down again if you leave the app while it is running. There is no background listening, no always-on mode and no way for the meter to run while the app is closed.

What happens to the sound

It is converted into a level, on the device, as it arrives. Reading a microphone level on iOS means going through the system recorder, so in the technical sense audio is being recorded — but the file it writes goes into the app's own cache container and is never read back. It is not played, not opened, not analysed, not copied, not exported and not uploaded. There is no speech recognition, no cloud audio API, no fingerprinting, and nothing whatsoever derived from the audio content. What survives the meter is a number, and only if you save the session.

The readings are estimates

An iPhone microphone is designed for speech, not measurement: it applies automatic gain, compresses very loud sounds and rolls off deep bass. Quiet Meter converts the microphone level into an estimated dB SPL. It is an estimate, not a measurement from a calibrated instrument, and it is not suitable for any official, workplace, legal or medical purpose. The app makes no claim about hearing, health or exposure. The calibration offset exists so you can correct the estimate against a meter you trust, and it applies to the whole session — minimum, average and maximum — together.

What is stored, and where

Saved sessions and nothing else: their statistics and reading data, any note you typed, the time they were taken, and your calibration offset and preferences. They live in the app's own sandboxed container on your iPhone, through the standard iOS storage the app is given. They are not synced to iCloud, not backed up to a server of ours, and not shared with any other app. Quiet Meter has no account system, no backend, no telemetry endpoint, no crash reporter and no analytics SDK. Outside the advertising described in section 3, the free app makes no network requests at all, and a Pro app makes none whatsoever.

Sharing a session

Sharing hands plain text to the iOS share sheet, and where it goes from there is your choice. Quiet Meter does not see or keep a copy of what you shared or where you sent it, and what is shared is numbers and your note — never audio, because there is no audio to share.

2. Purchases

The meter, statistics, chart and the full calibration screen are free and are never gated. Quiet Meter Pro is a single one-time App Store purchase (a non-consumable, not a subscription): it removes advertising permanently, opens your complete session history, and adds the reading-by-reading data to exports. Sessions you saved before buying reappear — nothing was ever deleted.

The transaction is handled entirely by Apple through StoreKit. We never see your name, card, billing address or any other payment detail — the app is told only that an entitlement is owned, and stores that fact on the device. Restoring a purchase asks Apple, not us.

For a Pro user the advertising module is never even loaded, so no ad SDK initialises and no ad request is ever made.

3. Advertising

The provider

The free version shows a single full-screen advertisement at natural breaks only — after a measurement is saved, or after one is shared. Never while the meter is running or the microphone is active, which is a hard veto re-checked at the moment an ad would be shown rather than assumed from the screen you are on, and never in your first sessions with the app. The provider is Google AdMob, one advertising SDK, with no mediation partners and no banner, rewarded, app-open or native ad units anywhere in the app. Google's own privacy disclosures apply to the ad request itself: see Google's Privacy Policy and how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

Non-personalised, and why

Every ad request sets non-personalised ads only. Quiet Meter does not present the App Tracking Transparency prompt and does not link the tracking-transparency library, so the advertising identifier is not available to it: personalised advertising is not merely declined, it is unavailable. Non-personalised inventory earns less, and that is accepted deliberately — a tracking prompt in an app whose whole proposition is that the microphone never leaves the phone is a worse trade. Maximum ad content rating is set to G.

Consent, and how to change your choices

Regional consent (GDPR and the US state privacy laws) is handled by Google's User Messaging Platform, which is asked on launch whether a form is required and shows one only where it is. Consent is gathered before the ads SDK is initialised, and if consent cannot be resolved for any reason the app requests no advertising at all — the failure direction is always fewer ads, never ads anyway.

Where a form applies to you, Settings → About & Support → Ad privacy options inside Quiet Meter reopens it, so you can change or withdraw what you chose at any time. That row appears only where Google reports that privacy options are required; where no form applies there is nothing to reopen, so no dead row is shown.

The boundary, stated precisely

No audio, and nothing derived from audio, reaches the advertising subsystem. Not a recording, a file path, a reading, a minimum, average or maximum, a chart, a session, a note or a calibration offset. This is structural rather than a matter of convention: every exported advertising function takes no arguments, so there is no parameter through which a reading could travel, and the decision about whether to show an ad is computed from a saved-session count, a break count and two timestamps. What Google's SDK receives is what it collects for itself on any iOS device — device and OS characteristics, coarse network information, an IP address, and the install-attribution signal Apple mediates through SKAdNetwork.

4. No tracking

Quiet Meter does not track you across apps or websites, in Apple's specific sense of the word or any other. There is no App Tracking Transparency prompt because there is nothing it could ask for: the app declares no tracking usage description, ships no tracking library, and its privacy manifest declares tracking false with an empty tracking-domains list. SKAdNetwork — Apple's privacy-preserving install attribution — is the only attribution mechanism present, and it is not tracking.

5. Children

Quiet Meter is a general-audience utility. It is not directed at children under 13, is not part of the Kids Category, and does not claim child-directed treatment in AdMob. We collect no data from anyone, children included.

6. Data deletion

Deleting the app removes its container, and with it every saved session, note, calibration setting and the cache the recorder wrote to. There is nothing held anywhere else, because nothing was ever sent anywhere else — we have no copy to delete on request, and no account to close. You can also delete individual sessions inside the app. If you want to keep a session, share it as text before you delete.

Contact

Email contact@webbifystudio.com and a person will answer.

Effective 9 September 2026.