Privacy Policy

Who is behind the app

Knuckle is made and published by Bis AS, a company registered in Norway, at Amalie Skrams vei 38, 5036 Bergen. Bernt Idar Sleire answers for it.

In the language of the data protection rules, that makes Bis AS the controller for the app. In practice the role is a thin one, because the app hands us no personal data to control. Where it becomes real is your email: if you write to us, we hold that correspondence, and section K explains what happens to it.

Write to spell@bisas.world.

What the app keeps on your phone

Four small things, all of them local:

• which letters you have ticked as learned in the alphabet grid, and how far you have got along the staged practice path;
• your best score in each of the quiz types, kept so the next attempt has something to beat;
• your settings — mirrored hand for left or right, hand tone, spelling speed, and whether the app is running in English or Norwegian;
• nothing else.

None of that identifies you. There is no name attached to it, no device identifier, no account, and no record of when you opened the app. Another app on the phone cannot read it, because Android keeps each app's private storage to itself.

The app cannot see you

This is the question people ask first about an app that teaches handshapes, so here is the direct answer: Knuckle never uses the camera. It does not watch your hand, does not check whether you formed a letter correctly, and holds no camera permission at all. The hand you see is a drawn model posed by the app, not a mirror.

The same goes for the microphone, your location, your contacts, your photos and the rest of your files. None of them are requested, so none of them can be reached. The app also asks for no internet permission, which is the strongest form this promise can take: a build without that permission is blocked by Android itself from opening a connection, whatever its code might say.

No advertising, no analytics, no third-party kits

There are no ad networks in this app, no measurement or attribution libraries, no crash reporter, no A/B testing tool and no social login. Nobody is paid per impression here, so there is no commercial reason for the app to be curious about you. That is why the list in section B is as short as it is.

If any of that ever changes in a later release, this page is rewritten before the release goes out, and Google Play's Data safety entry is redone to match. A reserve wording for that day is kept in the source of this page, commented out, so that nothing is improvised in a hurry.

Children using it

Knuckle is a reasonable thing to hand to a child, and plenty of the people learning an alphabet are children. Since the app gathers nothing from anybody, it gathers nothing from a child either — there is no profile being built, no advertising to target, and no age to ask for, because no answer would change what happens.

Worth knowing for a parent: the speller accepts whatever is typed into it, and section C applies to a child's typing exactly as it does to yours — it is spelled out and then forgotten.

Android's own backup

One thing happens outside the app's control and should be said plainly. If you have Android's backup to Google Drive switched on, the operating system may copy the small settings-and-progress file described in section B into your own Google account, along with the backups of your other apps. That copy belongs to you, sits under Google's terms rather than ours, and never passes through us — we have no account there and nothing to look at.

If you would rather it did not happen, Android's own settings turn backup off, either for everything or for this app alone.

Getting the app from Google Play

The download itself is Google's business, not ours. When you install anything from Google Play, Google records the transaction under your own account and may show us aggregate figures in the developer console — how many installs happened in a country, which Android versions are in use, how ratings are trending. Those are totals. No row of it points at a person, and we could not turn it back into one.

What Google does with your account is governed by Google's own privacy policy, which you can read at policies.google.com/privacy.

Removing what the app has kept

Because everything lives in one private folder, there is only one thing to clear and no request to send us. Uninstalling Knuckle deletes it with the app. If you would rather keep the app and start again from an empty grid, Android's app settings have a "clear storage" option that wipes the learned letters, the practice progress, the scores and the preferences in one go.

Neither route needs our involvement, and neither leaves a copy behind with us, since there was never a copy to begin with.

If you write to us

An email is the one moment personal data reaches us: your address, and whatever you chose to put in the message. We use it to answer you and for nothing else — it is not added to a mailing list, not sold, not passed on. Threads are kept while the matter is open and for a reasonable stretch afterwards in case it comes back, then deleted. Nothing in an email is ever linked to anything in the app, because there is nothing in the app to link it to.

The lawful basis here is our legitimate interest in replying to people who contact us, and if you ask us to delete the exchange, we will.

Your rights, and who to complain to

Norway applies the General Data Protection Regulation through personopplysningsloven, and it gives you the rights you would expect: to ask what we hold about you, to get a copy, to have it corrected or erased, to have its use restricted, to object to it, and to receive it in a portable form. In practice those rights reach our email correspondence and nothing else — the app hands us nothing to answer about.

Ask at spell@bisas.world and you will have a reply within one month. If it does not satisfy you, the supervisory authority in Norway is Datatilsynet, datatilsynet.no; anyone living elsewhere in the EEA may complain instead to their own national authority.

Changes to this page

The date at the top of this page is the version you are reading. A change that genuinely alters what the app does with data — any collection at all, any third-party component, any transfer — appears here before the release that introduces it reaches Google Play, and the Data safety declaration in the console is updated in the same pass.

Tidying a sentence for clarity does not count as a change of that kind, and will simply appear with a new date.