Heads-up: privacy policy

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This policy is about Heads-up, the Android app made by Weekend Bunnies, and the Heads-up relay that carries its notifications while you are away from home. It explains what the app does with information on your phone, what leaves your phone and when, and what your rights are. It does not cover this website, which has its own privacy notice, or your Home Assistant, which you run yourself.

The short version

  • Your notifications go from your own Home Assistant to your phone. At home they go directly over your own network. Away from home they go through our relay and Google's push service, end to end encrypted: we and Google cannot read them.
  • What the app keeps stays on your phone, encrypted. You never create an account.
  • Our relay keeps only what it needs to reach your phone: a random device number, Google's push address for the app on your phone, and, if you subscribe, a reference to your subscription so it can check it with Google Play.
  • There is no advertising, no analytics, no crash reporting and no tracking.

Who we are

Heads-up is made by Weekend Bunnies, a business based in the Netherlands. We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy, under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, in Dutch: AVG) and Dutch law. For anything about this policy or your data, email us at developer@weekendbunnies.com.

If you email us, we use your message and your email address only to answer you, keep them only as long as we need them to deal with your question, and never add your address to a mailing list or share it.

How a notification reaches you

Your Home Assistant decides when to send a notification and what it says. The Heads-up integration, which you install in Home Assistant, encrypts every notification with a key that only your Home Assistant and your phone have. The two make that key together when you link the phone, and you check it by comparing the six digit code on both screens.

  • At home, the phone keeps a connection open to Home Assistant over your own network, and notifications go straight to the phone. Nothing passes through us or Google.
  • Away from home, Home Assistant sends the encrypted notification to our relay, which hands it to Google's push service (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which delivers it to your phone. The relay and Google see only that a notification of a certain size goes to a device; they cannot read it, and the relay does not store it.

When you tap a button on a notification, such as Acknowledge or Snooze, the app sends that to your own Home Assistant: over your home network, or to the internet address you set up for your Home Assistant. It never goes to us.

What the app keeps on your phone

  • The link with your Home Assistant: the shared key, your Home Assistant's name and its addresses on your network and on the internet, and the address range of your home network, so the app can tell when you are at home.
  • Profiles: how each kind of notification behaves, as your Home Assistant defines them.
  • Snoozed alarms: a snoozed alarm, with its title and text, until it rings again or you clear it.
  • A short list of notification numbers already shown, so a notification that arrives twice shows once. Numbers only, never the text.
  • Button taps waiting to be sent, when your Home Assistant can't be reached for a moment.
  • Your relay registration: the random device number and the key Home Assistant uses to send to it.
  • Your subscription: how many free notifications you have used, and whether you have a subscription and until when, as our relay last reported it.

All of it is in the app's private storage, encrypted, where other apps cannot read it. Notifications themselves are shown by Android and stay in your notification shade until you or Home Assistant remove them.

What leaves your phone

To your own Home Assistant

When the phone connects to Home Assistant, and when something changes, the app tells Home Assistant the app's version, the phone's model, your relay registration, and your subscription state with the number of free notifications left. With every notification it sends back a receipt. Button taps, snoozes and alarms nobody answered go to Home Assistant as events. All of this stays in your Home Assistant; we never receive it.

While you link the phone, the app announces itself on your home network so Home Assistant can find it: with the phone's name, its model, a random phone number and a public key. Other devices on the same network can see that announcement too, only while the linking screen is open.

To our relay

The relay is a small service of ours that runs on Google Cloud (Firebase) in the Netherlands. The app registers with it so notifications can reach you away from home. For each registration the relay keeps:

  • a random device number, and a fingerprint of the key Home Assistant uses to send (never the key itself);
  • the push address Google's push service gave the app on your phone;
  • when the registration was last used, and how many notifications it carried in the current minute and day, to enforce the limits of 10 a minute and 200 a day;
  • if you subscribe: the purchase token Google Play gave the app, and until when the subscription runs. The relay sends the token to Google Play to check that the subscription is real and still running. The purchase token is not your name, email address or payment details.

The relay never stores the notifications themselves.

To Google

  • Google's push service (Firebase Cloud Messaging) gives the app a push address and delivers notifications while you are away from home. To do so it keeps an installation identifier for the app on your phone.
  • Google Play handles the subscription and the payment entirely. We never see your name, your payment details or your Google account. The app asks Google Play whether you subscribe, using Google Play Billing, a library from Google built into the app.

Google handles this under Google's privacy policy.

Nothing else

Nothing else leaves your phone. We never receive your notifications, your profiles, your Home Assistant's addresses, your button taps or anything else from your Home Assistant.

How long it is kept

  • On your phone: until you unlink the phone (which removes the link, the profiles, snoozed alarms and waiting taps), clear the app's storage or uninstall the app. The count of free notifications stays until you clear the storage or uninstall.
  • On our relay: a registration is deleted when it has not been used for 12 months, or when Google reports that the push address no longer works (for example after you uninstall the app), which the relay learns the next time a notification is sent.
  • Technical logs: Google Cloud keeps the relay's request logs, which include the internet address a request came from, for 30 days.

Permissions and why the app needs them

  • Notifications. To show anything at all.
  • Network access, Wi-Fi state and multicast. To find Home Assistant on your network, to tell whether you are at home, and to keep the connection open.
  • Run in the background (optional). Lets the home connection keep running while the screen is off and start again by itself; the app asks for it with an explanation.
  • Do Not Disturb access (optional). Only if one of your profiles breaks through Do Not Disturb.
  • Full-screen alarms (optional). Only if one of your profiles shows a full-screen alarm.
  • Alarms and reminders (optional). So that a snoozed alarm rings again exactly on time.
  • Start at boot. So that the home connection and snoozed alarms come back after the phone restarts.
  • Delivering your notifications through the relay, and checking your subscription: to perform our agreement with you (GDPR article 6(1)(b)).
  • The limits of 10 notifications a minute and 200 a day, and the technical logs: our legitimate interest in keeping the relay working and preventing abuse (GDPR article 6(1)(f)).

Where we rely on our legitimate interest, you may object; see "Your rights".

Who processes it for us

  • Google (Firebase and Google Cloud, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google Play and the Google Play Developer API): runs the relay, delivers notifications, handles subscriptions and lets us check them. Google's privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy
  • Microsoft (Microsoft 365): delivers our email, including our answers to you.

These companies process the data on our behalf, under a data processing agreement.

Outside the European Economic Area

The relay and its data are in the Netherlands, but Google and Microsoft may process data outside the European Economic Area (EEA), including in the United States. Where they do, the transfer is protected by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, for companies certified under it, or by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

Backups and moving to a new phone

Android's backup includes nothing from this app, and nothing is copied to a new phone. On a new phone you link it to your Home Assistant again, and your subscription comes back from Google Play.

Deleting your information

  • Unlink this phone in the app removes the link with your Home Assistant from the phone, and tells Home Assistant to remove the phone too.
  • To delete everything the app keeps, clear its storage in Android's settings for the app, or uninstall the app.
  • Your relay registration is deleted automatically, as described under "How long it is kept". To have it deleted sooner, write to us.

Children

Heads-up is made for people who run their own Home Assistant and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly receive information from children.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to see the personal data we hold about you and get a copy, to have it corrected or deleted, to have its use limited, to take it elsewhere, and to object to how we use it.

Everything the app keeps on your phone is under your control, so you can see, change and delete it yourself. On our relay we keep only the registration described above. Because we keep no account and no name, we may ask for the device number shown at the bottom of the app's main screen, or the order number of your subscription, so we can find your data. Write to developer@weekendbunnies.com and we answer within two weeks.

You can also complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl). If you live or work in another country of the European Union or the European Economic Area, such as Iceland, you may also complain to the authority there. In the United Kingdom you have the same rights under the UK GDPR, and you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, the new version appears on this page with a new date. If a change means the app sends something it did not send before, the app tells you before it does.