What PhonePact Measures, and What We Refuse To

By Hank Yang. Harvard Divinity School, MTS '26 · Founder of PhonePact · Built internet businesses reaching millionsUpdated July 2026

Most posts on this blog mention our app once, at the end, and earn the rest with useful information. This one is different on purpose: it's the full disclosure document, written in plain language, because "trust us" is not an architecture. If you're evaluating any screen time app, including ours, these are the questions to ask, and here are our answers on the record.

What data does PhonePact actually collect?

Overall device activity time. That's the measurement. The app needs to know how long your phone has been in use today so it can send you private notices ("you've been on your phone 2 hours today") and know when you've reached your pact point. It does not need to know, and does not record, which apps made up that time, which sites you visited, what you typed, or what you watched. The distinction is structural, not a settings toggle: the granular data never enters our system, so it can't leak, be subpoenaed, be sold, or tempt us later.

Your pact configuration. Your chosen daily point, your circles, and the check-in notes you write. Notes shared with a circle expire and are deleted after 24 hours by design, enforced with automatic time-to-live deletion at the database level rather than by policy promise. Support is supposed to be a conversation, not a permanent exhibit of your worst weeks.

Account basics. What's needed to run a paid service: your login, your subscription status. The subscription is the business model, $0.99 a month after a 30-day trial, and that sentence is the entire revenue section. No ads, no data sales, no "partnerships" that are data sales in a trench coat.

What does my circle actually see?

One kind of event: "Alex reached 2h 30m today," at the point you set, with an optional short note if you chose to add one during your Moment (the quiet private prompt ten minutes before). Circle members never see your app list, your browsing, your location, your total-versus-goal history charted over time, or anything you didn't explicitly send. There are no leaderboards, no streaks, no red badges of failure, because ranked shame is a growth mechanic and we don't run growth mechanics on your struggles.

Changes to your pact point are visible by design: propose a new goal and one person you pick confirms it. That's the one place we chose visibility over privacy, deliberately, because silent goal-abandonment is the failure mode the entire product exists to prevent, and an openly raised goal is the system working.

What will PhonePact never do?

No selling or sharing data with advertisers or brokers, ever, in any anonymized, aggregated, or otherwise laundered form. No location collection. No message or content scanning. No engagement notifications: nothing we send exists to bring you back to our app, which is a strange sentence for an app company and the whole point. No dark-pattern retention: cancel in two taps, and deleting your account deletes your data. And no quiet policy walkbacks: if any of this ever changes, it changes loudly, in advance, with an easy exit, though the honest plan is that it doesn't change, because the refusals aren't a marketing layer, they're the product spec.

We publish this because the screen time category has a trust problem it earned: apps positioned as digital wellness while harvesting granular behavioral data are surveillance with a lavender gradient. The bar you should hold any of them to, including us: what exactly is measured, who sees it, when is it deleted, and how does the company make money? Any app that can't answer all four in plain sentences has answered them.

If those answers are why you've hesitated to try accountability at all, the model built on them is here: getphonepact.com. And if you'd rather run a circle with no app and no company involved, genuinely, do it, the group-chat version works and we published the instructions.