Privacy

Kept is an iPhone app that watches you study with the front camera and hands you back a video. This page covers the app and this website. It is a plain description of what the app actually does — the camera, the video, and the three things that leave your phone.

Last updated: 30 August 2026.

The short version

• The camera never leaves your phone. No video, image or frame is uploaded anywhere. There is no server that could receive one.
• There is no account. No sign-up, no password, no email address, no profile. Nothing to log into.
• Four things do leave. Your subscription status, one word about where you heard about Kept, anonymous diagnostics from the face-detection library, and — only if you typed it into the waitlist form this site had before launch — your email address. Each one is explained below.
• No ads, and no tracking. There is no ad network in the app, nothing follows you between apps, and the app never asks for permission to track you, because it does not.

What the camera does

During a session the front camera is on, and the app reads each frame to answer three questions: is there a face in front of the phone, roughly which way is the head turned, and has the phone been picked up. That is the whole measurement — it is how a session gets scored.

All of that reading happens on the phone, using face detection built into iOS and a detection library bundled inside the app. Frames are not sent anywhere to be analysed. The app contains no code that uploads them.

The camera runs only while a session screen is open and the app is in front of you. Put the app in the background and the camera stops. Permission is asked the first time you start a session, in context, and never during setup.

The timelapse, and where the frames live

A few times a second, one small still frame is saved so the session can be turned into a timelapse at the end. Those frames are written into the app's own private storage on the phone — the area iOS gives each app, which other apps cannot read.

They are deleted, on the phone, in both of the cases there are:

• When you leave the result screen. The video has been made by then, and the frames have no further use.
• Immediately, if you back out of a session without finishing it. Nothing that was never scored is kept.

The frames themselves are the raw camera stills, not blurred — the blur belongs to the video, and is described next. They are never uploaded, and they do not appear in your photo library.

The video, and the face blur

When a session ends, the app builds a 15-second video on the phone: your timelapse with the ring, your time and your score drawn over it. Making it involves no network at all.

Faces in that video are found and blurred as it is being made, on the phone, frame by frame. This is on by default and it is free — the free plan has no switch for it at all. Kept Pro can turn the blur off for a clip, and the app asks you to confirm the first time, because that is the one control that can put a real face into a file you are about to send someone.

The finished video is stored in the app on your phone. It leaves only when you tap Share and pick somewhere to send it. From that moment it is in whichever app you chose — TikTok, Instagram, Messages — and that app's own rules apply to it. On the free plan the clip is cleared at the end of the day; keeping clips is part of Kept Pro.

Face data

The camera points at you while you study, so this deserves its own words: Kept does not collect face data. Nothing derived from your face ever leaves the phone.

During a session, face detection runs on the phone to answer two questions about each frame: is a face present, and roughly which way is the head turned. The answers are momentary numbers, used once to score the session, and they are not kept. The app does not recognise or identify anyone, and it never creates a faceprint, a face template, or any other biometric identifier. The same on-phone detection runs once more when a video is exported, to find the faces and blur them.

How long each thing lasts, all of it on the phone:

• The detection results — discarded immediately, frame by frame. They are never written to disk.
• The timelapse stills — deleted when you leave the result screen, or immediately if you back out of a session without finishing it.
• The finished video, faces blurred by default — on the free plan it clears at the end of the day; on Kept Pro it stays until you delete it. Deleting the app deletes everything at once.

No face data is shared with any third party. The face-detection library's diagnostics, described below, contain no images and no face data.

What stays on your phone

The app keeps one small file on the device. It holds the answers you gave during setup (year of school, subject, the time you study, and so on), whether you are on Pro, today's sessions, the subject names you have typed, and a note of which setup screens you reached so the flow can be improved.

None of that is sent anywhere. We have not put an analytics product in Kept — nothing in that file, and nothing about how you use the app, is reported to us. Today's sessions are pruned at midnight, and deleting the app deletes all of it at once.

What leaves your phone

Four things, and this is all of them.

• Your subscription. Buying is handled by Apple, and Kept uses a service called RevenueCat to ask whether a subscription is active. RevenueCat receives the purchase and subscription information and an anonymous ID it generates for your install of the app. It does not receive your name, your email address, your video, or anything the camera saw. This is what makes Pro survive a reinstall or a new phone, and what makes Restore Purchases work.
• Where you heard about Kept. One setup question asks this, and the answer — one word from a fixed list, like TikTok or Reddit or a friend — is attached to that same anonymous ID and sent the next time the app checks your subscription. Kept is made by one person, and this is how we tell which of those places is worth the time. It is a single label. It is not your browsing history, and it is not tied to a name.
• Diagnostics from the face detector. Finding a face in a frame is done by a library made by Google, running entirely on your phone. The library reports on itself to Google — how often it ran, how long it took, whether it failed, and which device it was on — under an anonymous ID for your install of the app. It is reporting on its own workings, not on what the camera saw: the images stay on the phone, and the app has no code that would upload one. This comes with the library rather than from us, we cannot see any of it, and it is not tied to your name.
• Your email address, if you gave us one. Only if you typed it into the waitlist form this site had before Kept launched. The form is gone; what was collected is covered further down.

Reminders

If you start a free trial, the app offers to warn you two or three days before it ends. That reminder is scheduled by your phone, on your phone. Kept has no push notification service and never receives a device token, so there is nothing for us to send you and no way to.

Notification permission is asked after the trial has already started, never before, and saying no changes nothing else about the app.

What the app asks permission for

• Camera. The front camera during a session. This is the mechanism — without it there is nothing to score.
• Motion. The accelerometer, to notice when the propped-up phone gets picked up, so the pickup can show on your session ring. Read on the device, never uploaded.
• Photos — adding only. Used only if you choose Save Video from the share sheet. Kept cannot read, browse or search your photo library.
• Notifications. For the trial reminder above, and nothing else.

The waitlist on this site (closed)

Before Kept was released, this site had a form that took an email address so we could send one message on launch day. Kept launched on 30 August 2026 and the form has been removed — there is no longer any way to submit an address here. For anyone who did sign up, three things were stored:

• Your email address. Lowercased before it is saved.
• Where you came from. A short text label — which link or campaign brought you to the page. Not your browsing history.
• The time you signed up.

That is the whole record. There was no name field, and nothing else was asked for.

It existed for one email, on the day Kept was released. That was the only reason the list existed. We do not send newsletters, and your address was never sold, rented or shared with anyone for their own purposes.

The list is stored in a Supabase database, and this site runs on Vercel. Both act only as infrastructure providers — they hold the data on our behalf and do not use it for their own purposes. The database is closed to public access; the only thing that can write to it is this site's own signup endpoint.

Now that Kept has been released, the list has done the only job it had. The remaining entries are being deleted, and you can ask us to remove yours immediately.

What this site does not do

• No analytics. This site has no analytics tool, no tracking pixel and no third-party scripts.
• No cookies. The site sets none.
• No advertising, and no ad networks.
• No profiles. Your email is not enriched, cross-referenced or matched against anything.

Your choices

• In the app: deleting Kept removes everything it kept on your phone — sessions, clips, timelapse frames and your answers. There is no copy anywhere else.
• Your subscription: cancel any time in your Apple Account settings. Apple keeps its own record of a purchase, and we cannot delete that. If you want the RevenueCat record for your install removed, email hello@kept.study — it is anonymous, so we will need something to find it by, such as the date of purchase.
• The waitlist: email hello@kept.study and we will tell you what we hold for your address, correct it, or delete it entirely. No account or verification hoops — just write from the address you signed up with, or tell us which address to look for. Deletion is permanent.

If you are a parent

Kept is built for students, and some of them are young, so the plain version: the camera does one job, which is to tell whether someone is sitting at the desk, and it does that on the phone. No video, image or frame is uploaded. There is no account, no feed, no messaging, and no way for anyone to see a session unless your child chooses to send it. Faces are blurred automatically in anything the app exports; that blur is on by default, and it can be turned off in the app.

If you are asked to approve a purchase, Kept Pro is the same study timer. It removes the watermark, lifts the limit on scored sessions, and lets clips be kept on the phone instead of clearing at the end of the day. It does not add an account, a feed, messaging or uploads — where the video goes does not change.

We do not knowingly keep waitlist entries from children under 13. If your child signed up while the form was up, email hello@kept.study and we will delete the entry.

Changes

If what the app or this site collects changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. This page is the notice — there is no mailing list to announce it on.

Contact

Kept is an independent project, not a company. For anything on this page, including deletion requests, write to hello@kept.study.