Squawk — Privacy Policy

Last Updated: 3 August 2026

Squawk is operated by Jamison Tech LLC (“Jamison Tech,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), 6150 64th Ln, Norwalk, IA 50211, United States. For privacy questions, contact squawk@jamisontech.com.

Jamison Tech LLC is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.

The short version

Squawk is built so that we cannot see your location, your contacts, or your messages. This is not a promise about our intentions — it is a property of how the software works. Your data is encrypted on your device with keys we do not have, and our server is a blind relay that passes along sealed messages it cannot open.

What we actually hold is small and dull: your email address, some timestamps, whether you have a paid subscription, and a record of which devices are signed in.

What we never hold, in any readable form: your location, your contact list, your beacons, your notes, your profile, or your photos.

The rest of this policy explains that precisely, including the places where the picture is more complicated than the summary.

1. What We Collect and Store on Our Servers

This is the complete list. It is drawn from our actual database schema, not from a template.

1.1 Account record

Data	Why we have it
Email address	Account identity, sign-in codes, account recovery, and subscription tracking. It is the only way we can identify you.
Public identity key	Your public encryption key. Contacts encrypt messages to it. It is public by nature and reveals nothing on its own.
Encrypted backup blob	An encrypted copy of your contact list, identity key, and profile. We cannot decrypt this. See Section 3.
PIN key-derivation salt, parameters, verifier hash, and blob version	Security material that lets your device — and only your device — derive the key to your backup, and lets our server check that a recovery attempt knows your PIN without ever learning the PIN.
Subscription tier and Pro expiry	To know which features your account is entitled to.
Store subscription details — which app store the subscription came from, the store’s transaction identifier for it, which product was bought, its expiry, and its current status	To confirm with Apple or Google that your subscription is genuine and still active. We never see your payment card or billing address — the store handles payment and tells us only whether the subscription is valid.
Promotional access expiry	If you received free Pro access (for example, a launch promotion), when it ends.
Created, updated, and last-seen timestamps	Account housekeeping and abuse prevention.

1.2 Device sessions

One record per signed-in device, containing a hashed sign-in token (never the token itself), the platform (iOS or Android), a push notification token, and timestamps for creation, last use, expiry, and sign-out.

Short-lived records used to verify email codes: the email address, a hash of the 6-digit code (never the code itself), what the code is for, how many attempts have been made, and timestamps. These expire after 10 minutes.

1.4 Messages in transit

When a contact sends you a beacon, a profile update, or a trust message, it sits in a queue until your device collects it. Each queued item holds the sealed, unreadable ciphertext, the sender’s and recipient’s account identifiers, a priority flag, and expiry timestamps.

We want to be precise about one thing here, because it is the single place our “no social graph” claim needs qualifying. While a message is waiting to be delivered, the queue necessarily records which account sent it to which account. We do not return the sender identifier to the recipient — the app learns who sent a message only by decrypting it — and the record is deleted as soon as your device confirms receipt, or when it expires. But for the period a message is undelivered, a pair of account identifiers exists on our server. We could not build a relay without it. There is no persistent social graph, and we do not log, archive, or analyze these pairs — but they are not nothing, and you should know they exist.

2. What We Never Collect

We want to be equally specific about the negative, because for Squawk it is the point.

Your location, in any form. Not GPS coordinates, not city names, not venue names, not the geospatial indices the app uses internally. Location math happens entirely on your device. Nothing location-bearing ever reaches our servers in readable form.
Your contact list. The people you trust are stored on your device and inside your encrypted backup. We cannot enumerate them.
Your beacons and their notes. The content of what you share — where you are, when you arrive, what you wrote — is encrypted end-to-end between you and your contacts.
Your profile. Your display name, photo, and optional phone number are stored on your device and propagated to your contacts end-to-end encrypted. Your optional phone number never reaches our servers in readable form, and is never verified, never used for sign-in, and never used to find you.
We do not use analytics. No Google Analytics, no third-party SDK telemetry, no behavioral tracking, no advertising identifiers.
We do not use cookies or tracking technologies. Not in the app, and not on squawkradar.com: the website sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, loads no third-party scripts, and has no analytics of any kind. That is why it never asks you to accept anything — there is nothing to consent to.
We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data for advertising, and we never will. We have no advertising business.

2.1 The one exception: when you report someone

Reporting another user is the only place where you deliberately hand us information about someone else, so it deserves to be spelled out rather than buried.

If you report a user from within the app, we receive exactly four things: the account identifier your device holds for that person, the categories you tick, the name you type for them, and what you write. That is all. We do not receive their photo, their profile as stored on your device, your private nickname for them, their phone number, their location, their beacons, or their notes. We cannot read any of that, and reporting does not give us the ability to.

Why an identifier and not an email address. The identifier is the reference we already keep for every account, and it is the one that stays correct: an email address can be changed at any time, and a report that pointed at an old address would quietly stop pointing at anyone. We use the identifier to look up that account in our own records — so what we act on is what we hold, not something sent to us by a device.

The name is yours, not ours. The app shows you, beside the field, the name that person shared, so you can spell it correctly — but the field starts empty and nothing is sent unless you type it. What reaches us is what you wrote.

We record who reported whom. Ordinarily the association between two users exists on our servers only for the moments a message is in transit (§1.4). A report makes one such association durable, in our support mailbox. We keep it for a reason we would rather state plainly: it is the only way to detect misuse of the reporting system itself — one person filing reports against several different people, or filing one in retaliation. Without that record, the report mechanism would be a weapon.

3. The Encrypted Backup, and Why We Will Not Send It to You

Your PIN encrypts a backup containing your contact list, your profile, and your identity key. We store the result as ciphertext.

We cannot read it. We hold no key that opens it, and your PIN never reaches us.

If you ask us for a copy of your data (Section 8), we will tell you that we hold this backup and what it contains, but we will not send you the backup itself or the security material associated with it.

Releasing those items together would materially weaken the protections around your account — and, because your backup describes the people who trust you, around your contacts as well, who have no say in your request. We are not willing to trade their security for a copy of a file you cannot read anyway.

Under the GDPR, the right of access and the right to portability both provide that they must not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others (Articles 15(4) and 20(4)), and controllers are required to keep processing appropriately secure (Article 32). We rely on those provisions here. If a supervisory authority asks us to justify this position in detail, we will do so directly with them.

You lose nothing by this. The backup is readable only with your PIN, and the app on your device is the only thing that can read it — which it does every time you use it.

4. Information Shared With Third Parties

We use a small number of providers. None of them receives your location from us, because we do not have it.

4.1 Google Maps Platform — the important one

When you open the map picker, search for a venue, or let the app name your city, your device contacts Google directly with your approximate location and your search terms.

This happens outside Squawk’s encryption boundary. We do not see these requests, but Google does, and Google’s own Privacy Policy governs them. We mention this first and plainly because it is the one place where using Squawk causes location data to reach another company.

You can avoid it by entering your city or venue manually instead of using the map or search.

4.2 Apple Push Notification service (APNs) and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)

We send your device a silent signal to tell it to check for new messages. The signal contains no content — it is a fixed wake-up instruction with no location, no sender name, and no message text. Apple and Google receive the push token for your device and the fact that a wake-up was sent.

4.3 Google Workspace (email delivery)

Used to send sign-in codes, account notices, and to receive your feedback reports. Google processes the email address and the message content of those emails.

4.4 Cloudflare

Routes network traffic to our servers and protects them from attack. Cloudflare necessarily processes connection metadata, including your IP address, in transit.

4.5 Our own infrastructure

Our servers are operated by Jamison Tech on self-hosted infrastructure in the United States. We do not use a third-party cloud database provider.

4.6 App stores

If you buy a subscription, Apple or Google processes the payment. We never see your payment card details.

4.7 Other disclosures

We may disclose information if required by valid legal process, to protect our rights or the safety of others, or in connection with a merger or sale of assets. Please note what we could actually produce in response to legal process: the account fields in Section 1. We cannot produce location history, message content, or contact lists, because we do not have them in readable form and cannot decrypt what we do have.

5. Legal Bases for Processing (EEA / UK)

Processing	Legal basis
Creating and operating your account; relaying your messages; delivering the Service	Contract — Article 6(1)(b)
Sending sign-in codes and account notices	Contract — Article 6(1)(b)
Rate limiting, abuse prevention, and security	Legitimate interests — Article 6(1)(f): keeping the Service available and safe
Responding to your support requests and feedback	Contract and legitimate interests
Complying with legal obligations	Legal obligation — Article 6(1)(c)

We do not process special-category data, we do not use your data for automated decision-making or profiling, and we do not use it for advertising.

6. How Long We Keep Things

Data	Retention
Account record	Until you delete your account with Burn, at which point it is deleted immediately.
Encrypted backup blob	Same as the account record — deleted with it.
Device sessions	Until you sign out, or after 180 days of inactivity.
Sign-in code challenges	10 minutes, then they expire and are cleared.
Queued messages	Until your device collects them, or until their expiry — at most 90 days, and usually far less.
Feedback you send us	Kept as email correspondence for as long as needed to resolve the matter.
Reports about another user	Kept as email correspondence. Because a pattern of reports is the only way we can detect misuse of the reporting system itself, these are kept longer than ordinary feedback — see §2.1.

Inactive accounts. We record a “last seen” timestamp on your account and on each device session. Device sessions expire on their own, as the table above says. Your account does not — an account you stop using persists until you Burn it. We would rather say that plainly than imply an automatic expiry that does not exist. If you are finished with Squawk, use Burn.

7. Security

End-to-end encryption for everything you share with contacts, using established public-key cryptography. Messages are sealed to the recipient’s key and authenticated to the sender’s, so a message cannot be forged or read by anyone else — including us.
Your PIN never reaches our servers. It is stretched on your device using a memory-hard key derivation function; the server stores only a verifier that proves knowledge without revealing the PIN.
Sign-in tokens are stored hashed, never in the clear.
PIN attempts are rate limited — five failures locks recovery for 24 hours.
One active device per account, so a new sign-in ends the previous session.
Traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS).

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by law — under the GDPR, within 72 hours of becoming aware where the breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms.

8. Your Rights and How to Use Them

8.1 Deletion — do it yourself, right now

Settings → Manage account → Danger zone → Burn. This deletes your account and all associated server records immediately and irreversibly, and wipes Squawk’s data from your device. You do not need to ask us, and we cannot undo it.

8.2 Your other rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

Access a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
Rectify inaccurate data. You can change your account email in the app (Settings → Edit profile → Change).
Erase your data — see Burn, above.
Restrict or object to certain processing.
Data portability — receive the data you provided in a machine-readable format.
Withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.
Complain to a supervisory authority. In the EEA, that is the data protection authority where you live or work. In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office.

8.3 How to make a request

Email squawk@jamisontech.com from the address on your Squawk account.

We will verify it is you by sending a code to that address, in the same way the app does. We do this because handing your data to someone impersonating you would itself be a breach.

We will respond within 30 days. There is no charge for a reasonable request.

8.4 What you will actually receive

Because of how Squawk is built, an access request produces a short document. It will contain your email address, your account timestamps, your subscription tier and expiry, your public identity key, a list of your device sessions with their platforms and timestamps, and a summary of any sign-in code activity.

It will not contain your contacts, your locations, your beacons, your notes, or your profile — not because we decline to provide them, but because we do not have them. Those live on your device, and you can see all of them in the app right now.

It will also not contain your encrypted backup or its associated security material, for the reasons set out in Section 3, nor your push notification token or stored token hashes, which are security credentials of no use to you. We will confirm that we hold them and what they are for.

9. International Transfers

Our servers are located in the United States. Squawk is available worldwide, so if you use it from outside the United States — including from the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom — the limited account data described in Section 1 is stored in the US.

Given the design, what reaches us at all is your email address, some timestamps, and ciphertext nobody can read. Your location, your contacts, and your messages do not cross any border in readable form, because they are never in readable form anywhere outside your own device.

Why we do not rely on a separate transfer mechanism. Jamison Tech LLC is established in the United States and has no establishment in the EEA or the UK. When you create a Squawk account, you provide your information directly to us — it is not exported to us by a European controller or processor acting as an intermediary. Following the European Data Protection Board’s guidance on the interplay between Article 3 and Chapter V of the GDPR, direct collection of this kind is not a “transfer” requiring Chapter V safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses. The GDPR still applies to our processing in full, under Article 3(2), and we comply with it as described throughout this policy.

Where data does move onward. The providers named in Section 4 process data in the United States under their own transfer arrangements. Google LLC, Cloudflare, Inc., and Apple Inc. are each certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension.

Your rights do not depend on where our servers sit. Every right in Section 8 is available to you wherever you live, and you may complain to your local supervisory authority at any time.

10. Children’s Privacy

Squawk is not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe someone under 16 has created an account, contact squawk@jamisontech.com and we will delete it.

We set the minimum age at 16 deliberately: it is at or above the age of consent for information society services in every EU/EEA member state (GDPR Article 8 permits member states to set this anywhere between 13 and 16), so we do not rely on parental consent as a lawful basis and do not operate per-country age-verification machinery.

Where local law sets a higher age for consent to data processing, that age applies.

11. United States State Privacy Rights

If you are a resident of California or another US state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have rights to know, delete, correct, and to opt out of “sale” or “sharing” of personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them.

We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined, we do not engage in targeted advertising, and we do not profile you. To exercise your rights, use Section 8.3.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy. We will update the “Last Updated” date and post the current version. If a change is material, we will notify you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

13. Contact

Jamison Tech LLC 6150 64th Ln Norwalk, IA 50211 United States

Email: squawk@jamisontech.com Phone: +1 (605) 310-7796

In-app: Settings → Help → Send feedback