SDAINews

Privacy Policy — Sid Apps

Effective date: 2 July 2026 Last updated: 5 September 2026 Applies to: Sid Apps for Android (package com.sdai.news).

Published alongside the Terms of Use and Publisher / Contact.

1. Who we are

Sid Apps is a free, non-commercial Android app with five parts: a news feed (World / national / regional headlines + video news), Know Your Product — a barcode scanner that rates a product’s safety, Games — Sudoku, kids’ language-learning (English / Telugu), and a Word of the Day dictionary, Sid Stories — an offline reader for 151 original stories, and Chat via Bluetooth — an offline, peer-to-peer text chat with people nearby. No ads, no accounts, no monetisation.


Publisher	Sudhir D — independent individual developer, India
App package	`com.sdai.news`
Privacy contact	lamarulife@gmail.com
Project home	https://github.com/lamarulife-ai

2. The short version

The news feed is device-only. No analytics, no accounts, no advertising IDs; we run no servers that receive your data.
Your location and reading history stay on your device (used only on-device to localise and order the feed).
Scan to Know does send data out — but only product data, never you. When you scan a barcode, the camera image stays on your device (the barcode is decoded on-device); the decoded barcode and the product’s public details are sent to Open Food Facts and to Google Gemini to produce the rating. No personal identity is attached.
Chat via Bluetooth never touches the internet. Rooms are direct phone-to-phone Bluetooth links. No message, and no record that a chat happened, is ever sent to us or to any server (see §12).
You stay anonymous — we never know who you are.

3. What Sid Apps does not collect or transmit

Your name, email, phone number, or any account identifier.
Your device identifier, advertising ID (AAID), or installation ID.
Camera images / video — the scanner decodes the barcode on-device; the picture itself is never uploaded or stored.
Your location — resolved and used only on your device (see §6).
Your reading behaviour — stays on the device (§7).
Voice / audio — the microphone is used only if you tap a pronunciation-practice exercise in Learn a language; audio is processed by Android’s on-device speech recognizer and is never recorded, stored, or uploaded (see §11).
Your contacts, calendar, or files.
Chat messages. Messages you send over Chat via Bluetooth are never transmitted to us or to any server — they go directly to the phones in the room (§12).
Photos, audio or files in chat — Chat via Bluetooth sends text and emoji only. It cannot attach media, does not read your gallery, and writes nothing to your shared storage.
Crash logs, performance metrics, screen views, or any analytics signal.

There are no analytics or tracking SDKs (no Firebase Analytics, Google Analytics, Crashlytics, Adjust, AppsFlyer, Facebook SDK). The Scan feature uses Google’s ML Kit (on-device barcode decoding) and the Gemini API (cloud, for ratings) — these are functional, not analytics (see §5, §10).

4. What stays on your device

Stored locally (Room + DataStore), never transmitted to us:

Data	Why	How
Bookmarked / saved articles	Revisit later	Room SQLite
Scan history (barcode, product name, rating)	Review past scans	Room SQLite
Location (city / region / country / language), if shared	Localise national + regional news	DataStore
Read-state, interest signals, reading streak	Order your feed	Room / DataStore
Preferences (theme, positive-only, language, blocked sources)	Persist choices	DataStore
Cache of recent headlines + images	Instant feed, brief offline use	Room + image cache
Sudoku save + stats (puzzle, progress, times)	Continue a game, track scores	Room SQLite
Dictionary lookups (Word of the Day + searched words)	Offline re-reading, avoid re-fetching	Room SQLite
Alert subscription choices	Remember what you subscribed to	DataStore
Chat messages + room history	Re-open a room where you left off	Room SQLite (`chat.db`)
Chat room names / recently joined rooms	One-tap reconnect	SharedPreferences
Chat blocked people + reports you filed	Enforce your blocks; your own record	SharedPreferences
Chat agreement record (version, timestamp, device model, app version, terms hash)	Show what you accepted, and when	SharedPreferences

Delete anytime via Settings → Apps → Sid Apps → Storage → Clear data, or by uninstalling. Chat data specifically can be erased in-app: Settings → About & Legal → Delete all chat data.

5. What the app fetches from the network

Standard HTTPS requests to public endpoints, carrying no personal identifier:

News feed

Google News RSS — World edition, plus your country and regional-language editions if you share a location.
Publisher RSS feeds (BBC, The Guardian, etc.) and positive-news sources.
YouTube channel RSS — video-news headlines + thumbnails from official broadcaster channels (no account/key).
REST Countries — a country-code → language lookup (no coordinates, no personal data).

Scan to Know

Open Food Facts (world.openfoodfacts.org and sibling databases) — looks up the scanned barcode (or product name) to fetch public product details (name, brand, ingredients).
Google Gemini API (generativelanguage.googleapis.com) — the product details are sent to Google’s Gemini model to generate the rating, safety label and breakdown. This is a Google cloud service governed by Google’s privacy policy and API terms. Only product information is sent — no identity, location, or reading data.

Games — Word of the Day

Free Dictionary API (api.dictionaryapi.dev) — looks up the word itself (from a list bundled in the app, or one you type) to fetch its definition, pronunciation audio and examples. No key, no account, no personal data is sent — only the word you’re looking up.

6. Location (optional)

Sid Apps can localise the news to where you are — entirely optional. A location is converted to city / region / country on your device (Android Geocoder); coordinates are not sent to us or stored after resolution. Country → national edition; region → local-language edition. If you don’t share a location, the app shows World news.

7. On-device personalisation

The feed is ordered from what you read (seen-state, lightweight interest signals, a reading streak) — computed and stored only on your device, never uploaded, no server-side profile.

8. Content filtering

On-device keyword filters remove graphic / abusive / sexual / vulgar headlines (English + common regional languages) to keep the feed suitable for a general and 16+ audience. Heuristic — reduces but cannot guarantee removal of all objectionable content.

9. Opening articles and videos

Articles open in your browser / an in-app tab, under the publisher’s own privacy policy.
Videos open in the YouTube app (or browser); from there you are in YouTube/Google’s environment (comments, recommendations, sign-in, tracking) under Google’s policy. We share nothing with YouTube beyond the public video link you open.

10. Scan to Know — product scanning

When you use the Scan tab:

The camera shows a live viewfinder. The barcode is decoded on-device by Google ML Kit — the camera image is never uploaded or saved.
The decoded barcode (or a product name) is sent to Open Food Facts to fetch public product details.
Those product details are sent to Google Gemini (cloud AI) to generate the safety rating, label, and breakdown.
The result (barcode, product name, rating) is saved to local scan history on your device.

Only product data leaves your device — never your identity, location, or reading history. Ratings are AI-generated and informational (see the Terms); they are not professional, medical, or safety advice.

11. Games — Sudoku, Learn a language, Word of the Day

The Games tab bundles three offline-first activities:

Sudoku — puzzles are generated on your device; your board, progress, hints and stats are saved locally (Room) and never leave your device.
Learn a language (English / Telugu) — kids’ reading games (alphabet, words, rhymes, stories, grammar). All content is bundled in the app; nothing is fetched or sent over the network. Some exercises let a child hear a word read aloud using Android’s built-in text-to-speech (audio is generated on-device and never recorded) and optionally repeat it back using Android’s built-in speech recognizer — this is the only feature that uses the microphone, it runs on-device, and no audio is ever stored, transmitted, or heard by us.
Word of the Day — see §5 for the dictionary lookup; results are cached locally so previously seen words work offline.

12. Chat via Bluetooth

Chat via Bluetooth lets you talk to people in the same room over a direct Bluetooth connection. It is designed so that no data can reach us even in principle: the feature contains no networking code at all.

How a room works. One phone hosts and names a room; up to 7 others join. Bluetooth Classic has no direct link between two joiners, so the host relays messages between them (a star topology).

What is sent, and to whom

Messages are text and emoji only. Photos, audio and files cannot be sent or received.
Traffic goes only between the phones in the room, over Bluetooth. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account, server or cloud component.
Each connection is encrypted with keys agreed by the two phones (ephemeral ECDH P-256, HKDF, AES-256-GCM). Keys are generated fresh per connection and are never stored or transmitted.

Important — the host can read the room. Because the host relays messages between participants, the host’s device necessarily processes the contents of what passes through it. This is not end-to-end encryption across a relayed room, and we do not describe it as such. Only join rooms hosted by someone you trust. The app states this on its first-run agreement screen.

Verifying who you are connected to. Each link shows a 6-digit security code on the Members screen. If both phones show the same code, nobody is intercepting the connection. If they differ, disconnect.

Where chat data is stored. A room’s history is stored on the devices in that room — the host’s and your own — in the app’s private database. There is no backup and no recovery: clearing the app’s data, deleting the app, or losing the device destroys it permanently.

Bluetooth permissions. BLUETOOTH_SCAN (declared neverForLocation), BLUETOOTH_CONNECT and BLUETOOTH_ADVERTISE are used solely to find, pair with and connect to nearby devices for chat. They are never used to derive your location. A connectedDevice foreground service, with an ongoing notification, keeps an open room connected while the app is in the background.

Safety tools. You can block anyone (as host they cannot rejoin; either way their messages stop reaching you) and report them. Because rooms are offline and peer-to-peer, a report is recorded on your own device — there is nowhere to submit it — and the block is the action that takes effect. Blocked people and filed reports are listed under Settings.

Responsibility. Sid Apps does not review, moderate, back up or recover any message sent over Chat via Bluetooth, and accepts no responsibility or liability for user-generated content shared over a local connection.

13. Permissions

Permission	Purpose	Optional?
`INTERNET`	Fetch news, product lookups, ratings, dictionary definitions	Required
`ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE`	Detect connectivity before refreshing	Required
`CAMERA`	Live viewfinder for barcode scanning — image decoded on-device, never uploaded (§10)	Used only in Scan
`RECORD_AUDIO`	On-device speech recognition for pronunciation-practice exercises in Learn a language — audio is never recorded or uploaded (§11)	Used only in that exercise
`ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION` / `ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION`	One-time fix to localise national/regional news — resolved on-device, never transmitted (§6)	Optional
`POST_NOTIFICATIONS` (Android 13+)	Daily digest, and the ongoing notification shown while a chat room is open	Optional
`BLUETOOTH_SCAN` (declared `neverForLocation`), `BLUETOOTH_CONNECT`, `BLUETOOTH_ADVERTISE`	Find, pair with and connect to nearby devices for Chat via Bluetooth. Never used to derive location (§12)	Used only in Chat
`FOREGROUND_SERVICE` + `FOREGROUND_SERVICE_CONNECTED_DEVICE`	Keep an open chat room connected while the app is in the background, with an ongoing notification	Used only in Chat

No contacts, calendar, SMS, call logs, or arbitrary file access.

14. Age suitability & children

Sid Apps presents real-world news and is intended for a general audience aged 16 and above (rated Teen), with on-device content filtering (§8). It is not directed at children under 13 and collects no personal information from anyone, so no parental-consent mechanism is required.

15. Retention, your rights, security

No server-side data is collected, so there is nothing for us to retain. Local data stays on your device until you clear it; cached news is auto-pruned (~1 day).
Access / delete / export: all local data is on your device — inspect or clear it via Android’s app settings; uninstalling removes everything.
Network requests use HTTPS. Local data lives in the app’s private sandbox.
For DPDP (India) / GDPR requests, email lamarulife@gmail.com — we reply within 7 days.

16. Changes & contact

We may update this policy (e.g. a new source). Material changes are surfaced in-app on first launch after the update.

Email: lamarulife@gmail.com · Project home: https://github.com/lamarulife-ai