Security & Privacy

Your audio and voice

• The microphone is on only while you practice: in a drill, the tuner, the intonation check, or Listen with Answer out loud. Your iPhone, iPad or Mac shows its microphone indicator whenever it's on.
• Heard, then gone. The sound is analysed in memory on your device to find the notes you played, then thrown away. It's never recorded, saved or sent, to us or anyone else.
• Spoken answers stay private too. Voice commands and Listen's spoken answers use Apple's speech recognition locked to run on your device only. If your device can't recognise speech on the device itself, the feature stays off rather than sending your voice anywhere. In Listen, EarFret only listens in the short pause after each question.
• Same for connected gear. Notes from a MIDI keyboard, MIDI guitar or audio interface are read on your device in the same way, and never recorded.

Your practice data

• Only practice, nothing personal. EarFret keeps what you've learned, scores, your streak, session notes, settings, reminders, maps and custom drills. It never asks for your name, email address or location.
• Protected on your device. On iPhone and iPad with a passcode, EarFret's files are encrypted by the device and can't be read after a restart until you unlock it. On a Mac, they live in EarFret's sandboxed folder, which other apps can't open.
• Synced only through your own iCloud. If you use iCloud, your progress and preferences sync between your devices in the private database of your own iCloud account. Apple encrypts it on the way and in storage, and we have no way to read it. Microphone settings stay on each device.
• Apple Watch and widgets see only a summary (like your streak and what's due), passed through Apple's encrypted connection to your paired watch and storage only EarFret's own widgets can read.
• The listening log is off unless you turn it on. It's for troubleshooting, holds pitch readings as text (never sound), and leaves your device only if you export it.
• You decide what you share. Session spreadsheets, fretboard map PDFs, result cards and the weekly report go only where you send them.

No tracking or ads

• No account, no sign-in, so there's no password or profile of yours to steal.
• No analytics, advertising, crash-reporting or tracking code. EarFret's privacy declaration to Apple says it doesn't track you and collects no data.
• No server of ours. The app makes no internet requests of its own. Sync, purchases, Game Center and your watch all go through Apple's encrypted services. On a Mac, the app's sandbox doesn't even allow it to connect to the internet by itself.
• Purchases go through Apple. We never see your name, Apple Account or payment details.
• Game Center is optional. If you're signed in, your best challenge scores and streak go to Game Center leaderboards, where other players may see your Game Center nickname, depending on your Game Center settings.

Permissions you control

EarFret asks for each permission only when you reach the feature that needs it, and works without it:

• Microphone: when you first set up EarFret or start a drill that listens. Without it, answer every drill by tapping.
• Speech Recognition: the first time you use Listen with Answer out loud, or practice with Voice commands on. Without it, answer in your head.
• Notifications: on the last setup screen, for the daily practice nudge (tap No reminders to skip it), or when you turn on reminders, pitch-memory check-ins or quick quizzes. They're scheduled on your device, not sent from a server.

Turn off the microphone or speech recognition

1. Open your device's Settings (on a Mac, System Settings).
2. Go to Privacy & Security.
3. Choose Microphone or Speech Recognition and switch EarFret off.

Notifications: Settings › Notifications › EarFret, or turn the reminder off in EarFret's Settings › Reminders.

Deleting your data

1. Erase your progress everywhere: in EarFret, tap Reset all progress at the bottom of Settings. It clears your progress on this device and, through iCloud, on your other devices.
2. Clear the listening log: Settings › Troubleshooting › Clear listening log.
3. Remove EarFret's data from iCloud: open your device's Settings, tap your name, then iCloud › Manage Storage, choose EarFret and delete its data.
4. Remove it from a device: delete the app. Everything it kept on that device goes with it.
5. Leave the waitlist: email [email protected] and we'll delete your address (Cloudflare's restore history drops it within 30 days).

Game Center scores are kept by Apple; manage them in Game Center's settings on your device.

Our website

• Always encrypted. earfret.com only works over HTTPS (TLS 1.2 or newer), and tells browsers to never use an unencrypted connection to it or any of its subdomains.
• No trackers. No analytics, ads, tracking cookies, or third-party scripts or fonts: every page, image and video comes from earfret.com.
• Locked down. Our pages only run code that comes from earfret.com itself, other sites can't embed them, and the site itself can't ask your browser for your camera, microphone or location.
• The waitlist keeps only what it needs: your email address, the date, the page you signed up on and your browser's language, so we can send the launch email in your language. It's stored with Cloudflare, our host, in a database encrypted at rest, used for nothing else, and deleted after launch. Cloudflare's restore history can hold a copy for up to 30 days after that, then it's gone.
• Protected from junk sign-ups without tracking you. The form accepts a few tries an hour from each connection, with no puzzle to solve. To count them we keep a scrambled code made from your IP address, never the address itself; the code changes every day and is deleted within a day. To catch typos, the form also checks that your address's domain (the part after the @) can receive email; it never sends you anything to do that.

How we keep it this way

• Checked on every build. Automated tests fail if the app ever gains an internet call of its own, a third-party library, speech recognition off the device, an exception to encrypted connections, or a tracking declaration.
• A locked-down Mac app. On a Mac, EarFret runs in Apple's app sandbox with the hardened runtime, so it can't look through your other files or other apps' data: it can use its own files, the microphone and the files you choose to save.
• Regular security reviews. EarFret's code gets an automated security review every 15 days, in rotation with our other apps, and anything found is fixed with a test so it stays fixed.
• Found a problem? Email [email protected]. A person reads every message.

The legal details are in the privacy policy. This page describes EarFret 0.1.5 and was last reviewed in October 2026.