It never sees what you buy.

The short version

Cooldown has no account, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party SDKs. There is no bank connection, no purchase history, no price tracking and no affiliate link anywhere in it. Everything it knows is written to your iPhone and stays there.

There is exactly one exception, and it is off until you switch it on: the optional AI reflection. What it sends is listed in full below — and switching it off returns the app to making no network calls of its own at all.

This policy applies to the Cooldown app for iPhone, published by TOPSOL, and to this website.

What we collect

With the AI reflection off — the state the app ships in — nothing. In Apple's terms, "collecting" means transmitting data off the device and storing it somewhere that is not transient. Cooldown has no channel through which that could happen.

Tracking: none. Cooldown does not link anything about you with data from other companies' apps or websites, and shares nothing with data brokers or advertisers. There are no affiliate links: Cooldown earns nothing when you buy something, which is the only arrangement compatible with an app whose job is to help you buy less.

What stays on your phone

Cooldown stores the following in its own private storage on your iPhone, protected by your device's passcode and encryption. None of it is uploaded, backed up by us, or visible to us.

• Your shop selection — as opaque Screen Time tokens Cooldown cannot read (see below).
• Your wishlist — the item names you typed, the prices you estimated, the feeling you tapped, and when each item was captured.
• What you decided — that a shield was shown, and whether you walked away, cooled the item, let it go or kept it. This is what your savings total and charts are made of.
• Your spend log and any follow-up answers — how a purchase felt afterwards, if you chose to say.
• Your rules — danger hours, per-shop rules, cooldown lengths and strict-mode state.
• Your Premium entitlement — a tier and an expiry date, so the app knows what to unlock.

If you use iCloud Backup or an encrypted local backup, Apple may include Cooldown's data in that backup under your own Apple ID and Apple's privacy terms. We have no access to it.

Screen Time and your shops

Cooldown is built on Apple's Screen Time framework (Family Controls, Managed Settings and Device Activity). You grant it access once, through Apple's own prompt, and can withdraw it at any time in Settings → Screen Time.

When you pick shops, Apple's picker returns tokens: values that identify the app or website to iOS but mean nothing to Cooldown and nothing outside your phone. Cooldown stores those tokens so it can ask iOS to shield what you chose. It never receives a bundle identifier, an app name or a domain, and it could not report one if it wanted to. Where its own components need to compare tokens, they compare one-way hashes of them, never the tokens themselves — and those hashes never leave the phone either.

Cooldown does not observe your browsing, your messages or what you do inside any app. iOS itself draws the shield and enforces it. Cooldown learns only that its own shield was shown and what you chose on it.

The one thing that can leave the phone

The AI reflection is an optional Premium feature that asks one short question before the choices, and writes a few sentences about your week on Sundays. It ships off, and stays off until you switch it on.

What is sent, when it is on

• The name of the item you just typed, and anything you write in answer to the question.
• A price band — a range, never the amount you actually typed — and your currency.
• The feeling you tapped, if you tapped one.
• The hour and minute on your clock. No date, no time zone.
• How many shops you have opened today.
• Your own regret rate for that one feeling, once you have rated enough purchases for it to mean anything.

The Sunday write-up carries none of the above and no item names at all — only counts and totals.

What is never sent

• Screen Time tokens or their hashes, bundle identifiers or domains.
• Which shops or websites you protect, or how many.
• The exact price you typed.
• Anything else on your wishlist — no names, no prices.
• Your estimated savings total, or anything in your spend log.
• How you rated any individual purchase.
• Your rules, danger hours or strict-mode state.
• Any name, account, email or device identifier. Nothing sent is linked to you.

Where it goes

To Cooldown's own service, and on to Google's Gemini model on Vertex AI. Cooldown's service stores none of it — it keeps no copy of the question, your answer, or anything in the list above, only that a request happened, how long it took and whether it worked. Google does not use it to train its models; Google may keep it for up to 24 hours to speed things up and may log it to check for abuse, under their standard cloud terms. The model is served from Google's global endpoint, so we cannot promise your text is processed in any particular country.

Purchases

Premium is sold through Apple's App Store using StoreKit. The transaction is between you and Apple, under Apple's privacy policy. Apple tells Cooldown whether a purchase is active — nothing else — and Cooldown tells Apple nothing about how you use the app. No wishlist, no savings total, no shop selection and no identifier of ours travels with a purchase. We never see a card.

Notifications, widgets and the Lock Screen

Notifications are optional and are generated on your phone. Cooldown uses them to hand you from the shield into the capture screen, and to tell you when an item's cooldown is over. None is sent from a server.

Widgets and the Live Activity read a small snapshot of counts and dates — this month's estimated savings, how many items are on ice, how long one has left. They deliberately have no Screen Time access and never see which shops you shielded. Anything that can appear on a Lock Screen is written to be readable by whoever is holding the phone.

Third parties

Cooldown contains no analytics, no advertising, no attribution and no crash reporter. Two other parties are involved, both narrowly:

• Apple — operates the App Store, processes purchases, enforces the Screen Time shield, and verifies through App Attest that a request comes from a genuine copy of the app. If you have opted in to sharing with developers, Apple may share crash logs with us under its own policy.
• Google Cloud (Vertex AI) — only if you switch on the AI reflection, and only for what is listed above.

We do not sell, rent or share personal data with anyone.

Deleting your data

Everything Cooldown holds is on your phone, so removing it does not require asking us. The Your data page walks through it: items leave your list as you decide about them, switching the AI reflection off deletes the weekly write-up, and deleting the app removes everything at once.

There is nothing on our side to delete — but you are welcome to write to us anyway.

Your rights

Wherever you live — including under the GDPR, the UK GDPR and the CCPA/CPRA — you have rights to access, correct, export, restrict and erase personal data a company holds about you, and to complain to a supervisory authority. Because Cooldown holds no personal data about you on any server, there is nothing for us to produce or delete; the data on your phone is already in your hands. If you believe otherwise, write to topsol.org@gmail.com and we will respond.

Children

Cooldown is a self-directed tool for the person using the phone. It is not a parental-control product and does not manage another person's device. It is not directed at children under 13 (or the age of digital consent where you live), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone — of any age.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the app changes. The date at the top moves when we do, and material changes will be noted in the app's release notes. Continued use of Cooldown after a change means you accept the revised policy.

Contact

TOPSOL, the publisher of Cooldown, is the controller for anything covered here. Questions about privacy: topsol.org@gmail.com.