Seismor Phone collects no data, and cannot transmit any. The app is built without permission to access the internet. Your contacts, your call history and your list of blocked callers stay on the device and are never uploaded, because the app has no means of uploading anything.
How call screening works, and what it does not do
Seismor Phone decides whether to let a call ring by checking the incoming number against the contacts already saved on your phone. That check happens entirely on the device. Unlike caller-ID and spam-blocking services, the app never sends the number of an incoming call to anyone — there is no lookup service, no shared spam database and no reputation server, because the app cannot reach the network. It does not know who is calling; it only knows whether you do.
Callers who are not in your contacts, including those withholding their number, are turned away and recorded in an in-app list so you can see who tried. You choose whether a turned-away caller is hung up on immediately or silenced and left to roll to voicemail.
Four things ring even though they are not saved contacts:
- Emergency services, always, whatever your settings say. Alongside the numbers the mobile network itself flags as emergency, the app carries its own built-in list of South African service numbers — 10111, 10177, 107 and 112 — because the network does not report those, and a whitelist that turns away an ambulance is the worst thing this app could do.
- Numbers you have allowed by hand. From the blocked-call list you can let a number through in one tap without saving it to your contacts. These are kept in the app's own storage, with whatever label you give them, and never written to your address book.
- A number you dialled recently, so a callback from the clinic on a different line still rings. The window is thirty minutes by default.
- Everything, while the door is open. The temporary override lifts the whitelist for a set duration — thirty minutes to eight hours — and then closes itself.
When the app cannot make a decision — the contacts permission has been withdrawn, the provider is unavailable, the lookup runs out of time, or the app hits a bug — it lets the call ring. It fails open by design. One consequence worth knowing: between a restart and your first unlock of the phone, Android makes the contacts provider unreadable to every app, so calls ring through until you unlock.
What the app stores, and where
All of the following is written to app-private storage that other applications cannot read. None of it is transmitted, and we never receive any of it.
- Its own recent-calls list — the number, the matching contact name if there is one, the time, whether the call was incoming or outgoing, how long it lasted and whether it was answered. Oldest entries are dropped once the list is full.
- Turned-away calls, with the time and the reason, so you can review who was blocked. Also capped, oldest first.
- Numbers you have allowed by hand, with your label for each.
- Numbers you dialled recently, kept only long enough to recognise a call back and deleted automatically once the window has passed.
- Your settings — theme, how long the override lasts, how long a callback is allowed, and whether blocked calls go to voicemail — plus the expiry time of any override currently open.
The app reads your contacts to decide who may ring you, but it never writes to or modifies your contacts, and it does not copy them anywhere. It looks a number up one at a time, as a call arrives; it never reads out your address book or keeps a copy of it. When you ask to save a caller, the app hands the number to Android's own contacts app and that app does the writing.
The system call log
This app deliberately does not request permission to read or write Android's system call log. As your default dialer it already sees every call as it happens, so reading the system log would mean holding a restricted permission for information the app has anyway. It keeps its own recents list in private storage instead.
Two consequences follow. Its recents begin the day you install it, because it cannot read the calls that came before. And Android's telephony service goes on maintaining the system call log for your other apps exactly as it always did — that is the operating system's behaviour, not ours, and the app neither adds to it nor removes from it.
Copying and pasting a number
The keypad can copy the number you have typed, and paste one in. This is the only place the app takes in anything from outside itself, so it is worth being precise about.
- The contents of the clipboard are read only when you tap Paste. Holding the number field to open the copy-and-paste sheet asks Android one question only — whether the clipboard is currently holding text at all — so that the Paste button can be greyed out when there is nothing to paste. That question does not reveal what the text says. The app never watches the clipboard, never reads it at startup, and never reads it while sitting in the background.
- This is deliberate rather than incidental: reading the clipboard is what makes Android show you its "pasted from your clipboard" notice, and that notice should appear when you ask to paste, not when you open a sheet to copy.
- What is pasted is reduced to the characters a phone number can contain — digits,
+,*,#and the pause characters — and capped in length. Everything else is discarded on the spot. If you paste a whole message, only the dialable part of it ever reaches the field. - The app takes the clipboard's text and only its text. If what was copied is a link pointing at another app's data, the app will not follow it to fetch a number.
- Nothing from the clipboard is stored. It goes into the number field, and that is all.
- Copying puts the number you typed onto the system clipboard because you asked it to. Once it is there, Android's clipboard rules apply, not ours.
Recording, microphone and audio
The app does not record calls and cannot. It holds no microphone permission, and its build fails if one appears. Android has not permitted third-party call recording for years, whatever other dialers imply.
Permissions
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
READ_CONTACTS | To check an incoming number against people you have saved, and to show names on the keypad and in recents. Read-only. |
CALL_PHONE | To place a call when you dial one. |
READ_PHONE_STATE | To know when a call starts, ends or is already in progress. |
ANSWER_PHONE_CALLS | To answer or decline from the ringing screen. |
USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT | To show the ringing screen over the lock screen. |
POST_NOTIFICATIONS | To show ongoing-call and missed-call notifications, and to show that the override is open. |
RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED | To resume screening after the phone restarts. |
That is the whole list. There is no internet permission, no microphone permission and no call-log permission. The app's own build checks the final manifest and fails if any of internet, network or Wi-Fi state, audio recording, or call-log access has appeared — so none of them can arrive by accident in a future release, or be dragged in by a library we depend on. As a second line, the app also ships a network configuration that trusts no certificate authority at all, so even if the internet permission were somehow restored, every connection would still fail.
Sharing and third parties
Nothing is shared. The app contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising libraries, no Google Play Services and no third-party services. There is no caller-ID provider involved and no data for us to sell, rent or disclose. The only code the app is built on beyond our own is Google's standard AndroidX and Compose interface libraries, which are bundled into the app and make no network calls of their own.
Paying for the app
Seismor Phone is a paid app, bought once per Google account for a lifetime licence. The purchase is handled entirely by Google Play. We never see your card details, your billing address or your name, and the app itself contains no payment or billing code. There are no in-app purchases, no subscriptions and no premium tier. What Google does with the transaction is covered by Google's own privacy policy, not this one.
The app also contains no licence check. Having no network permission, it could not verify a licence with a server even if we wanted it to — so there is no sign-in, no activation, no account, and nothing that reports back that you are entitled to make a call.
Backups
The app opts out of Android backup, and additionally excludes its data from device-to-device transfer, which is a separate channel that has to be refused separately. Your recents, blocked-caller list and allowed numbers are not copied to Google Drive and do not follow you to a new handset.
Keeping and deleting your data
Everything the app stores remains on your device until you delete it, and you can delete all of it from inside the app:
- Clear on the recents list empties the app's call history.
- Clear on the blocked-call list empties the record of turned-away callers.
- An allowed number can be removed individually, from the same screen it was added.
- The override can be closed at any time, and expires on its own regardless.
To remove your settings as well, clear the app's storage under Android Settings. Uninstalling the app deletes everything it has stored. Removing the app does not affect your contacts or Android's own call log, which belong to Android rather than to us. Because we never receive any of it, there is nothing for you to request from us and nothing for us to delete on your behalf.
What we declare on Google Play
Google Play asks every developer to complete a Data safety form. Ours says the app collects no data and shares no data, and that no data is transmitted off the device. That declaration matches this policy because the app has no means of sending anything anywhere.
Children
The app is suitable for use by children and older people — that is part of why it exists — and it collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. It shows no advertising, contains no purchases, and cannot display content fetched from the internet, because it cannot reach the internet. We do not knowingly collect information from children because we do not collect information from anybody.
Security
The app relies on Android's application sandbox to keep its storage private. Because nothing is transmitted, there is no network traffic to intercept and no server holding your call history. Releases are signed by us, so Android will only install an update that came from Seismor.
Your rights
Laws such as South Africa's POPIA, the EU and UK GDPR, and similar rules elsewhere give you rights to see, correct, export or delete the personal information a company holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to look up, correct or erase. The data the app keeps is on your device, under your control, and you can delete it at any time as described above. You may still contact us with any question about this, and you have the right to complain to your data protection authority — in South Africa, the Information Regulator.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the revised version will be posted here with a new effective date.
Contact
Questions about this policy: privacy@seismor.com
Seismor (Pty) Ltd, South Africa.