Privacy Policy

Niek.li Tools for Android · Last updated 6 August 2026

Niek.li Tools is a collection of eight small utilities for Android. This policy explains exactly what the app does with information, in plain language.

The short version: there are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no trackers. Nothing you do in the app is logged or profiled.

Some tools have to contact a service to be useful — a forecast needs a forecast provider, a barcode needs a product database — and this policy sets out precisely what is sent, to whom, and why.

Who is responsible

Niek.li Tools is published by an individual developer, Niek van der Meer.

Contact for any privacy question or request: hi@niek.li
Website: niek.li

What the app stores on your device

Everything the app remembers is kept in the app's own private storage on your phone. It is not uploaded anywhere, and it is not readable by other apps.

What	Where it comes from
Favourite radio stations	Stations you mark as favourites
Saved colours	Colours you save in the Colour picker
Recently scanned products	Barcodes you look up in the Food scanner
Cities you have added	Cities you add in Time zones
Currency selection and last known rates	Your choices in Exchange rates
Timer lengths and preferences	Your settings in the Focus timer
Skin-tone setting and reminder preference	Your settings in UV index
Cached forecast and rate data	So a tool still shows something when offline

Uninstalling the app deletes all of it.

If you have Android's Backup enabled, your preferences and favourites are included in your own Google backup so a new phone restores them. Caches, the running Focus timer and the UV reminder are deliberately excluded from backup, because restoring them onto another device would be meaningless or misleading. Backups are governed by Google's own privacy policy, not this one.

What the app does not do

No account, sign-in, email address or profile.
No analytics or crash-reporting SDK of any kind.
No advertising, and no advertising identifier is requested or read.
No third-party tracking libraries.
No collection of your contacts, files, photos, call logs or messages.
Nothing you do is stored on any server the developer controls, beyond the ordinary short-lived web-server logs described below.

Permissions the app asks for, and why

Approximate location (ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION) — used only by UV index and Rain, and only when you open one of those tools or tap “Locate”. The app requests approximate location only; it never asks for precise location. You can refuse, and both tools still work if you search for a place by name instead.

Camera (CAMERA) — used only by the Food scanner, to read a barcode, and the Colour picker, to sample a colour. The camera preview is processed live on your device. No photo or video is ever recorded, saved or transmitted. Barcode recognition runs entirely on-device using Google's ML Kit; the image never leaves your phone.

Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS) — so the Focus timer can tell you a round has finished, the UV tool can remind you to reapply sunscreen, and Radio can show playback controls.

Foreground service / media playback (FOREGROUND_SERVICE, FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK, WAKE_LOCK) — so internet radio keeps playing when you leave the app or lock the screen, with controls on your lock screen. It runs only while a station is playing.

Internet and network state (INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE) — to fetch forecasts, rates, station lists and product data, and to know when you are offline.

What is sent off your device, tool by tool

Where a tool uses your location, the coordinates are rounded to two decimal places — roughly one kilometre — on your device before they are sent. The service receives an approximate area, not the spot you are standing on. Your location is never stored by the app beyond the current session, and never sent anywhere except as listed here.

UV index

Rounded coordinates to open-meteo.com (api.open-meteo.com, air-quality-api.open-meteo.com) to fetch UV, temperature and sun times.
Rounded coordinates to photon.komoot.io to turn them into a place name, so the screen can say “Amsterdam” instead of “your location”.
If you search for a place by name, that search text goes to the same geocoding service.

Rain

Rounded coordinates to niek.li (niek.li/rain/rain.php), a small proxy operated by the developer, which forwards the request to the Dutch radar service buienradar.nl. The proxy exists so the app does not need an API key; it stores nothing beyond ordinary web-server logs.
Rounded coordinates to open-meteo.com for the surrounding forecast, and to photon.komoot.io and geocoding-api.open-meteo.com for place names and search.

Radio

Your search terms, and the country or genre you browse, go to niek.li (niek.li/radio/radio.php), a proxy operated by the developer that forwards the query to the community Radio Browser directory. No location is sent.
When you play a station, your device connects directly to that station's own streaming server. That server is operated by the broadcaster, not by the developer or by Google, and — like any website you visit — it will see your IP address and can keep its own logs. The developer has no control over, and no access to, those logs.
If you cast to a speaker or TV, Google Cast handles the connection under Google's privacy policy.

Food scanner

The barcode number goes to world.openfoodfacts.org, the Open Food Facts database, to retrieve the product. The camera image itself never leaves your device.
If a product's ingredient text is in another language, that text is sent to a LibreTranslate instance (translate.disroot.org, falling back to libretranslate.com) to be translated. Only the ingredient text is sent — nothing that identifies you.

Exchange rates

A request with no personal data to api.frankfurter.dev for the European Central Bank's daily reference rates, with latest.currency-api.pages.dev and cdn.jsdelivr.net as fallbacks.

Time zones, Focus timer, Colour picker

Nothing is sent. These three work entirely offline.

The unavoidable part: IP addresses

Any time your device requests something over the internet, the server on the other end necessarily sees your IP address, which is a rough indicator of location. This is true of every app and every website; it is how the internet works. It applies to each service listed above, including the developer's own niek.li proxies and the radio stations you play.

The developer does not use niek.li server logs to build any profile of users, and does not combine them with anything else. Each third-party service handles its logs under its own policy:

Children

The app is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, including a child. It contains no ads and no in-app purchases.

Your rights

Because the app holds no personal data on any server, there is no account to access, correct, export or delete, and no data set from which you could be identified. To erase everything the app has kept, uninstall it, and remove it from your Google backup if you use one.

If you are in the EU or UK and believe any processing described here concerns you, write to the address above. Where the developer's own niek.li proxies briefly process an IP address, the legal basis is legitimate interest in delivering the feature you asked for.

Changes

If this policy changes, the “last updated” date above changes with it, and material changes will be noted in the app's release notes. The current version always lives at niek.li/privacy.