Privacy Policy

Focen is built to need as little of your data as possible. This policy explains the little we touch, why, and the control you have. Plain language first; the legal specifics follow.

The short version: Focen runs locally on your computer, with an optional iPhone companion. Your activity (which apps and sites you use) is processed on your device. What leaves your device: while AI classification is on, the address and title of a page Focen has not classified recently on a site that is not on your own lists (or the name of an app), and what you do if you set it; a summary of each finished session (times, focused minutes, device) and the state of a running session, so your computer and iPhone match; your settings, including your own lists of sites and apps; a count of how many sites and apps you classify (linked to your account, never which ones); and, only while anonymized sharing is on, pooled site or app categories, grouped by kind of work, with no link to you. The content of any page never leaves your device. Focen reads only the name of the app you’re on and, in a browser, the address and tab title. It never reads the content of any page. On our servers we keep your email, your subscription tier, basic subscription and trial status, your settings and lists, a summary of each finished session (times, focused minutes, device), your age range if you give one, and, if you use Boards, your nickname and the hours Focen counted for you, plus a count of how many sites you classify (never which ones), and any support messages you send us. We will never sell your data.

1. Who we are

Focen (“Focen,” “we,” “us”) is an independent software project based in Massachusetts, United States. For any privacy question, contact support@focen.app.

2. What we process and where

On your device

Session detection, distraction monitoring, break enforcement, and focus mode run on your device, on your Mac or Windows computer.

Synced with your account

A summary of each finished session syncs to our servers so your computer and iPhone show the same totals: when it started and ended, focused minutes, which device, how it ended, and, from your computer, how often you came back on your own and how often Focen stepped in. Which apps and sites you used is not part of this summary. While a session runs, its state, such as when it started, its mode, any break, when your computer went to sleep, and how long you spent in apps you chose to block on your iPhone, is also kept on our servers so your devices can follow it. Your settings, including the sites and apps on your own lists, are saved to your account so they carry over when you reinstall Focen or sign in on another computer.

What Focen reads on your device

To notice which app or site you’re on, Focen reads the name of the frontmost app and, when that app is a browser, the address (URL) and tab title of the active tab. That is all. It never reads the content of a page, the text you type in other apps and sites, your form fields, messages, or documents. On macOS, reading the address of the page you are on asks for the Automation permission for that browser, which is the dialog macOS shows the first time Focen looks; Firefox instead uses the Accessibility permission. Both are granted broadly by the operating system, and Focen chooses to read only the app name, address, and tab title with them.

On a Mac with a notch, Focen also asks once for the Accessibility permission so it can see where the menus of the app in front sit in the menu bar. It reads only their position and size, never their names, and uses that to keep its small mark next to the notch from covering them. If you say no, nothing else changes and the mark only uses the space to the right of the notch. Nothing it reads this way leaves your Mac.

When you install Focen

The first time a new install of Focen opens on a computer, it sends us a random install ID, whether the computer is a Mac or a Windows PC, the main version number of its operating system, and the Focen version. This is not linked to you or your account, and we use it only to count installs.

How Focen blocks a site

When you open a blocked site during a session, Focen replaces that tab with a local Focen page stored on your device and switches you back to your last productive tab. The address of the site you left is kept on your device so it can be restored when the session ends. Focen reads the site’s address to know it is off-limits; it does not read the page, and the page never leaves your computer.

Incognito and private windows

Some browsers tell apps when a window is private. In Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc, and most browsers on Windows, a private tab's address is used on your computer and sent nowhere. Focen checks it against what your machine already knows: your own work and distraction lists, the built-in lists, and any verdict the AI gave that site on an ordinary visit. A site you have already told Focen to block is still blocked in a private window.

What does not happen there: the address is never sent to the AI classifier, so a site you only ever visit privately is never looked up and never learned; it is not written to your activity history; it earns no focus credit; and it is not shown in the Focen panel. Nothing about a private tab leaves your computer or is recorded on it.

Focen used to ignore private windows completely. That was a stronger promise than it sounds: it also meant a private window was a way around the product entirely, which is not what anyone turning on a focus app wants.

Safari and Firefox on Mac do not expose that signal, so Focen cannot tell one of their private windows apart from a normal one. With AI classification off this only affects on-device processing and nothing leaves your computer. With it on, a private Safari or Firefox site's domain, path, title, and what you do, if you set it, could be sent for classification like any other site, so keep that in mind if you rely on private browsing there. We are working on detecting private windows in those two browsers as well.

AI classification, including the 7-day trial

When AI classification is on, Focen sends the site’s domain, URL path, and page title to our classification service so it can label a site you haven’t categorized (for example, telling a document on docs.google.com from a video on a streaming site). On a site that is not on your own lists but counts as a distraction, such as a video site, each page is labeled on its own, so the domain, path, and title of each new page you open there are sent. If you tell Focen what you do, when you set it up or later in Settings, it sends that too: the kind of work you picked, such as Student or Software, or the few words you entered under Something else. Today it does not send full query strings or page content. A page title can include words you typed. For example, a search on a video site shows your search in the title, and the title is sent as the page shows it. If Focen ever sends more than this, it will be behind its own separate opt-in, off by default, and this page will say so before the code ships. The request is authenticated with your account (a signed token in the request header) so that only active plans can use the classifier and we can prevent abuse; the site data we send is not tied to a profile of you and is used only to return a category and to check that categories are accurate (see Cloudflare in section 3a). For a site we don’t recognize, the classifier may additionally look the domain up on its own (for example, searching “what is example.com”) via Google Search to work out what the site is. Only the domain, and what you do if you set it, is used for that lookup, never the path, title, or page content. This applies while a Focen subscription or its 7-day trial is active, and on accounts from before Focen became a subscription that have the AI plan. Classification is on while your plan or trial is active, and you can switch it off at any time in Settings. When it is off, or on an account without an active plan, nothing goes to the classifier.

Classification count

Focen keeps a count of how many sites and apps you classify, per day and in total, linked to your account. We use this number for product metrics and, if you agreed to product emails, to time a few of them, such as a note when Focen has sorted 100 sites for you, or one question if you stop using Focen. If you answer that question, or tell us why you unsubscribed, we keep your answer with your account. It never includes which sites or apps you classify, only how many. This count applies whether or not a plan is active.

Anonymized sharing (optional)

You can turn on a setting that helps improve Focen by sharing the category of each site or app it classifies, for example that a site was classified as a distraction. In the desktop app it is off unless you turn it on. On the iPhone sign-up screen the same switch currently starts on, and if your account has no saved settings yet, leaving it on turns sharing on for your account. When it is on, only the site or app and its category are pooled into a shared database, grouped by the kind of work you picked (if any), with no link to you, your account, your device, or your IP. Anything typed under Something else is pooled as one group, without the words you entered. Your IP address is kept for about a day for a rate check and is never stored with the shared data. You can turn it off at any time in the app. The Focen iPhone app collects and shares none of this.

iPhone companion

The optional iPhone app is a companion to the desktop app. It signs you in to your Focen account and uses Apple’s Screen Time (Family Controls) API, which applies only to your own device. That API gives Focen opaque tokens for the apps you select, not their names, so Focen cannot tell which app you are on, only whether an app you chose is one you asked to treat as a distraction. The iPhone app does not read page content and does not send us the apps or sites you use. When you are signed in, it registers a device push token with us, whether or not you allow notifications, so your computer can tell the phone when a session starts, changes, or ends. The token is used only for these session messages, focus notifications and, if you use Boards, Boards notifications.

Boards (optional)

If you make a Boards profile, we store the nickname you choose, your time zone, when you agreed to the Terms, the boards you are in, your Boards settings, and for each day your focused minutes and the minutes Focen counted for you. From your computer this includes, for each session, how much of it counted after leaving out time you were drifting or away. We also keep a result for each week (your hours, your place and your league) and the people you block. Members of your boards see your nickname, your counted hours for the week (rounded to 10 minutes and updated once an hour) and your place. If you join the global board, people you don’t know see the same, along with your league. Nobody sees which apps or sites you used, your session times, or your email.

If you enter a board invite code before you join that board, such as on the trial screen, we keep it with your account for up to 30 days so you can join it, and count it toward how many trials start from an invite. If you report a name, the report goes to our support inbox by email. We keep the report for no longer than 90 days and delete the email once we have acted on it. On iPhone, Boards notifications tell you your weekly result and when someone joins a board you own, until you turn them off in Settings. You can leave Boards and delete this data in Settings at any time, and deleting your account deletes it too. A block someone else placed on you, or a removal from Boards, stays with your account until you delete it.

3. Accounts and billing data

Focen requires an account. You sign in with Google or Apple, and we receive your email address from that provider, and from Google also your name and profile picture, to identify your account. We use only your email. We store your email, subscription tier, and basic subscription and trial status (for example, when your trial started) so we can verify which plan you’re on. We never receive your Google or Apple password.

After your trial starts, the desktop app asks once for your age range, such as 25-34, and you can choose Prefer not to say. We store your answer with your account and use it only in aggregate counts of who uses Focen. Deleting your account deletes it.

If you answer the setup question about where you heard of Focen, we store your answer with your account. The desktop app also records, with your account, when you open the plans screen or a checkout, so we can see how people choose a plan.

For payments, Lemon Squeezy acts as our merchant of record and collects the information needed to bill you (such as your email and a payment token). If you subscribe in the iPhone app, Apple handles the payment and tells us the subscription’s ID, its plan, and when it renews or ends, so we can unlock your plan. We do not store full card numbers, and we keep billing records only as needed to manage your subscription and meet tax and accounting obligations.

Website

When you click a download button on this site, we record an anonymous download count (platform only). We also count page views, clicks on the trial and download buttons, and your answer if you tell us on the welcome page where you heard about Focen, without cookies; the IP address is hashed with a key and the hash is deleted after 7 days. A board invite page (focen.app/j/ followed by a code) counts the visit with its code and stores nothing in your browser. If you contact support or submit a data request, the message you send (including your email) is delivered to us by email through Web3Forms and kept as long as needed to help you. If you send a data request, we also keep a record of it, with how to reach you, the type of request, and when we answered, to show that we responded. Before downloads opened in September 2026, this site had a waitlist. We deleted it, with every email on it, on October 17, 2026. If you try the classifier on this site, the domain you type is sent through Cloudflare to our AI classification providers, and a hash of your IP address, changed daily, is kept for about a day to limit how often the demo runs.

Creators who promote Focen have links of the form focen.app followed by their name. If you arrive through one, we record the visit and any download you make against that creator, together with a keyed hash of your IP address. If you create an account within seven days of that visit, the hash is used once to match the account to the creator so they can be paid for it, and the match is stored against your account. The hash is deleted after seven days; the counts and the match remain. The key is held by us and is not shared. If you use a creator’s code at checkout, your subscription is matched to that creator by the code. If you arrived through a creator’s link, this site remembers that creator in your browser for 90 days and adds their code to the checkout, so a subscription you start in that time is matched to them even if you do not type a code. Payments on a matched subscription are recorded against the creator so they can be paid their share. Deleting your account deletes the match from your account; the billing record of the subscription keeps which creator it was credited to.

If you join the creator program, we keep your name, email and login for the creator portal, your social handles, the videos you submit with their view counts and screenshots, your earnings and payouts, and how you want to be paid. To read view counts, we look up your public videos through ScrapeCreators, Meta and YouTube.

Email

We use your email to send account and trial messages: for example a welcome note, a mid-trial summary, receipts, and account notices. These are service messages tied to your account and are sent to all account holders. We may also send occasional product updates and tips (marketing email) while the Product updates & tips switch is on. It starts off on your computer. On the iPhone sign-up screen it currently starts on. If you cancel a paid plan, we may also send you up to two emails with an offer to come back. If you ask the iPhone app to email you the link for your computer, we send it to that address. If you ask it to remind you, we send up to three reminders and stop once Focen is running on your computer. We keep that request with a keyed hash of your IP address, used to stop repeated requests. You can withdraw marketing consent at any time using the unsubscribe link in any email or the “Product updates & tips” toggle in the app; account and trial emails continue regardless. We store your email, your marketing opt-in status, and an unsubscribe token in a mailing-list record. Email is delivered through Resend.

3a. Service providers

A small number of providers process limited data to run Focen. Each receives only what its job requires:

• Supabase: accounts (email, tier, trial status, and age range if you give one), your settings and lists, session summaries and the state of a running session, Boards profiles, boards, counted hours and reports, your setup answers and plans-screen events, the mailing list, download-link requests, the download counter, your classification count (a number linked to your account, never which sites), and, while anonymized sharing is on, pooled site or app categories, grouped by kind of work, with no link to you.
• Resend: delivers account, trial, and marketing emails (with your opt-in, or up to two offers to come back after you cancel a paid plan), and Boards reports to our support inbox.
• AI classification provider: only while AI classification is on, the domain, URL path, page title or app name, and what you do if you set it, to return a category.
• Google (Gemini API + Google Search): only while AI classification is on, the domain, URL path, page title or app name, and what you do (if you set it) for classification, and, for a site we don’t recognize, the domain and what you do (if you set it) to look up what the site is.
• Cloudflare: relays classification and lookup requests to our AI classification providers and Google, and keeps the address and path of classified pages, and the names of classified apps, for 14 days to check accuracy, with no link to you. We keep our API keys there, not on your device.
• Lemon Squeezy: payments, as merchant of record.
• Vercel: hosts this website and, only if you choose Allow on the cookie banner, measures visits with its analytics.
• Web3Forms: delivers support and data-request form submissions to us by email.
• GitHub: hosts the installer files and app updates. When you download Focen or the app checks for an update, GitHub receives your IP address.
• Apple: on iPhone, handles subscriptions bought in the app and delivers session messages, focus notifications and Boards notifications through the Apple Push Notification service to your iPhone’s push token.

4. What we never do

• We never sell or rent your personal information.
• We never serve third-party advertising.
• We never read the content of your pages, messages, or documents. (With AI classification on, the page title and site address are used for classification as described in section 2, never the page itself.)
• We never collect your browsing history tied to you, the contents of any page, or anything you type in other apps and sites. The one exception is the day-4 trial email, described below, and it is the only one.
• We never send an incognito or private tab's address to the AI classifier, and never record one in your history, wherever the browser lets us detect that a window is private (see the note in section 2 about Safari and Firefox on Mac).
• On the iPhone, Focen works from the opaque tokens Apple provides and never learns which apps you use, only whether an app you selected is one you asked to block.

What the day-4 trial email contains

Four days into the 7-day AI trial, Focen sends one email showing where it caught you drifting that week. To do that, your computer works out your three most-interrupted sites or apps from the last seven days and puts those names, with a number of minutes, into the email it asks our server to deliver.

This is the only time Focen sends us a ranking of the sites and apps you used, and it goes only into this email. We would rather say so plainly than let the sentence above imply otherwise. AI classification, described in section 2, sends each new page with your sign-in token so we can check your plan, and we do not keep those pages with your account. The ranking is computed on your device and we do not store it. Our email provider, Resend, keeps a copy of sent emails for a short time as part of delivering them. The email is sent once, only during a trial, and only to you.

5. Legal bases (GDPR/UK GDPR)

Where the GDPR applies, we rely on: performance of a contract (to provide the app you subscribe to, including syncing your settings and sessions between your devices, and Boards if you make a profile); legitimate interests (to keep the service secure and working, including acting on Boards reports, to understand how people find and choose Focen, such as your setup answers, plans-screen events and creator matches, and to email past subscribers about coming back); consent (for marketing email, anonymized sharing, and analytics on this website); and legal obligation (for tax and accounting records). You may withdraw consent at any time, and you can object to any processing based on legitimate interests by contacting us.

6. Your rights

Depending on where you live (including under the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act), you may have the right to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict processing of your personal data, and to object to certain processing. Because most of your data never leaves your device, you can exercise many of these rights simply by managing or deleting data in the app. For anything held by us (such as billing records), submit a data request. We respond within 30 days and never charge for a first request.

7. Children’s privacy

Focen is for users 13 and older, matching our Terms: it is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you are 13 to 17, use Focen with a parent or guardian’s permission. In some countries their consent may be legally required for an account. The global board in Boards is also for people 13 and older.

If a parent or guardian believes a child has provided us personal information, contact support@focen.app and we will delete it promptly. A school or parent who installs Focen on a minor’s device is responsible for obtaining any consent required by law. See our Terms for age and parental-consent requirements.

8. Security

We minimize risk by keeping data on your device. Where data does reach us (billing, session summaries, settings, optional domain classification, support email), it is transmitted over encrypted connections (TLS/SSL) and access is limited to what is necessary. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but local-first design removes the central honeypot that most breaches rely on.

9. Data retention

On-device data persists until you delete it. Session summaries and your synced settings are kept while you have an account, and deleting your account deletes them. Billing records are retained only as long as required for legal and accounting purposes. Domain classification and lookup requests are not retained in a form tied to you; the address and path of classified pages, and the names of classified apps, are kept for 14 days to check accuracy. The classification count is kept as an aggregate number linked to your account; any anonymized shared categories are kept with no link to you. Boards keeps your daily minutes for 35 days and one result a week while you have a Boards profile. An invite code you enter before joining a board is deleted after 30 days.

10. International transfers

Our database and most of the providers in section 3a are in the United States. If you use Focen from outside the U.S., your account data, synced settings and session summaries, and classification requests are processed there. Where required, we use appropriate safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses.

11. Changes

We may update this policy. Material changes will be reflected by the “last updated” date above and, where appropriate, an in-app or email notice.

12. Contact

Questions or requests: support@focen.app.