The PresenceOS Promise

What I promise

Nothing on this phone is trying to keep your child on it. There is no feed. There is no autoplay, no infinite scroll, no notification engineered to pull her back. No screen on this device was designed to increase the time she spends looking at it.

Nobody is building a profile of your child. No advertising. No data sold, shared, or brokered — not now, not if I need the money, not as part of any deal. No advertiser, no data broker, and nobody who makes money from your child's attention is in the loop — that machinery was never built. Plumbing is: like every phone, this one leans on a few utilities to work. Google carries the tap on the shoulder that wakes the parent's phone, and when it does, it can see who messaged whom, by name, and when — never what was said. The map and weather services see the coordinates of the map they are drawing. Cloudflare carries the connection to my server. Apple's iTunes Search can look up cover art for whatever music is playing over Bluetooth — it is off by default, and only ever asked when you turn it on. None of them get message content, none of them pay me, and none of them are paid with your child's data. The full, current list of every outside service lives in the privacy policy, where it belongs.

The link between you and your child is not surveillance. Every capability on her phone is a switch, on by default, and she can ask for any of them to be turned off. You decide. She can see, on her own phone, every switch and whether it is on. A child who knows she is being watched and has no say in it learns to hide; that is the opposite of what this is for.

I will never lock your child out of her own phone. No forced updates, no update walls, no "you must upgrade to keep using this". Updates are offered, never imposed. Her phone keeps working.

You can leave, and your data is yours. It lives on your phones, not on my servers. But I will not oversell the moving truck: today the export writes your Presence ID, your address and your trusted-contact list to a USB stick — enough to stand your identity up again — and that part works. It does not yet export messages, photos, texts, contacts or call history, and there is no single press-it-and-everything-goes delete button. Both are being built. Until they exist, email me and I will delete your records on my server by hand.

What I cannot promise

A promise that claims everything is worth nothing, so here are the limits.

Ordinary calls and texts go through your phone company. When your child sends a normal text or makes a normal call, the carrier carries it, the same as on any other phone on earth. I do not control that and I will not pretend otherwise.

Our server sees that two accounts exchanged something, and when. For chats and calls, it cannot read what was said — that holds. It does not hold for everything, so here is the rest, plainly. Email sent through a Presence address sits on my server readable, the way email sits on any mail service — email is email. When you view the family camera from outside the house, the pictures pass through my server on the way to you. The notes that set a call up — who is calling whom, and the network addresses that let the call connect — pass through readable too. And if you set up emergency alerts, the phone numbers you both gave are stored with your IDs so the alert can reach you.

I am one person. PresenceOS is built, maintained and supported by me. That means it is not built by a company that answers to investors — and it also means that if I am ill, things wait. You should know both halves of that.

Why you should believe any of this

Not because I have said it. Because of how the thing is built:

• There is no advertising business here that would need your child's attention. There is nothing to switch on later, because the machinery was never built.
• The public progress tracker at presenceos.mobile/progress shows what is broken and what is being fixed, including the embarrassing parts.
• This document is dated and versioned. Watch whether it changes.