DOPAMINE Sensei

Privacy Policy

The short version: DOPAMINE Sensei has no account, no server, and collects nothing about you. Everything it reads from your screen stays on your phone.

Last updated 1 September 2026 · Applies to the Android app com.dopaminesensei.app

What we collect

DOPAMINE Sensei is not connected to any server that stores information about you, because no such server exists. There is nothing for us to look at, hand over, sell, or lose.

What the app reads on your device

To block an app or a specific feed, DOPAMINE Sensei has to know which app and which screen you are currently looking at. Android provides this only through the Accessibility service, which is why the app asks for that permission.

It reads

• The package name of the app in the foreground — for example com.instagram.android.
• The view resource identifiers of the screen layout. These are the internal names a developer gives to parts of a screen, such as clips_viewer_view_pager. They describe the structure of a screen, not what is on it.
• In a browser you have added to a block that has blocked words: the web address of the page you are on.

About that last one. A web address is not just the name of a site. It can carry a search you ran, the title of a document, a share link, or a sign-in token. Calling this "we only read the address" would be technically true and misleading, so plainly: this is real access to something private, and it is bounded four ways.

• Only browsers you chose. A browser you have not put in a block with words is never inspected. An app that is not a browser is never inspected at all.
• Only once you have navigated. The address bar is skipped while you are in it, and the text has to look like an address rather than a half-typed phrase — so a search you started and thought better of is never seen.
• Only compared, never kept. The address is matched against the words you wrote and discarded in the same instant. It is not stored, not written to the app's statistics, and not sent anywhere. Nothing this app records can reconstruct a page you visited or a word you searched for.
• Only on your phone. There is no account and no server. Turning off blocked words ends the access entirely.

It never reads

• Your messages, posts, comments, or any other text on a page.
• Anything you type, including passwords, card numbers, and searches as you write them. The address bar is read only after you have navigated, never while you are typing into it.
• Screenshots. The app does not capture, record, or transmit images of your screen at any time, for any reason.
• Your accounts, files, contacts, photos, microphone, camera, or location.

All of this processing happens on your phone, as it happens, and is discarded. Screen-derived information is never written to a file we send anywhere, because we do not send anything anywhere.

What stays on your phone

Your rules, schedules, PIN, and usage statistics are stored in the app's private storage on your device. Other apps cannot read them. They are included in your device's own backups only if you have that enabled in Android.

You can export your statistics to a CSV file at any time. That export is something you start, saved where you choose. We never see it.

Uninstalling the app deletes all of it.

The one network request

DOPAMINE Sensei makes exactly one kind of network request, at most once a day.

Blocking a specific feed — Reels, Shorts, For You — depends on recognising that screen by its internal identifiers, and those identifiers change whenever Instagram or YouTube redesigns something. So the app periodically downloads an updated set of matching rules from rules.dopamine-sensei.com.

We want to be precise about one thing rather than overclaim, because it is true of every app that touches the internet: making any web request necessarily reveals your device's IP address to the server answering it, in this case Cloudflare's network. We have turned request logging off on that hostname, so those requests are not recorded or retained by us, and we have no way to associate them with a person, a device, or an installation. But an IP address is briefly visible in transit, and a privacy policy that told you otherwise would be wrong.

If the app cannot reach the network, it keeps using the rules it already has and carries on working. The download is never required.

What is not in the app

• No analytics or telemetry of any kind.
• No advertising, ad networks, or ad identifiers.
• No third-party SDKs that collect data.
• No crash reporter that could capture screen contents.
• No trackers, cookies, or fingerprinting.

Reporting a broken block

If feed blocking stops working for an app, there is a button that prepares a short report containing the app's package name, its version number, and which feed failed. Nothing else.

That report is never sent automatically. It opens your own email or messaging app with the text already written so you can read every word before deciding to send it. If you do not send it, it goes nowhere.

Children

DOPAMINE Sensei is a self-control tool for the owner of the device. It is not designed for or directed at children, and it is not a parental-control or monitoring product. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age, because we do not collect information.

Your rights

Data-protection law gives you rights to access, correct, export, and delete personal data held about you. We hold none, so there is nothing to request — but the practical equivalents are all in your hands: your data is on your device, the app can export it, and uninstalling erases it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects what the app does with your information, the change will be described in the app's release notes as well as here, and the date at the top will be updated. Previous versions are kept in the public repository this site is built from.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or anything in this policy: dopaminesensei@gmail.com