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
Nothing. There is no sign-up, no login, no account, and no user profile. We do not collect your name, email address, phone number, contacts, location, advertising ID, or any identifier for your device or installation.
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.
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.
com.instagram.android.clips_viewer_view_pager.
They describe the structure of a screen, not what is on it.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.
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.
A block can also silence notifications from the apps it covers, while it is holding. This is off unless you switch it on for a block, and it needs a separate Android permission that you grant yourself.
It reads the name of the app that posted the notification, and the handle Android uses to identify that notification — which is what dismissing it requires. The handle is a system reference, not content.
It does not read the sender, the title, the body, the message, any image, or any button the notification carries. Android hands an app with this permission the entire contents of every notification on the phone; DOPAMINE Sensei takes the package name off it and lets the rest go. Notifications are not stored, not counted, and never shown back to you as a list of what you missed.
The record it keeps is that a notification from a package was silenced, with the package name and the time. Nothing from inside the notification is in that record.
A block can be opened for fifteen minutes by holding a physical NFC tag against your phone — the point being that the tag lives somewhere inconvenient, so unlocking costs a walk.
It reads the tag's serial number, and only while you are on the registration screen or a tag you already registered is scanned.
It does not read anything written on the tag. No NDEF records, no text, no URLs — the app asks Android to skip reading the tag's contents entirely. It never writes to a tag, and it is never used for payments or identity. The serial is stored on the block it opens and compared against tags you scan; it is a few bytes of hardware identifier with no meaning outside this app.
A block can hold whenever the phone is plugged in — a rough stand-in for being at home or winding down, and the only one that needs no location permission at all.
It reads whether the phone is charging: a yes or a no. Not the battery level, not what kind of charger, not how long it has been on it.
The app records when it stepped in, for which app, and what it did — so you can see your own pattern. It has always done this. Two things about the timing are worth saying plainly:
None of it leaves the phone. There is no account and no server to send it to.
You can export your statistics as a CSV file, and your blocks as a JSON file. Both go through Android's own file picker to a place you choose. Nothing is written until you name a destination, and nothing is uploaded.
The blocks file deliberately leaves out any NFC tag you registered. A tag identifies one physical object, and carrying it to another phone would leave a block claiming it can be opened by something you no longer have.
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.
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.
That request is a plain download. It sends no account, no device identifier, no installation ID, and no information about your usage, your apps, or your settings. It is the same kind of request your browser makes when it loads an image.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Questions about privacy, or anything in this policy: dopaminesensei@gmail.com