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Hearing Aid Sound Amplifier — Privacy Policy

Hearing Aid Sound Amplifier — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 15 September 2026

Hearing Aid Sound Amplifier ("the app", "we", "our") is developed by ByteNine AS, Norway. This policy also covers Hearing Aid AI Sound Amplifier for iOS and iPadOS, which is the same app on a different platform. Where the two differ, it is said so explicitly.

There is no account and no sign-in. You never tell the app who you are.

The single most important thing in this policy: the sound the app amplifies never leaves your device. The one thing that does leave it is an audiogram photo, and only if you choose to use the AI hearing profile. Section 4a explains exactly what that means.

1. The sound is processed on your device

The app takes audio from the microphone, amplifies and equalises it, and plays it back into your headphones. All of that happens on your device, in real time.

The audio is never recorded, never stored, and never transmitted. It exists only in memory for the few milliseconds it takes to process, and is then gone. There is no recording feature, and no copy of what your microphone hears is kept anywhere — not on the device, and not by us.

On Android the app runs a foreground service while amplifying, so the sound keeps working when the screen is off or you are in another app. That service is what the persistent "Hearing Aid is amplifying" notification is for. It uses the microphone for amplification only.

2. Data stored on your device

Kept locally, and not sent anywhere:

  • Your equaliser settings, including the separate curve for each ear
  • Volume, gain, balance, and the safe-limit switch
  • Which input and output device you last chose
  • The last three AI hearing profiles, so you can go back to one
  • How long you have used amplification, for the free daily allowance
  • Whether you have bought the unlock

Uninstalling the app removes all of it.

3. Permissions

  • Microphone — required. Without it the app cannot do anything at all.
  • Notifications — for the "amplifying" notification, so you can see and stop the service.
  • Camera and photo library (Android and iOS) — only if you choose to photograph or pick an audiogram for the AI hearing profile. The app opens the picker; it never browses your library on its own.

4. Data that leaves your device

a. The AI hearing profile

This is optional. Nothing here happens unless you open the AI screen and press Analyze.

When you do, the app sends to an AI provider:

  • The photo of your audiogram, if you attached one
  • What you wrote in the description field
  • Your device language, so the answer comes back in your language

The photo is the document as it is. An audiogram printed at a clinic often carries your name, date of birth, patient number, the clinic's name and the date of the test. All of that is part of the image that is sent. We do not redact it, because reliably finding and removing identifiers from an arbitrary audiogram layout is not something we can guarantee — and silently getting it wrong would be worse than telling you plainly.

If you would rather not send those details, cover or crop them before you photograph the chart, or skip the photo and describe your hearing in words instead. The app works either way.

Requests travel through the ByteNine AI gateway, which forwards them to Anthropic or OpenAI. The gateway exists so that no provider key ever ships inside the app.

The gateway does not store your request. It writes one usage row per request, for cost control and abuse detection, containing only: the app, the provider and model, the number of tokens, the cost, a timestamp, and a one-way hashed installation identifier. Neither your photo, your description, nor the suggested equaliser curve is kept. The row cannot be linked back to you.

The AI provider processes the request under its own policy and may retain it briefly for abuse monitoring:

  • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/privacy
  • OpenAI: https://openai.com/privacy

The result — the suggested curve and a short explanation — is stored only on your device.

b. Sending feedback

If you use "Send feedback", the app sends what you typed: the kind of report, a title, and your message. It also attaches the app version, your device model and operating system version, and an anonymous installation identifier, so we can make sense of a bug report.

Your e-mail address is optional. If you give one, we use it to reply and to tell you when a report you sent has shipped. If you leave it blank, the report is anonymous and we have no way to contact you.

The form has a Public / Developers only choice. Public reports appear on the app's page at bytenine.com, where other users can read and vote on them — your message is visible, your e-mail address never is. "Developers only" keeps the report in our inbox and off the public page. We can also hide any public report later.

Feedback is stored on the ByteNine backend, which runs on Microsoft Azure in Europe. We also store a one-way hash of your IP address, used only to stop the same source flooding the form.

c. Purchases

Purchases are handled by the platform's own store — Google Play on Android, the App Store on iOS. We never see your card details, and no payment information passes through the app.

On Android, purchase and subscription state is managed through RevenueCat, which receives the transaction and an anonymous identifier so the app knows what you own across reinstalls. On iOS this is handled by Apple's StoreKit directly, with no third party involved.

We receive aggregate sales data from both stores for accounting.

  • RevenueCat: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy
  • Google Play: https://policies.google.com/privacy
  • Apple: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/

d. Advertising, analytics and crash reports

Android. The Android app shows banner adverts through Google AdMob until you buy the unlock, and includes Google Analytics for Firebase. Both are Google products. They use your device's advertising identifier and basic usage data, and Google may use that data to personalise adverts.

You can limit this in Android's settings, under Privacy → Ads, where you can delete or reset the advertising ID and turn off ad personalisation. Buying any unlock removes the adverts from the app entirely.

  • AdMob: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/6128543
  • Google Analytics for Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/policies/analytics

iOS, from version 1.1. The iOS app has no adverts. From version 1.1 it includes Google Analytics for Firebase and Firebase Crashlytics, so we can see which parts of the app are used and fix crashes. Version 1.0 includes neither.

  • Analytics receives an app-instance identifier generated on your device, which features are used — for example that the purchase screen was opened, a plan was chosen, or the AI hearing profile was requested — the product, amount and currency of a purchase, your device model and system version, and a coarse location that Google derives from your IP address.

  • Crashlytics receives a report when the app crashes or an operation fails: the device model, the system version, and where in the app's code it happened.

  • Neither receives the sound, your equaliser settings, your audiogram photo, what you wrote in the description, or anything else you enter. The iOS app does not use the advertising identifier (IDFA), never asks to track you, and does not link this data to you.

  • Google Analytics for Firebase and Crashlytics: https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy

e. Settings we can change remotely

The app asks the ByteNine backend for its configuration — how long the free trial runs, whether the AI feature is switched on, and similar. The request carries the app's identifier and an anonymous installation identifier. Nothing about you is sent.

5. What we do not do

  • We do not sell your data. Not to anyone, for any purpose.
  • We do not record, store, or listen to your microphone audio.
  • We do not ask you to create an account, and we do not build a profile of you.
  • We do not use your data to train AI models.

6. How long we keep things

  • Feedback is kept while it is useful — an open report until it is resolved, and after that for reference. Ask us and we delete it.
  • AI usage rows (the metadata described in 4a) are kept for cost accounting and are not tied to you.
  • Purchase records are kept as long as accounting law requires, currently five years in Norway.
  • Everything on your device disappears when you uninstall the app.

7. Your rights

ByteNine AS is the data controller. If you are in the EEA or the United Kingdom, the GDPR gives you the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object to how we use it.

In practice we hold almost nothing that identifies you. The realistic case is a feedback report with your e-mail address on it. Write to support@bytenine.com and we will find it and remove it.

Our legal basis is your consent for the AI feature and for feedback — both are things you choose to do — and legitimate interest for the technical data needed to run and maintain the app.

You can also complain to your national data protection authority. In Norway that is Datatilsynet.

8. Children

The app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us personal information through the feedback form, write to us and we will delete it.

9. Security

Traffic between the app and our backend uses HTTPS. Feedback and configuration are stored on Microsoft Azure in Europe with access limited to ByteNine. Provider keys are held on our server and never ship inside the app, which is the reason the AI gateway exists at all.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that the categories of data we hold are deliberately small.

10. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the app changes. The date at the top says when it was last revised. Material changes will be announced in the app.

11. Contact

ByteNine AS support@bytenine.com https://bytenine.com