Cover records the following items:
The list of apps installed on your phone, including which apps are
on your homescreen and dock
The number of times you run an app, including the time and place
where you ran it (specifically, the cell tower or wifi network you
were connected to, or that you were located within a geographic area
you identified such as home or work)
The number of times you turn on your phone (i.e. view your Cover
lockscreen), and what you do subsequently: launch an app, slide open
the cover, or simply turn the screen back off (e.g. just glance at
the clock).
Information from connected Bluetooth devices, such as the Bluetooth
device ID of your car.
Information from the sensors in your phone, such as the
accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS (though GPS is used exceptionally
sparingly in order to save your battery).
The system starts to collect data as soon as you install Cover. The
data collection continues until you remove Cover from your phone.
The data is uploaded from your phone over a secured connection to
our servers.
Cover is tracking every app you launch on your phone, when you launch it, where you are when you launch it, and even what angle you're holding your phone when you launch it. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, sounds like valuable data.
I'd suggest that a portion of the funding go towards a re-write of the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. I'm by no means an expert, but I'm not one to mess with having holes in legal documents that could later bite me in the ass.
It's glaringly obvious they did not hire a lawyer to write their Privacy Policy or Terms of Service. I understand they mention "human readable" in the beginning of the Privacy Policy, but does this really hold up in court? In the Terms of Service, they make mention to "You" as opposed to "Client", "Customer", etc, with no definition.
Yeah, I was excited until I got the point about "our servers". Why would they need any data on their servers just to know when I need to read email?
But it's a good idea, hopefully easy to copy and release as an actual app (something I define as an executable that runs *on' a device, not a glorified json interpreter and exchange system).
There is probably useful analysis that they can perform in aggregate across all of their users. Perhaps people who read email are more likely to do <x> at a certain time and that signal is only noticeable with more data than you as an individual generate.
Seems that type of analysis is not really helpful in the long run. It should be catering to me, not what it thinks I need based on other people's habits. If my habits are completely different than everybody else's, then the results it provides are almost always off. Then it has to figure things out again solely using me, which it should have done in the first place.
