Privacy

This app exists to help someone being watched. It would be indefensible for it to keep its own record of where that person has been.

Nothing you scan leaves the phone

Clearsweep has no server of its own and contacts none. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics and no crash reporter. Nothing you scan is uploaded, because there is nowhere for it to go.

It is worth being exact about the one thing that does use the network, because “no network requests” would not be true. The Wi-Fi check works by opening brief connections to other devices on the network you are already joined to — that is how it learns which of them answer on a camera's streaming port. It sends them nothing and closes each connection immediately; the fact that one answered is the whole observation. Those connections never leave your local network, and nothing about them is reported anywhere.

The one request to the internet

The DNS comparison in the network check is the only thing in the app that uses the internet, and it runs only when you tap its button, which says where it goes. It looks up three public names, dns.google, one.one.one.one and dns.quad9.net, through the network you are joined to and through Quad9 (https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query, over HTTPS), and compares the answers. Quad9 sees those three names and your phone's internet address, as any website you visit would. It is told nothing about your network, your devices or any result. What Quad9 does with a request is set by its own privacy policy, not by this one.

The laptop tool makes the same DNS request and, unless you pass --no-internet, one plain web request to connectivitycheck.gstatic.com to see whether a sign-in page is in the way. Neither carries anything about you or your network. The network check also asks your router's own name list what each device on your network called itself, and sends discovery questions that devices on your network exist to answer; none of that leaves your local network. The list of devices it finds is shown on the screen and is not stored.

What is stored, and why anything is stored at all

Deciding that a tracker is travelling with you takes more than one moment: it takes 3 different places over 20 minutes. A phone in a pocket is opened and closed many times inside that window, so a record that only lived in memory could never reach that verdict. Clearsweep therefore keeps a short list of what it heard, on the phone, and throws away anything older than 24 hours.

A place is a bucket, never a coordinate

A location is never stored. What is stored is a hash of a coarse bucket — a rounded grid square, or the name of a Wi-Fi network — salted with a random value generated on your phone and kept there. It is enough to tell “somewhere different” from “the same room”, and it cannot be turned back into an address, on this phone or anywhere else.

A device is a token, never its address

The Bluetooth address of every device near you would be a running record of the people around you. Clearsweep stores a salted token instead, useful only for matching a device against itself on this phone.

This site

These pages are static files. There is no analytics, no cookie, no tracking pixel, no embedded font and no third-party script — nothing on this page loads from anywhere but this site. Nobody is told you read it.

No account, no subscription, no trial

The scan is free and asks for nothing. The most common complaint about every other app in this category is being charged before the first scan. A person deciding whether they are safe should not be negotiating a subscription.

Who to contact

Clearsweep is made by Heron Networks LLC. Questions about this statement: [email protected], or the business phone line, (703) 249-9248.