Legal
Privacy Policy
Who we are
Heads Up is developed and published by LME Labs. If you have a question about this policy or about how the app works, write to support@lmelabs.com. This is the privacy contact for the app.
What the app does
Heads Up runs passively in the background while you walk distracted. It uses your phone's rear-facing camera to watch for objects approaching from behind and, when it detects a likely collision threat, alerts you with directional haptics and a transparent overlay so you can react without looking up from whatever you were doing. All detection runs on your device's hardware.
Information the app accesses on your device
The app accesses the following information solely while running on your device. None of it is transmitted, copied, or shared off the device.
- Camera frames (rear camera)
- While detection is active, the app reads frames from your phone's rear camera, runs them through an on-device machine learning model to estimate the position and approach trajectory of nearby objects, and then discards the frames. Frames are never saved, photographed, recorded, exported, or transmitted. The model itself runs entirely on your phone's CPU, GPU, or neural accelerator.
- Motion and activity signals
- The app uses Android's activity-recognition API to tell when you are walking, so detection can wake up only when it's relevant and sleep otherwise (saving battery). This classification happens on your device. The app does not read raw accelerometer or gyroscope traces and does not log your activity history.
- Local app preferences
-
The app stores a small amount of state on your device using
Android's standard
SharedPreferencesstorage: whether you've completed onboarding, your configured alert sensitivity and behaviour, and whether overlay alerts are enabled. This is app state, not personal data. It is removed when you uninstall the app or clear its storage from Android Settings.
Information transmitted, collected, or shared
None. The app does not request the
INTERNET permission and contains no networking
code. There is no server we operate that the app talks to.
We do not collect, transmit, sell, rent, or share any
information about you or your device with any party, for
any purpose.
We do not collect:
- Personal identifiers (name, email address, phone number, account names).
- Device identifiers (Android ID, advertising ID, IMEI, MAC, IP address).
- Location (the app does not request location permissions and does not derive location from any other signal).
- Contacts, calendar, SMS, call logs, photos, files, or any other content from your phone.
- Camera images, video, or audio.
- Analytics, telemetry, performance metrics, crash reports, or feature-usage events.
- Cookies, advertising data, or attribution data.
Permissions the app requests, and why
CAMERA- Required to read frames from your rear camera for the on-device collision detector. Frames are processed in memory and discarded; they are never stored or transmitted.
FOREGROUND_SERVICE,FOREGROUND_SERVICE_CAMERA,FOREGROUND_SERVICE_SPECIAL_USE- Required by Android so the detection pipeline can keep running with the screen off while you're walking. The persistent notification you see when detection is active is mandated by Android — it is a transparency feature, not telemetry.
POST_NOTIFICATIONS- Required by Android 13+ to show the foreground-service notification described above.
SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW("Display over other apps")- Required to draw the directional collision-alert overlay on top of whatever app you're using.
VIBRATE- Required to play the directional haptic alert pattern.
ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION- Used to detect when you start and stop walking so the camera and detection model can run only when needed. The classification is performed by Android on-device; the app never sees an activity history.
The app does not request: INTERNET,
ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION,
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION,
RECORD_AUDIO,
READ_CONTACTS,
READ_PHONE_STATE, or any storage / media
permissions.
Children and family use
Heads Up is designed for a general audience (Android users aged 13 and over) and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone — children included — because, as described above, we do not collect personal information from anyone at all.
The same on-device, no-transmission guarantees described in this policy apply identically when a minor uses the app. There are no accounts to create, no profiles, no social or chat features, no advertising, no in-app purchases, and no identifiers shared with third parties.
That said, Heads Up uses the camera and provides physical- safety alerts. We recommend that a parent or guardian set up the app with their child, confirm the overlay and haptic alerts are working, and reinforce that the app is a supplement to — not a replacement for — paying attention to their surroundings.
If you are a parent or guardian and believe the app has collected personal information from a child (it shouldn't — it doesn't collect personal information from anyone), contact us at support@lmelabs.com and we'll respond promptly.
Data retention and deletion
We don't hold any data about you, so there's nothing on a server to retain or delete. The only data the app stores is the local app state described above (onboarding flag and your alert settings), which lives in private app storage on your phone.
You can erase this local state at any time, without contacting us, in three equivalent ways:
- Uninstall the app (Settings → Apps → Heads Up → Uninstall).
- Clear the app's storage (Settings → Apps → Heads Up → Storage → Clear storage).
- Reset your phone to factory defaults.
Security
The strongest privacy protection is not collecting data in the first place. Heads Up is built so that camera frames, motion signals, and detection results never leave the device — there is no server to breach, no account to be stolen, and no analytics pipeline to be subpoenaed. Local app state is stored in Android's per-app private storage, which other apps cannot read.
Third-party services
The app contains no third-party SDKs for analytics, advertising, attribution, crash reporting, A/B testing, or social integration. The Android system frameworks the app relies on (camera, sensors, machine-learning runtime, notification system) are provided by Android itself and run on your device.
Your rights
Privacy regulations including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act / CPRA (CCPA), and the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) give users rights to access, correct, delete, port, and restrict the processing of their personal data, and to opt out of its sale.
We honour all of these rights by default: we hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing for us to access, export, correct, delete, or sell. If you want to erase the local app state on your own device, follow the steps in the "Data retention and deletion" section above. If you have a question or believe this account of our practices is incorrect, contact us at support@lmelabs.com.
Changes to this policy
If the app's behaviour ever changes in a way that affects this policy — for example, if a future version were to add a feature that requires the app to transmit data — we will update this page, update the "Last updated" date at the top, and call out the change prominently. Any future version that collects, transmits, or shares data would also be reflected in the Google Play Data Safety section of the app's listing.
Contact
Privacy questions, requests, or corrections: support@lmelabs.com.