Effective 11 November 2026
SonicSweep collects nothing unless you choose to share drives with the community (below). What it measures otherwise stays on your device.
Microphone. SonicSweep uses the microphone only while you measure. The sound is analysed on your device as it arrives; it is not recorded to a file unless you choose to keep a drive's raw audio (below), and it is never sent anywhere.
On your device. Your settings, calibration adjustments, imported calibration files, drives and downloaded maps are stored on your device (and in your device backups, if you use iCloud Backup or back up to a computer; on Android only the car keys described below are backed up), and are removed when you delete the app.
Exports. Graphs and data leave the app only when you export them, to the destination you choose (your photo library, or an app through the share sheet). Saving to Photos asks only for permission to add photos, never to read them. A drive's data export leaves out location and keeps only the date, unless you choose the full export.
Location. Road Noise drives record GPS position and speed to match roads between drives. Drives stay on your device; exports leave out location unless you choose the full export.
Sharing drives. When you send drives to someone, the file holds the name you give, your cars, and the drives' dates and times, sound levels, speeds second by second, conditions, and which seconds had speech or music. It never holds your location, your notes, or your microphone's name or serial number. It goes only where you send it, through the share sheet. Drives you open from someone else stay on your device like your own; any location in an older file is removed when you open it.
Community sharing (optional). If you choose to share a drive with the community, SonicSweep sends your car's make, model, year, class, powertrain and drivetrain (or, if your car isn't in the list, the make and model you typed), its tyres if you entered them (brand, model, size and season), your phone model and its iOS or Android version, the app version, its microphone type and the calibration that was applied, the month and your country (from your region setting), the drive's conditions (rain, wet road, windows, sunroof, whether the phone sat on the centre armrest, and how many people were in the car, up to three), and its sound levels and speeds as short stretches of steady driving in shuffled order, with a second or two missing between them. If you share a bus, tram, train, subway, plane, motorcycle or taxi ride, or a walk, just for fun, it sends what it was (for example a bus) in place of a car and tyres, never its line, route, aircraft or seat; a flight or a walk sends no speeds. These appear only on the site's Just for fun page, apart from every car number. Before sending, the app keeps only steady driving (no stops, and no speeding up or slowing down except a second or two between cruising seconds, which is usually GPS jitter), cuts speech, music and other cabin sounds (sending only whether each second counts, never what was heard), and keeps no clock times. A calibration you made yourself is described only by its kind, with its response rounded. It never sends your location or route, the date or time of day, audio, notes, names, or any account details. Each upload carries a random key that the app creates for this installation (for Apple's App Attest on an iPhone, or Android's Key Attestation on Android); the server keeps a one-way code made from it to limit abuse and to tell installations apart. A new key is made if you reinstall the app. On Android, when that key is made, the app sends the certificates Google's system gives it for the key once: they name this app and its signing certificate and say that the phone's secure hardware made the key, that the phone's software is unmodified and which Android version and security update it runs, and hold no serial number, IMEI or account; the server checks them against Google's public list of withdrawn certificates and keeps only the key's public part. Shared drives are stored on Amazon Web Services in the United States and are used only to publish averages at sonicsweep.dev, where only averages are shown (a model shared from a single car shows that car's averages, marked Early days); the averages may also be offered as open data. Each car you share has a random key in your iCloud Keychain (on Android: on the phone, in Google's Block Store and in your Android backup, only where that backup is end-to-end encrypted) that lets you delete its drives at any time in Settings → Community sharing; deleted drives leave the published averages within a day and are erased from encrypted backups within 35 days. Your IP address is used to deliver an upload and is never stored; for abuse limits the server keeps a one-way code made from it with that day's random key, and both are erased within two days. The server records when an upload arrives; only the week is used, nothing with a date or time is published, and its logs are erased within 14 days. Apple's App Attest and Android's Key Attestation are used to check that uploads come from the real app.
Calibration sharing (optional, iPhone only). After measuring your iPhone against a measurement microphone in the app, you can share the result: your phone model and its model code (such as iPhone17,3), the model of the measurement microphone you used (such as UMIK-2), the measured sensitivity and frequency response, and the month. It never includes the microphone's serial number, your location or any recording. So that each iPhone shares at most one calibration, the app also sends a one-time device token from Apple's DeviceCheck; the server passes it to Apple, which keeps one yes-or-no mark for this app on your iPhone, and doesn't store it. Results that agree are combined into a community calibration for that phone model and published at sonicsweep.dev. To remove yours, tap Remove next to your calibration in Settings → Community sharing (Delete everything I've shared removes it too).
Community numbers. When you open a community screen (and, if you chose the typical shared car as your scoring reference, when the app opens), the app downloads the published averages from sonicsweep.dev and keeps a copy on your device; it never does this while a drive is recording.
Apple Watch. The watch app uses the watch's microphone and location only while you record. Sound levels are worked out on the watch; no audio is saved or sent. The levels and GPS go only to your iPhone, where they are stored like a drive.
Raw audio (optional). If you turn on "Keep the raw audio" for a drive, its sound is saved on your device as a WAV file so it can be analysed again later; it records conversations in the car too. It is never uploaded; it leaves the device only if you export it, and deleting the drive deletes it.
Maps. When you tap to download a map, SonicSweep requests the roads of that map area as OpenStreetMap map tiles from VersaTiles (tiles.versatiles.org), or, if that fails, from the public OpenStreetMap Overpass servers (overpass-api.de, overpass.private.coffee). The requests name only the map tiles, which shows those servers roughly which area you downloaded, as any map app does; nothing else about you or your drives is sent. The app checks whether the phone is on Wi-Fi to suggest a good time to download.
No tracking. SonicSweep has no account, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking.
Children. SonicSweep collects no data unless you choose to share drives, and does not knowingly collect data from children.
Changes. If this policy changes, the new version will be published with a new effective date.
Contact. support@sonicsweep.dev