The consulting website has no contact form and no contact backend. It offers two ways to reach us, and they do not handle your data the same way.
LINE. The contact page shows a QR code and a link to our LINE profile. Opening a conversation there means LINE Corporation carries the message, under its own privacy policy and retention rules, not ours. We receive whatever you send, plus the LINE display name and profile photo of the account you send it from. This is a change from the site's previous email-draft form, which deliberately kept everything on your device: if you would rather no third party carry the conversation, use email instead. Please do not send credentials or confidential production data over either channel.
Email. Writing to admin@factor-io.com is ordinary correspondence between you, your email provider and ours. We do not promise that email is never retained; ask about access or deletion at the same address. The governance example elsewhere on the site is a local simulation; it operates no infrastructure.
The website adds no analytics, tracking scripts or contact backend, and stores nothing in cookies or browser storage. Its static host receives standard web-request metadata to serve pages. The app and calculator behaviors below are separate and unchanged.
Cat Countdown contains no advertisements, no advertising networks or SDKs, no advertising identifiers, and no third-party tracking of any kind. We do not earn money from your attention, so we have no reason to watch you.
Cat Countdown has no user accounts, no usage analytics and no telemetry. Everything you create in the app — your countdowns, dates, tasks, notes, attachments and settings — stays on your device and is never sent to a Factor IO server. So that this statement is accurate rather than merely reassuring, the three things the app does handle are named individually below.
1. Purchase history, and only if you buy something. Cat Countdown sells a single subscription: a yearly plan that unlocks cloud backup. Purchases are processed by RevenueCat, our billing provider, which receives the store purchase token so the subscription can be verified and later restored. The app never asks you to sign in to us, so the RevenueCat app-user identifier is anonymous: it is not linked to an account, an email address, or your other apps, and no advertising identifier is collected. RevenueCat keeps the transaction record so your subscription can be supported — the same purchase history the store already holds. It is used to run and support the subscription. RevenueCat also reduces it to aggregate purchase reporting for us, such as how many subscriptions are active, and that aggregate reporting is the analytics our Play and App Store data-safety declarations list for purchase history. It is not used to profile you, and never for advertising. If you never buy the subscription, none of this applies to you.
2. Approximate location, and only if you allow it. With your permission, the app sends your approximate coordinates to Open-Meteo to fetch the current weather for the home screen and a forecast for each of your countdown dates. Those lookups run on their own while the app is open, and section 04 sets out exactly when. This is the one place where data you generate is shared with an outside service. The coordinates are used for that request and are not written to storage; only the resulting weather condition is kept, and the position is discarded from memory after five minutes. Declining the permission leaves the app fully usable, without the weather.
3. A licence identifier, on Android only. Cat Countdown is a paid app, so Android checks that your copy is genuine. To do that it sends a Play Integrity token and a stable hash of a key held in your device’s own secure storage to a Factor IO server. That hash identifies one installation and nothing more: it carries no name, no email address, no account and no advertising identifier, it is never shared with anyone, and it is used to verify the licence and to rate-limit automated licence requests. iPhone builds make no such request and verify the purchase on-device instead.
Cloud backup is your own copy, not ours. When you use cloud backup, your app data is written into a private area of your own Google Drive or your own iCloud account, where you and the app are the only parties to it. Factor IO neither receives, stores nor proxies that backup. You should know one thing about it plainly: the app does not add its own encryption to the backup archive, so the protection it gets is whatever your drive provider already applies. Section 04 describes when a backup runs.
The web calculator’s separate AI advisor is the one further case, and only to the transmit half of this: pressing Send or Ask sends your message and planning context to a Factor IO server so the request can be completed. Section 04 states exactly what is sent, to whom, and what is kept.
Not everything on this page is something you trigger. This section separates what happens on its own from what happens because you did something.
Automatic, once you have allowed location (Android and iPhone). While the app is open, the home screen refreshes the current weather when it opens and again at the start of each hour, and a countdown card looks up the forecast for its date. Each of those lookups sends your approximate coordinates to Open-Meteo without waiting for a tap. Declining the permission, or revoking it later, stops all of it.
Automatic, on Android only. The licence check described in section 03 runs so that the app can verify itself; iPhone builds make no such request. Apart from the weather lookups above and that licence check, neither app sends anything off your device without you doing something.
Automatic, on the web calculator. The calculator makes public GET requests at startup for OpenRouter model pricing and a USD-to-THB rate from Frankfurter, an ECB-data mirror. These requests carry standard browser network metadata such as your IP address and user agent to those services, but include no calculator inputs, transcript, or result. A failed or incomplete refresh leaves the dated local fallback unchanged.
Only when you choose one of these:
ai.factor-io.com, which forwards it to MiniMax.For calculator AI requests, the payload contains your message, bounded current controls, current model candidates and source-status envelopes, the deterministic blueprint and component ledger when available, bounded complete exchange history, and structured tool definitions.
Factor IO now proxies calculator AI requests. This changed in v0.7 and is a deliberate reversal of the previous arrangement. There is no longer any API-key field in the calculator, because the MiniMax credential is held on a Factor IO server and added to your request there — it never exists in your browser. In exchange, your request passes through infrastructure we operate: ai.factor-io.com receives your message and planning context, adds the credential, forwards the request to MiniMax and returns MiniMax's reply to you unchanged. We do not store your message, the planning context or the response; the service logs only the request route, status, model name, byte counts and duration. Your conversation history stays in memory for the current tab and is never written to disk by us.
Opening the separate advisor stores a bounded scenario and pending proposal in this tab's sessionStorage for up to two hours (at most four records). This includes calculator controls, selected example, captured figures and source dates, not conversation messages or credentials. The opaque URL identifier is only a reference to that tab-local record. Reload loses the in-memory conversation, but can retain an unexpired scenario. The advisor's confirmed Clear action removes its owned records and current conversation without touching other site storage. Opening the advisor or selecting an example never sends inference.
The advisor can prepare and copy a credential-free request for Ollama, LM Studio or your own OpenAI-compatible gateway without sending it. Send and Ask contact Factor IO's endpoint explicitly.
If you never ask a question, no conversation or calculator context is sent to an AI endpoint. The automatic public pricing and FX GETs still occur.
Six outside services are involved, and each is listed here with the reason it appears. Google and Apple hold the account that receives your cloud backup. RevenueCat processes the yearly subscription you buy. Open-Meteo returns a weather forecast. OpenRouter and Frankfurter serve public pricing and exchange-rate data to the calculator, and MiniMax receives calculator AI requests that Factor IO’s own endpoint forwards.
We have no arrangement with any of them that gives us access to your data beyond the specific exchange described in sections 03 and 04. RevenueCat processes purchases as our service provider rather than as a recipient we pass data to, and it holds no advertising identifier. Their policies: Google · Apple · RevenueCat · Open-Meteo.
Because our apps hold no account and gather nothing about who you are, they gather nothing about children either. None of the three items in section 03 is profiling. A purchase belongs to whoever made it, a weather request carries no identifier, and the Android licence check sends a hash of an installation key rather than anything about a person. None of them is used for tracking, and none is shared with an advertiser. On the web calculator the one action that sends anything to a Factor IO server is pressing Send or Ask; it never happens on its own, and what it sends is forwarded and not stored.
If this statement changes, we will update this page and revise the effective date above. If a change ever affects how an app handles your data, we will surface it in the app itself.
Write to us any time: admin@factor-io.com