Privacy policy

Who is responsible

iPingTools is published by an individual developer, reachable at kaizar.tariq.inan@gmail.com. The application's source code is public at https://github.com/inanbd/iPingTools, so every claim on this page can be checked against the code that makes it.

Information we do not collect

We do not collect, receive, store or process any of the following:

• Names, email addresses, phone numbers or any other contact details.
• Your location. The app requests location permission for one reason, explained below, and never reads a position from it.
• Device identifiers, advertising identifiers or any other persistent identifier.
• Usage analytics, event telemetry, session recordings or crash reports.
• The addresses, hostnames or networks you look up, scan or ping.
• The results of any scan, and the details of any device the app discovers.

The app contains no advertising SDK, no analytics SDK and no third-party tracking library of any kind. Its only external dependency is Android's own preference storage.

Information stored on your device

Some things have to persist between sessions. All of it is written to the app's own private storage on the phone, is readable only by the app, is never transmitted anywhere, and is deleted when you uninstall the app or clear its data from Android Settings.

• Saved Wake-on-LAN machines — the name, MAC address, broadcast address and port you entered for each one.
• Watched servers — the hosts, ports and check intervals you set up in Server Watcher, and whether each was reachable at the last check.
• Devices seen on your network — if you turn on the new-device alert, the addresses and names of the devices already on your network, so the app can tell an arrival from something it has seen before. This is a list of your own equipment, held on your own phone, and it never leaves it.
• Tool preferences — small settings such as your last chosen DNS resolver or port-range preset.

Scan results, ping histories and traceroute output are held in memory while a tool is open and are discarded when you leave it. Nothing is written to a shared or world-readable location, and the app has no backup or cloud-sync feature.

Network connections the app makes

A network tool is not much use without a network, so the app does make outbound connections — but only in response to something you asked it to do, and only to the destinations listed here.

Wherever you point it

Ping, traceroute, MTR, the port scanner, iPerf, the LAN scanner and the DNS and WHOIS tools all contact the host, network or server that you enter. That traffic goes directly from your phone to that destination and does not pass through us. What those destinations do with the connection is governed by their operators, not by this policy.

Public services used by specific tools

A few tools rely on a public service to answer a question your phone cannot answer by itself. Each connection is made over HTTPS, carries no identifier beyond the network request itself, and happens only when you use that tool. Because these are ordinary internet requests, the operator of the service will necessarily see the IP address your request comes from, and their own privacy policy applies to that.

No other tool contacts a third party. If you use only the offline tools — the IP calculator, or the WiFi analyzer, which reads the radio rather than the internet — the app makes no outbound connection at all.

Permissions, and why each one is needed

Location (fine and coarse), and nearby WiFi devices

Android will not return the list of nearby WiFi networks to any app that does not hold location permission. This is an operating-system rule introduced to stop apps from inferring your position from surrounding access points, and it applies to every WiFi analyzer on the Play Store. iPingTools requests the permission for that single purpose: to read the scan results shown in the WiFi Analyzer.

The app never calls any location API, never reads GPS or network position, never stores a position, and never transmits one. It does not request background location. If you never open the WiFi Analyzer, the permission is never requested, and denying it leaves every other tool fully working.

Notifications

Used by Server Watcher, to say when a host you asked it to watch stops answering, and by the new-device alert, to say when something joins your network. No notification is ever sent for marketing or any other purpose.

Foreground service, and start on boot

Used by Server Watcher and by the new-device alert. Android defers ordinary background work and will not run it more frequently than roughly every fifteen minutes, which is too slow to notice an outage. A foreground service — the kind that shows a persistent notification while it runs — is the only way to check on the interval you chose. Start-on-boot lets watching resume after you restart the phone. Neither runs unless you have set up a watched server or turned the network watch on, and the network watch only ever probes the subnet your phone is already attached to.

Network, WiFi state and multicast

Needed for the tools themselves: opening sockets, reading which network you are attached to, and receiving the multicast replies that Bonjour, UPnP and WS-Discovery devices send back during a LAN scan. Android's WiFi driver discards multicast an app has not asked for, so the app holds a multicast lock for the duration of a scan and releases it afterwards.

Children

iPingTools is a technical utility. It is not directed at children, contains no content aimed at children, and collects no information from anyone, including children.

Data sharing and sale

We collect no personal information, so there is none to share, sell, rent or disclose. No data is transferred to advertisers, data brokers, or any other third party. We do not respond to data requests with user data because we hold none.

Your rights

Because nothing is collected, there is no account to close and no record for us to export or erase. Everything the app has stored is on your own device: clearing the app's data in Android Settings, or uninstalling it, removes all of it permanently and immediately.

Security

Requests to the public services listed above use HTTPS. On-device data lives in the app's private storage, which Android isolates from other applications. The WHOIS protocol has no encrypted form — it is defined as plain text on TCP port 43 — so a WHOIS query travels unencrypted, as it does from every WHOIS client.

Changes to this policy

If the app changes in a way that affects this policy, the policy will be updated and the date at the top of this page changed with it. Because the policy lives in the same public repository as the app, its full revision history is visible alongside the code.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about the app's behaviour, can go to kaizar.tariq.inan@gmail.com.