Privacy

1. The short version

Firstsong listens through your iPhone microphone and plays back, amplified and filtered, what it actually hears. That audio, every recording you keep and the pregnancy week you enter stay on your iPhone and in your own private iCloud. They never reach a server of ours, because we do not run one. There is no account and no login, so there is nothing about you for us to look up, hand over or lose.

2. The microphone

The app asks for the microphone because that is its only job: to listen to your abdomen and let you hear it through your headphones. The sound is processed live on the device, by code that runs on your iPhone. Nothing is streamed, nothing is uploaded and nothing is analyzed anywhere else. A recording exists only if you tap record and decide to keep it.

3. Your recordings

Recordings are stored on your iPhone and synchronized through your own private iCloud database, the one protected by your Apple Account. Apple provides that storage and we cannot read it. We hold no copy, so we cannot lose one, hand one over or be compelled to produce one. When you share a recording, you are the sender, using the app or the message you chose, and it leaves your control at that moment exactly like any other file you send.

4. Apple Health

With your permission the app reads one value and only one, your heart rate, from Apple Health. It uses it for a single purpose: to tell your own pulse apart from your baby's, so it can say that is your own heart instead of letting you believe something else. The app writes nothing back to Apple Health, sends that value nowhere and keeps it no longer than the listening session in front of you. If you say no, the app still works and tells you plainly that it is working without the reference.

5. The camera

If you have no Apple Watch you can rest a finger over the camera so the app can read your pulse from the changing light. That is the only reason the camera permission exists here. No photo and no video is taken, stored or transmitted.

6. What we do measure, exactly

So we can tell whether the app works and where people give up, it sends anonymous usage and crash events to Firebase (Google) and attribution events to the advertising kits of Meta, Google, TikTok and Apple. Those events say things like a screen was seen, a listening session started, a purchase completed and for how much.

One of them, and we would rather name it than hide it, reports the outcome of a listening session in four flat values: a rate was shown, your own pulse was identified, nothing was found, or the room was too loud. That is how we know whether the app is doing its job at all.

What those events never carry, by a rule written into the app and not by good intentions: your pregnancy week, any heart rate figure of yours or your baby's, the name you gave a recording, and never one second of audio.

7. Tracking, and the prompt Apple makes us show

Apple requires an app to ask before it may link your activity to you across other companies' apps and websites. Firstsong asks after the paywall, never before, and no is a complete answer that costs you nothing in the app. If you decline, the advertising kits still receive the events above but without the identifier that would tie them to you.

8. Payments

Apple runs the subscription end to end. We never see your name, your address or your card. So a purchase can be matched to the copy of the app that made it, your iPhone generates a random identifier the first time you open Firstsong and sends it to Apple with the purchase. It is a random number, it is not derived from anything about you, and on its own it identifies nobody.

9. How long we keep things

We retain nothing about your pregnancy, because we hold nothing. Your recordings and your week live on your iPhone and in your iCloud until you delete them or delete the app. The anonymous events in section 6 are held by Firebase and by the advertising platforms under their own retention rules, which you can read on their sites.

10. Children

Firstsong is made for adults. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

11. Who is responsible, and the EU

The data controller for the little we do handle (the anonymous events in section 6 and any email you choose to send us) is Digital Nafta Portal FZCO, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Legal basis in the EU and the UK: our legitimate interest in knowing whether the app works, your consent where the tracking prompt applies, and performance of the contract for anything to do with your subscription.

12. Your rights, and how to reach a person

Delete one recording or all of them inside the app, and none of it goes through us. For access, deletion, objection, or to complain (in the EU and the UK you can also go straight to your data protection authority), write to firstsong@digitalnafta.com. A person answers within two business days.

13. If this policy changes

We update the version and the date at the top and publish the new text at this address before the change takes effect in the app.

14. This website, which the sections above do not cover

Everything above is about the app. The site you are reading has its own, much shorter, story.

• No cookies. Not analytics cookies, not preference cookies, none. Check your browser storage after visiting.
• No third party requests. No fonts from a font host, no tag manager, no pixel, no embedded video, no chat widget. Every file this site loads comes from this domain, and you can verify that in your browser network tab on any page.
• No analytics at all. We cannot tell you how many people read this sentence. That is the trade we made.
• The listening tool uploads nothing. The three demo recordings are downloaded to your browser and analysed there. No audio and no result is sent anywhere.

15. The email list

If you type an email address into the box on this site and tick the consent box, this is exactly what happens.

• The address is written to a file on our own server, outside the public web folder.
• Alongside it we store the timestamp, which page you were on, your browser user agent string, and a one way hash of your IP address. The IP address itself is never stored. The hash exists only to stop one script signing up ten thousand times.
• Nothing about your pregnancy is asked for or stored. Not your week, not a due date, not a heart rate, not audio.
• You get exactly one message, on the day the app opens. It is not a newsletter and there is no sequence behind it.
• The list is never sold, rented, shared or handed to an advertising platform.
• Reply to that email, or write to firstsong@digitalnafta.com, and the address is deleted. No form and no reason required.

This section exists because the policy above was written for the app and does not mention the website. Keeping quiet about the one thing this site does store would be worse than adding two sections.

Last checked 2026-08-23