Effective 2026-09-28
dishdash is a dashcam app. It records the road while you drive, keeps a rotating buffer of footage on your phone, and protects the clips around a detected impact so they are not deleted.
dishdash has no server. There is no dishdash account, no dishdash backend, and no analytics, crash reporting or advertising in the app. Your footage, your location history and your settings stay on your phone unless you explicitly send them somewhere, and the only places you can send them are ones you choose yourself.
Everything in this section is written to private storage on your phone and stays there.
Video. dishdash records video from your camera to your device's storage. It records video only. No audio is captured in your recordings.
Location. While a recording is running, dishdash logs GPS positions to a track file next to your clips. It uses this to show your speed and position during playback, to draw the route of a drive, to group clips into drives, to detect heavy braking and sharp turns, and to stop recording when you arrive at a place you have saved. Location is only logged while a recording is running.
Motion. dishdash reads your phone's accelerometer to detect an impact, so it can protect the footage either side of it from being deleted by the rotating buffer.
Your settings. Saved places (their coordinates, names and radii), the Bluetooth identifier of the one car stereo you have paired dishdash with, and your preferences are stored in a settings file on the device.
Microphone. If you switch on horn detection, and only then, dishdash listens for the sound of a car horn so it can label a clip. The audio is analysed as it arrives, in the app's native code, and is never written to disk and never transmitted. Nothing is retained. With the setting off, the app does not request microphone access at all.
Physical activity. If you switch on the activity trigger, dishdash asks Android whether you appear to be in a vehicle, so it can offer to start recording. It receives a category such as "in a vehicle" or "walking", not a location, and does not store it.
Camera frames for lens checks. dishdash measures the brightness and detail of the live camera image on a coarse grid to warn you when the lens is blocked, misted or facing the wrong way. These measurements are numbers computed on the device and discarded immediately; the frames they come from are not saved separately from your recording.
Number plates and faces. If you use the blurring feature, dishdash scans a copy of a clip on your device to find plates and faces and covers them. The scan happens entirely on the phone, the text it reads is not stored, and your original clip is never modified.
A device identifier. dishdash reads Android's app-scoped ANDROID_ID when it starts, to check whether this build was compiled as a developer build. It is compared against a value inside the app and is never transmitted anywhere. It is scoped to this app's signing key and cannot be used to identify you in another app.
NFC and Bluetooth. dishdash reads an NFC tag on your phone mount to know you have docked, and watches for your car's stereo connecting. It matches one specific remembered device rather than "any audio device", so your headphones do not start a recording.
Four things can send data off the device. Three of them are optional and one is off unless you back up.
A cloud folder, or a cloud account. You can copy clips to a folder you pick on your phone, which your own gallery or cloud app may then sync under that app's terms rather than ours, or sign in to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox and have dishdash upload clips directly. If you sign in, dishdash receives an access token, stores it in your phone's encrypted keystore, and uses it to upload the clips you have chosen to back up. dishdash asks for the narrowest access each provider offers: on Google Drive it can only see files it created itself, and on Dropbox it is confined to its own app folder. It cannot read the rest of your files. Your footage goes to *your* account and is governed by that provider's privacy policy. Sign out, and the token is deleted.
The street map. When you open the full-screen map of a drive, dishdash downloads map tiles from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org). That server receives your IP address and the tiles requested, which indicates the general area of the drive you are looking at. It receives no footage, no track file and no identifier from dishdash. You can turn the street map off in settings, and the app's own route map is used instead, drawn from the track file on your phone with no network at all.
Address lookup. If you type an address when saving a place, dishdash passes it to your phone's built-in geocoder, which on most Android phones is a Google Play Services facility subject to Google's privacy policy. dishdash does not send it to a server of its own choosing, and dragging the pin on the map instead involves no lookup.
The purchase. If you buy dishdash Plus, the transaction is handled by Google Play. dishdash receives from Play whether the purchase exists and whether it has been acknowledged. It never sees your payment details.
Nobody. dishdash does not sell, rent or share your data, and there is no recipient to share it with. The developer cannot see your footage, your location or your settings, because none of it is ever sent to us.
The providers named in the previous section receive data only as described there, and only because you asked them to.
Recordings stay on your phone until the rotating buffer reaches the storage limit you set and deletes the oldest clips to make room, or until you delete them yourself. Clips protected by an impact, or locked by you, are kept under a separate allowance so ordinary footage is deleted before they are.
Uninstalling dishdash deletes everything it holds: clips, GPS tracks, saved places, settings and any stored cloud token. Copies you have already uploaded to your own cloud account, or copied into a folder, are yours and stay where you put them; delete them at that provider.
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Camera | To record the road. The app is a dashcam. |
| Location (precise, and while recording) | Speed and position on your footage, the route of a drive, braking and turn detection, and stopping at places you save. |
| Foreground service (camera, location) | To keep recording while you use Maps or your screen is off. This is what the ongoing notification is telling you about. |
| Microphone | Horn detection only, and only when you switch it on. Audio is never recorded. |
| Physical activity | The optional trigger that starts a recording when you appear to be driving. |
| Bluetooth | To notice your car's stereo connecting, so recording can start by itself. |
| NFC | To read the tag on your phone mount. |
| Notifications | To tell you that recording started or stopped, and why. |
| Run at startup | So the app still notices your car after the phone has been rebooted. |
| Billing | The single in-app purchase. |
dishdash asks for the optional ones at the moment you switch on the feature that needs them, and the app records perfectly well if you refuse them.
dishdash is not directed at children and is not intended for use by anyone under 13.
If this policy changes, the revised version will be posted at this address with a new effective date. Material changes will also be noted in the app's release notes on Google Play.