Privacy Policy
The short version: Foreman Walk needs an account, because your walks have to survive your phone. You talk, it records, and the recording is uploaded, turned into text, and then deleted. What we keep is the transcript, the photos you attached, the reports built from them and your task list — all of it tied to your account, all of it exportable in one tap, and all of it deleted when you delete your account. There is one ad banner at the bottom of some screens, it is non-personalised, and it never sees anything you record. No tracking, no third-party analytics.
Foreman Walk is made by SmartMetal. Questions about anything on this page go to hello@smartmetal.ca.
1. What the app collects
Your account
An email address and a password, so that your walks, your reports and your task list belong to you rather than to the phone in your pocket. Your walk count is attached to that account too. The password is handled by our authentication provider (Supabase) and is never visible to us.
Your voice — and what happens to it
When you take a walk, the app records what you say as a series of audio notes. Those files stay on your phone until you tap Finish. On Finish they are uploaded and transcribed by a speech-to-text provider (Groq), and the audio is deleted from our storage as soon as the transcript exists — within minutes, and long before the report is finished. We do not keep a copy, and there is no setting that turns that off. The transcript is what survives.
Separately, the app labels each note in your on-screen log with the first few words you said. That label is produced by iOS on your phone using on-device speech recognition. It never leaves the device and never reaches the report.
On the phone itself, the recordings and photos of a walk you have sent are kept for up to 30 days and then deleted automatically. They are the fallback if a report ever fails to build; once the app has seen that your report is ready it clears them sooner, usually the first time you open it. Nothing about that copy leaves your phone, and deleting the app removes it immediately.
Your photos
Every walk needs at least one photo — that is what turns notes into evidence. Photos are taken inside the app, straight into the app's own storage, and are uploaded with the walk so they can be placed in the report. Photos taken in Foreman Walk never enter your iOS photo library, and the app never reads your library.
What the report contains
The report is built from your transcripts by an AI model (Anthropic). It contains what you said and nothing it was not told: the job, the crew, the weather, the hours and the work — each only where you said it out loud. That means names come through when you say them ("me, Tony and the two apprentices"), and they are stored and printed as part of the report. The report also carries the open task list, carried forward walk to walk until you tick each one off or drop it.
Who the report is sent to
Every finished report is emailed to the address on your account. You can also give the app one second address — Setup → “Send a copy to”, for a project manager or an estimator — and every report from then on is emailed to both. That address is your choice, it is stored on your phone and alongside the delivery record for each report so we can show you where a report went, and clearing the field stops it with the next walk. There is no other recipient: we never send your reports to anyone you have not named here.
The ad banner, and what it is not
Foreman Walk shows a single banner ad, from Google AdMob, at the bottom of some screens. It is never on the screen you record on, never over a report, and never on this page. It is what pays for the transcription and the report writing: the app is free, there is nothing in it to buy, and nothing is held back.
Every ad request is marked non-personalised. That means no advertising profile is used to choose it, and the app never asks for permission to track you — there is no “Allow this app to track” prompt in Foreman Walk because there is nothing to allow. Google still receives what it needs to serve and count an ad: coarse device and network information, and identifiers it uses to limit how often you see the same one. It never receives your recordings, your transcripts, your photos, your reports, your tasks, your job names, or your email address. Nothing you say on a walk reaches an ad network.
What we do not collect
No location, no contacts, no behavioural analytics, and no advertising identifier of our own. We do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone for advertising.
2. Where it goes, and who touches it
Our server code runs on Vercel, and that is where your report is built. Everything the build touches passes through it: your recordings are read back into it to be sent for transcription, your photos are read back into it to be placed on the page, and the transcripts and the finished report are assembled there before they are stored. The one thing that does not go through Vercel is the upload itself — when you tap Finish, the recordings and photos go from the phone straight to Supabase. Vercel is where the code runs, not where anything is filed. What it does keep is our server log, which records which address each report was delivered to.
Your account, transcripts, photos, reports and tasks are stored with Supabase (database and file storage). Processing a walk involves Groq (speech-to-text, on the audio only), Anthropic (the report and task extraction, on the transcripts) and Resend (emailing the finished report to your account address, and to the second address you chose in Setup if you set one). Each of these is a processor acting on our instructions; none of them is permitted to use your walks to train models or for their own purposes.
Capture is entirely offline. The app does not need a network connection while you walk — it only needs one when you tap Finish.
3. How long it is kept
- Audio recordings: deleted as soon as they have been transcribed. If the transcription itself fails, that one recording is kept for up to three more days so the report can be built on a retry, and is then deleted whether it ever transcribed or not.
- Transcripts, reports, photos and tasks: kept for as long as your account exists, because the whole point is a paper trail you can still search in two years.
- A walk you never finished: its recordings are discarded after a short period, and the app will tell you if you come back to it too late.
4. What you can do about it
Export everything. Settings → Export everything gives you a single file containing every job, walk, transcript, report and task on your account, plus download links for the files still in storage. It is always available and it is never held back. The audio is not in it, because it no longer exists.
Delete everything. Settings → Delete account permanently removes your account and everything stored against it — every transcript, every report and every photo. It cannot be undone, so export first if you want to keep any of it. Walks still sitting on your phone are removed when you delete the app.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to access, correct or restrict processing of your personal data, and to complain to a data protection authority. Write to the address above and we will help.
5. Notifications
The two daily reminders are local notifications scheduled by your own phone. Nothing about your schedule is sent to a server, and we cannot send you a push notification.
6. Children
Foreman Walk is a tool for construction professionals. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.
7. Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or how long we keep it, the effective date above changes and the new version ships with the app update.