Privacy

The clock

A clock on firmware 1.2.0 or later asks clock.bh for its pictures: a few times a day on battery, more often on USB power. With those requests it sends:

• Its Clock ID. Sixteen characters worked out from the board's chip. It stays the same when the clock is reset or reinstalled, and it says nothing about who you are.
• A key the clock makes once and keeps. We store only a fingerprint of it, to tell your clock from another board that claims the same ID.
• Its status: firmware version; battery level and voltage; whether it is on USB power; Wi-Fi signal strength; the face, city and dark-or-light choice; how long since it started and why it last restarted; a few settings (four greys, faces changing by themselves, updates); how many photos it holds, not the photos; how long since it last set its time; free memory; and the room temperature from its sensor.

We use this to send the right pictures for your city, and to notice a failing battery, a crash, weak Wi-Fi or a bad update before you have to tell us.

The clock never sends your Wi-Fi network's name or password, the password of the clock's own page, your photos, or your location beyond the city you chose.

What we keep: one record per Clock ID (when it was first and last seen, its last status and the key's fingerprint), its visits with their status for 90 days, and the days it was active and notable events (first seen, firmware or city changed, battery low, a crash) for 400 days. We do not keep your IP address with any of this, only a scrambled code for the block of addresses it came from: enough to see that a clock moved to another network, not which one.

Clocks on firmware 1.0 or 1.1 send none of this. We estimate how many there are each day from scrambled codes that are deleted at the end of the day; only the daily count is kept.

The clock also asks our time server for the time, unless you set another one, and when updates are on it checks clock.bh for new firmware.

Your photos

Photos go from your browser straight to the clock, over the USB cable or over your home Wi-Fi to the clock's own page. They never pass through clock.bh.

The studio (e.clock.bh)

The studio runs in your browser and writes the firmware and the settings to the clock over USB. Your Wi-Fi password and the clock page's password go only to the clock: they are never sent to us and never saved in your browser.

So you do not have to start over, the studio keeps a few things in your browser: your settings without the passwords, Basic or Advanced, the step you are on (until you close the tab) and light or dark mode. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes them.

To show the faces, the studio asks clock.bh for pictures of them for the city you chose.

The waitlist

If you sign up to hear when the clock can be ordered, we keep your email address and country, and anything you add: your name, a WhatsApp number, how many clocks, what they are for, and a note. We also keep when you signed up, which page or link brought you, your browser's language and its User-Agent line, and a scrambled code for your network, never your address.

We use it to tell you when you can order, and to plan how many clocks to make. We keep it until you ask us to remove it.

This website and our servers

Like any website, our web server logs each request: the IP address, the time, the page and the browser. The logs are deleted after 14 days. We use them to keep the site working and to stop abuse.

clock.bh is also a public time server. It sees the address of every device that asks it for the time, and keeps the addresses seen in the last 24 hours to count how many use it. Older ones are dropped.

There are no ads, no analytics and no tracking cookies. The only cookie is the owner's login to the dashboard.

The faces' data comes from Open-Meteo (weather), AlAdhan (prayer times), OpenSky Network (flights), CelesTrak (the ISS), NOAA (space weather), Cloudflare Radar (Internet pulse) and football-data.org (football). Our server asks them; your clock never does. We send them nothing about you, only a city's coordinates or a league.

Who sees it, and where it is kept

Only the owner of clock.bh, through a password-protected dashboard. Everything is kept on clock.bh's own server, with a nightly backup on the same server.

Your choices

• To have your clock's record deleted, send its Clock ID to admin@clock.bh. The ID is on the clock's own page and in the studio's Find my clock. We delete it within 7 days. If the clock keeps calling in afterwards, it starts a new record. A setting to stop a clock sending its status is planned for a later firmware.
• To be taken off the waitlist, email admin@clock.bh from the address you signed up with.
• For any question about privacy, write to the same address.

Changes

When anything here changes, we update this page and its date.