PerliDial Privacy Policy
Effective 24 September 2026
1. Summary
- There is no account and no server. PerliDial has no sign-in, and we operate no service behind it. We receive nothing.
- Your contacts, your call log and everything the app works out about a number stay on your phone. Caller naming, the shape of a number, how often it has rung you and the spam marks you set are all worked out on the device, from the phone's own data.
- No caller-ID lookup service. Paid caller-ID services work by sending a phone's call history to a third party. PerliDial does not use one, because it cannot: see the next point.
- Scanning and beaming run on the phone. Reading a number out of a photograph and sending a contact card by sound or over Bluetooth all happen on the device; no picture, recording or card is uploaded.
- No location, no SMS reading, no microphone in the background.
2. Who is responsible
Perlicom Systems Limited (company number 546999, Ireland) publishes PerliDial. Contact: support@perlicom.com. Because the app keeps everything on your device, there is in ordinary use no personal data for us to control: we hold none of it.
3. What the app does
PerliDial is a replacement dialler. When you set it as your default phone app, Android hands it the dialling, the incoming-call screen, the in-call screen and the call log. It shows who is calling using your own contacts and what your own call history already says about the number, lets you block a number so the phone does not even ring, keeps your contacts, and can pass a number across to another app you already use, such as WhatsApp or Messages, to carry on there. It can read a phone number off a photograph, show your own contact card as a QR code, and hand a card to another phone by a burst of high-pitched sound or over Bluetooth.
4. Where the data lives
Your contacts and your call log are Android's, not ours. PerliDial reads them from the phone's own providers each time it needs them and deliberately keeps no copy between launches, so it can never show a stale name against a number. When you edit a contact, the change is written back to the phone's address book — the same one your other apps use.
What the app stores for itself, in its own private storage on the phone: your settings and appearance choices, the keypad shortcuts you set, the numbers you chose to block, the labels and marks you put on a number, and your own contact card if you filled one in. Uninstalling the app or clearing its storage removes all of it. None of it is backed up to us, because there is nowhere to send it.
How caller insight works. The name, the label and the "this number has rung you before" line come from your contacts and your call log. The country and kind of number come from a numbering-plan table compiled into the app itself. No lookup leaves the phone, so it works with no signal — which is exactly when someone needs to make a call.
5. Permissions, and exactly what each one is for
A default dialler needs the permissions the phone app needs; Android will not let an app hold the dialler role without them. Each is requested for the reason below and for nothing else.
| Permission | What PerliDial uses it for |
|---|---|
CALL_PHONE | Placing the call you dialled or tapped. |
ANSWER_PHONE_CALLS | Answering or rejecting a call from PerliDial's own incoming-call screen. |
READ_PHONE_STATE | Knowing whether a call is ringing, connected or ended, so the right screen is shown. Required by the Android telecom framework for the dialler role. |
READ_PHONE_NUMBERS | Showing your own number, and telling one SIM from another on a dual-SIM phone. |
READ_CALL_LOG | The Recents list, and the local insight described in section 4 — whether this number has called before, and how often. The call log stays on the phone. |
WRITE_CALL_LOG | Recording a call you made or received, and deleting an entry when you ask. |
READ_CONTACTS | Naming a caller, and the contacts list and search. Read on the device, never uploaded. |
WRITE_CONTACTS | Only when you save a contact, edit one, or accept a card someone beamed to you. |
POST_NOTIFICATIONS, USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT | The incoming-call notification and the full-screen incoming-call display on the lock screen, and the ongoing-call notification. Without the full-screen permission Android strips the call screen and the dialler role misbehaves. |
MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS | Switching call audio between the earpiece, the loudspeaker and a headset, and playing the beam tones. |
VIBRATE | Ringing and haptic feedback on the keypad. |
WAKE_LOCK | The proximity behaviour during a call: the screen goes off at your ear so a cheek cannot press Mute or End. |
CAMERA (hardware declared optional) | Only the scanner: pointing the camera at a card, a poster or a screen to read a phone number out of it. The text recognition runs on the device; the image is not saved and is not sent anywhere. |
RECORD_AUDIO | Only "listen for a beamed card": while that screen is open, the microphone listens for the high-pitched tones another PerliDial phone plays and decodes a name and number from them. It is requested when you open that screen, never at launch, nothing is recorded to a file, and the app never listens during a call or in the background. |
BLUETOOTH_SCAN (flagged "never for location"), BLUETOOTH_CONNECT, BLUETOOTH_ADVERTISE, and on Android 11 and older BLUETOOTH, BLUETOOTH_ADMIN and ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION | Only the nearby transfer: handing contacts straight from one PerliDial phone to another with no network involved. The location permission is the one older versions of Android required before they would allow any Bluetooth discovery at all; it is capped at Android 11, PerliDial never asks Android where you are and holds no location permission on newer Android, and the scan is flagged so it cannot be used to derive your location. |
5.1 The permissions it does not have — including internet
PerliDial has no internet permission. It is not merely unused: it is stripped from the app at build time, including where a third-party library would have added one, so the app cannot make a network connection even by accident. That is why the caller insight is local and why nothing can be sent to us. The only outbound links are the ones you tap to continue in another app, and those are handed to that app to open.
There is also no location permission on modern Android, no SMS or MMS reading, no calendar, no photo-library access, no microphone use outside the listen screen, no call recording, and no "see all installed apps" permission — the app asks Android about only the handful of messaging apps its hand-off sheet can pass a number to.
6. Advertising
As published today, PerliDial shows no advertising. No advertising SDK is active in it, no advertising identifier is read, and — as section 5.1 explains — the app cannot reach an ad network at all.
If advertising is introduced in a future version, it will be supplied by Google AdMob, and these are the rules it will be held to, which we publish now so they can be checked against what the app does:
- Never on or over a call. Not the incoming-call screen, not the in-call screen, not the call-ended summary. Nothing may stand between you and Answer or Hang up.
- Never on the keypad. An advert beside the call button is one mis-tap away from dialling a stranger.
- A banner on the Recents and Contacts lists, and nothing else. There are no full-screen ads in PerliDial at all — a phone app is never at a "natural break".
- To serve an ad, Google would process your device's advertising ID, coarse device and app information and your IP address, from which an approximate, city-level location is derived, as an independent controller under its own policies (policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites).
- Nothing from the phone would be shared with an advertiser: not your contacts, not your call log, not a number, not who called you, not a blocked number and not anything the app worked out about a caller. No ad would ever be targeted using them.
- In the EU, EEA and UK the app would ask for your consent before any personalised advertising, through Google's certified consent flow, with a way to reopen it and change your answer in the settings.
- On Android you can reset or delete your advertising ID, and switch off ad personalisation, in Settings > Privacy > Ads (on many phones: Settings > Security & privacy > Privacy > Ads, or Settings > Google > Ads); you can also manage Google ad settings at myadcenter.google.com.
Introducing advertising would mean giving the app network access, which would end the guarantee in section 5.1. We would say so on this page, in the app's release notes and on the Google Play listing before it happened, and this page would be updated on the same day.
7. Who else is involved
- Google Play distributes and updates the app, and knows you installed it. That is Google's processing, under Google's privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy).
- Another app you choose to continue in — if you hand a number to WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Instagram or your messaging app, that number goes to that app, and what it does with it is governed by its own policy.
- Another phone you beam a card to. A card you send by sound or Bluetooth goes to whoever is listening nearby, so send it deliberately: the tones are as public as speech in the room.
There is no analytics provider, no crash-reporting service, no advertising network and no caller-ID service in the app.
8. Your rights (GDPR)
If you are in the EU, EEA or UK you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or port your personal data and to object to its processing. We hold none of your PerliDial data, so there is nothing for us to give you or delete: the data is on your phone, and uninstalling the app or clearing its storage removes what the app kept. Your contacts and call log belong to Android and remain after the app is gone. If you contact us at support@perlicom.com we will answer within one month.
You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission (www.dataprotection.ie) or with the supervisory authority where you live or work.
9. Californian residents (CCPA/CPRA)
We do not collect, sell or share personal information from PerliDial users, so there is nothing to opt out of. If advertising is ever introduced, this section will be updated before it ships.
10. Children
PerliDial is a general-purpose phone app and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone, including children.
11. Emergency calls
Emergency calls are placed by Android and your mobile network, not by us. PerliDial does not screen, delay or block an emergency call, and it never places an advert or an update prompt over the dialling screen. It cannot make a call where your phone has no service.
12. Changes to this policy
We will update this page if the app or the law changes, and change the effective date above. A change to what leaves the phone would be announced in the app and on the Google Play listing as well.
13. Contact
Perlicom Systems Limited (company number 546999, Ireland)
E-mail: support@perlicom.com