Why I Built a Screen Time Tracker That Never Sees Your Data

I spend too much time on my phone. This is not a confession, it's a demographic fact. The average is somewhere around 3 hours a day, and I was right in that range. Mostly Instagram Reels, mostly in the evenings. I'd start scrolling and suddenly realize two hours had passed. The turning point was a Huberman Lab episode where he discussed a 2017 study ("Brain Drain" by Ward et al.) showing that the mere presence of a phone in the same room, even face-down, even if you're not thinking about it, measurably reduces cognitive performance. Not distraction. Presence. That reframed the problem for me: this isn't about willpower. It's about designing small friction points that interrupt the autopilot. So I decided to build my own tracker. And along the way, I discovered that the most popular tools for measuring this problem have a privacy problem of their own. The screen time tracker trust problem When I started looking for a tracker, the big names kept appearing: StayFree (~200K Chrome users, m