The default Samsung Calculator doesn't display a privacy policy (or any menu options really) in-app, but you can find them as a link at the bottom of the 'See Details' page under 'Data Saftey' on the play store. Annoyingly, it's just a generic set of terms that covers most of their products/services. That document says they collect and share all sorts of data, but the store page for the calculator say no data collected.
(i) Privacy Policies: All apps must include a link to their privacy policy in the App Store Connect metadata field and within the app in an easily accessible manner...
For Android it's in their User Data article:
Privacy Policy
All apps must post a privacy policy link in the designated field within Play Console, and a privacy policy link or text within the app itself...
In this case, it redirects to Google's general privacy policy that covers all their services. Anyway Google's calculator stores a history of all the calculations you did in your account somewhere. So I guess it needs to have a policy stating what they do with that data.
Alas, no permissions doesn't fully mean no privacy intrusion/violation. For example, system permissions are not needed to track how many times you calculate 8008135, and upload that statistic together with your IP address to a public website.
Google is so far off the deep end of "cloud" shit and surveillance capitalism that the people running the Play Store can no longer even conceive of software that's incapable of spying because it doesn't connect to the Internet to begin with.
I work for a company that requires everything to have a privacy policy that meets some minimums. We're technically not supposed to even use Google websearch because putting any question into it potentially sends company information into the world and out of our control. That one's not really enforced, thank goodness.
Without a privacy policy, I guess the calculator app could scrape the numbers you're entering, plus, idk an email and a OneNote entry for context, to reverse engineer the latest doodad we've been designing.
It's difficult to imagine what numbers from the calculator alone could be used for, but combine it with other information and you've got a problem.
Defensish. Close enough that we overlap some and have a lot of intense rules to follow.
These people throwing company private information into chatGPT are absolutely wild to me. I'm waiting for someone from an actual defense company to get busted and make headlines for putting like missile defense system specs in, and then it's part of the dataset used to feed answers to everyone else.
A privacy policy is only legally required when you actually collect user data. Most devs don't write a privacy policy for no reason, so seeing one can often be suspicious. Btw if you are worried about a FOSS app tracking you without disclosing it in their privacy policy, if this is the case, F-Droid would display it under the Anti-features section.
I can't believe you use the calculator for 2x2! Do you need help from mathtutors.com? It's only $5 per month but just for you we're applying a special rebate which puts your offer at a much lower $12 per month.
We also noticed that you calculated numbers near 700,000....are you try to buy a house? And also you keep dividing things by 9 and 12. Are you expecting a baby soon?
A teenager making a simple and cute calculator and deciding to share it with the world and the world takes that, people contribute, and project emerges