App Metrics Legal Considerations

1. Short and formal

Releasecat takes data protection and privacy seriously. However, when using App Metrics, the data collected and stored does not qualify as personal data under the GDPR or similar data protection regulations.

Here's why:

  • No user-identifiable data is collected or stored.

    Releasecat does not track or log which specific users triggered which functions in your application.

  • Only anonymous functional identifiers are processed.

    When your app sends usage data to Releasecat, it only includes numeric or symbolic function identifiers.

    These identifiers are completely decoupled from user accounts, sessions, or devices.

  • No session, device, or behavioral data is recorded.

    The system does not store, analyze, or infer any behavior related to individual users — even in an anonymized or pseudonymized form.

  • Aggregated counters only.

    Each usage report merely increases a global counter for a given function within a specific app version.

These counters reflect total usage across all users and cannot be traced back to any individual or group.

As a result, no data stored in the App Metrics module can be used — even theoretically — to identify or profile users. Therefore, the metrics data is not subject to GDPR, CCPA, or similar data privacy laws.

2. In other words

If you're building an application for a highly regulated and closely supervised industry (such as banking), you may be concerned about whether collecting data on how features are used complies with regulations that restrict the collection of user-related information.

In such cases, the bare minimum is usually to ask users for explicit consent. Unfortunately, this significantly reduces the representativeness of the data sample and limits the value of both the research and its results. And that's exactly what we want to avoid.

At Releasecat, we've developed an approach based on collecting data about the application—not about the user. At no point and at no stage do our systems store information about the actions of any specific user.

Neither you nor any of our administrators can obtain personal data about your users—or even anonymized user identifiers linked to any description, statistics, or other trace of a user's activity in your application, not even a one-off event.

And this is not because such data is exceptionally well protected. It's because this data is not processed by our systems at all. Put simply: it does not exist.

So how does Releasecat know how frequently a given feature of your application is used? Because that's the only thing we actually collect. Each time a feature is used in your application, that event is sent to Releasecat at some

point. Releasecat then increments a global usage counter for that feature (in other words, it increases the number associated with the metric identifier by one). No user is identified or remembered in the process. Every feature usage is treated exactly the same.

This also reveals a certain limitation of our metrics. Since we don't know who used a given feature, we increment its counter on every use, regardless of who triggered it. As a result, if user A uses a feature 100 times in a week and user B uses it only once, Releasecat will store the value 101 for that feature—not 2.

At first glance, this may seem unrepresentative or even misleading, but:

  • first, we measure how often a feature is used. We do not answer the question "How many people used feature A?"—because we don't distinguish between "people." We answer a different question: how often feature A was used in the application. That, we do know.
  • second, across thousands—or even millions—of usage events, statistics do their job and naturally smooth out such inequalities. Extremely frequent (or extremely rare) usage by a small percentage of users fades into the average.

So you can use Releasecat App Metrics with confidence. No one will extract information about your users' behavior—because we don't collect it anywhere, in any form.