Effective October 2, 2026
Scheming Eunuch is an Android app by Nicholas Ton: a comedic AI assistant, voiced as a sycophantic palace eunuch, that lives in a home-screen widget. This policy says what it does with information.
In short: there's no developer account, no ads and no analytics. Your chats stay on your phone, except that what you say to the assistant is sent to the AI provider you choose, using your own key, or to the free trial service described below if you haven't added a key. The developer doesn't keep your messages.
The app stores your conversation, a short running summary of it, the facts the assistant has noted about you (for example, that you like tea), your reminders and your settings (names, title, voice, briefing time). API keys are encrypted with the Android Keystore. None of this is sent to the developer, apart from messages passed through the free trial service described below. App data is excluded from Android backups. You can erase memories and chat history in Settings, and uninstalling the app deletes everything.
Your AI provider. The app needs an AI provider to answer you. You pick one (OpenRouter, Google Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic) and supply your own key. When you send a message, or when the daily briefing is written, the app sends that provider your recent messages, the running summary, the noted facts, the current local date and time, and the assistant's instructions. The provider handles this under its own terms and privacy policy and your account with it: OpenRouter, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic. Free models may use what is sent to improve their services.
Free trial ("palace oracle"). If you haven't added your own key, the app sends the same information to a small relay run by the developer on Cloudflare Workers, along with a random install ID that the app creates. The relay forwards your messages to Google Gemini's free tier and returns the reply. It doesn't store your messages. To enforce daily limits it keeps only salted, one-way hashes of the install ID and your IP address, with a count of today's requests, and these are deleted within a few days. Google may use content sent to its free tier to improve its products (see Gemini API terms), and Cloudflare handles traffic under its privacy policy. Adding your own key in Settings stops use of the trial. If the trial is unavailable or used up and there's no key, the app replies offline with canned lines and sends nothing.
OpenRouter sign-in. If you choose "Sign in with OpenRouter", your browser opens OpenRouter's sign-in page; OpenRouter then gives the app a key, which is stored encrypted on your phone. The app also downloads public lists of available models from your provider.
Court gossip: texts, emails and notifications (optional, off by default). If you turn it on and grant Android notification access, the app reads the sender, title and text of notifications from other apps, including text messages, chat apps and email apps. It does not read your SMS or email inboxes directly; it only sees messages that arrive as notifications while access is on. They are kept only in memory, never saved to storage, and are sent to your AI provider (or the free trial relay) only when you ask about your messages, emails or notifications, or for the daily briefing. You can turn this off in Settings or in Android's settings.
Palace surveyors: approximate location (optional, off by default). If you turn it on and grant Android's approximate-location permission, the app looks up your approximate location only when you ask something that needs it (for example "where am I?"). It uses your phone's location service and geocoder to get the town or city and coordinates rounded to about 1 km, and sends these to your AI provider (or the free trial relay) to answer that question. Location is never tracked in the background, never stored by the app, and never sent to the developer. You can turn this off in Settings or in Android's settings.
All of this goes over encrypted (HTTPS) connections.
Voice input uses your phone's speech-recognition service (on most phones, Google's), which returns text to the app; the app does not record audio itself. Spoken replies use your phone's text-to-speech engine. Alarms and timers are handed to your Clock app, and opening apps or web searches hands off to those apps. The app only lists installed apps so it can open the one you name.
There's no sign-in to the developer, no advertising, and no analytics or tracking code. The app only asks for your location if you turn on Palace Surveyors, and never asks for your contacts, photos, camera or microphone. The developer doesn't collect, sell or share personal information. If you report a reply or send feedback, your email app sends that message, including the reply text and your phone model, to the developer.
Scheming Eunuch is not directed at children and is intended for adults.
If this policy changes, the new version will be on this page with a new effective date.
Questions about this policy or the app: nichkt@gmail.com.