Belong Switzerland, Privacy Policy
Belong Switzerland runs on your iPhone. What you enter about your residence, your record and your progress stays on your phone. We do not collect it, we cannot see it and it is never sent to us or to anyone else.
Who we are
Belong Switzerland is made by Belong Europe ApS, a company registered in Copenhagen, Denmark, CVR number 46649044, at Øster Søgade 32, 3. tv, 1357 København. You can reach us at hello@belongeurope.com.
What you enter and where it lives
Your citizenship, the month you became resident, whether you hold a C permit, whether you are married to a Swiss citizen, your answer about your criminal record, what you have done toward the language, knowledge and work requirements, the trips you log or plan ahead, your practice progress, the day you filed your application and the updates you log about it, the sitting date you add, the details of any second person you add and anything else you enter are stored only on your phone, in the app’s own storage. They are not uploaded, backed up to us or shared with any third party. If you delete the app, that data goes with it.
The name and the photo you can add for yourself on the You tab are stored the same way: the name in the app’s own storage, the photo scaled down and saved as one file in the app’s private storage on your phone. Neither is uploaded, synced or shared, and removing them, or deleting the app, deletes them.
Your What if scenarios are not stored at all. The sandbox runs on a copy of your situation held in memory while the sheet is open, and it is discarded when you close it.
What we collect
Nothing. Belong Switzerland has no accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party software development kits that collect data about you. We do not know who you are, whether you opened the app today or what you entered.
Belong Switzerland is an iPhone app with no account: there is nothing to sign in to, nothing to link and no email address for us to hold. Your subscription is checked between the app and the App Store on your phone. No server of ours is involved in that decision.
This page, our terms page and belongswiss.app are served by Cloudflare, which records anonymous page-load statistics for us without cookies. The app has no part in that and sends nothing about you.
If you write to us
belongswiss.app invites you to email us if you want to hear the day Belong Switzerland is out. That email, and any other you send to hello@belongeurope.com, reaches us with your email address and what you wrote. We use it only to answer you, or to write to you the day the app is out if that is what you asked for. We never add it to a marketing list, sell it or pass it on, and you can ask us at any time to delete it.
A second person on your phone
You can add a second adult, such as a partner, on the You tab, and the app keeps a count for them alongside yours. What you enter about them, their name, their answers to the setup questions, the trips logged for them and any filing you record for them, is stored only on your phone, in the same place as your own entries, and is never sent to us or to anyone else. Practice, documents, reminders and the copy the widgets read hold your own entries only and never theirs. Removing a person deletes their entries from the phone; deleting the app deletes them with everything else.
News
The News segment, which sits in the Practice tab alongside Practice, Chapters, Progress and Guides, shows The Local Switzerland’s stories, from their public tag feeds at feeds.thelocal.com: the immigration tag and the Swiss citizenship tag. The app requests the two feeds directly from your phone when you open the segment or pull to refresh. The stories are already scoped to immigration and citizenship by The Local’s own tags, and your device keeps the recent ones; no server of ours sees any of it. The request itself is an ordinary web request, so The Local’s servers see standard technical information such as your IP address, exactly as they would if you opened their site yourself. We add no identifier to the request, we do not tell The Local who you are and we receive nothing back about you.
If you turn on news notifications, the check for new stories runs in the background and makes the same request, when iOS decides to run it. The preference is stored on your device only. Tapping a story opens it in the in-app browser on The Local’s own site, where their privacy policy applies and some articles may require a subscription. Besides this, the app puts only three kinds of request on the network: the App Store check on your subscription, the App Store’s own request to show you a rating card and any page you choose to open, which loads from whoever publishes it, in the in-app browser or in your phone’s own browser.
Practice
The practice questions in the Practice tab come with the app rather than from a server, and practising works fully offline.
Your answers, your scores, your mistakes deck, the schedule that decides when a question comes back, your progress through the chapters, your run of days and the sitting date you can add are written to your own device and never sent anywhere. Nothing about how you practise reaches us, and no authority sees any of it.
Opening the page of the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) on ordinary naturalisation loads it from SEM’s own site, in an in-app browser, and none of your practice history goes with it.
Stage one and your permit
The Path tab has two stages, C permit and Citizenship. What you record on Stage one is stored only on your phone, in the same place as the rest of your entries: the requirements you mark with I meet this, whether you have told the app you hold a C permit, the day your residence permit ends if you add it and your answer if you tell the app you have no permit that ends. None of it is sent to us or to anyone else, and what you record there for a second person is stored the same way, with their other entries. The requirements, fees and renewal rules shown there ship inside the app, and showing them makes no network request. Opening an official source, such as the law on fedlex.admin.ch, loads it from that site and carries nothing you entered.
The dates worked out from your permit, such as when you can apply to extend it and the last day the law asks you to apply by, appear in What’s coming. They reach you through the same alerts as the other dates, only if you have turned those alerts on and only for your own permit, never for a second person’s. Like any notification they can appear on your lock screen, and they say that they are about extending your residence permit. Most of them also give the day it ends.
After you apply
If you tell the app that you have applied, what you record is stored only on your phone: the day you filed, the reference from the authority’s receipt if you choose to enter it and the updates you log from the authority’s letters, each with its date, its kind and any note you write. None of it is sent to us, and the reference in particular is never transmitted anywhere: the app cannot look your case up and does not try. The link to SEM’s own page opens as an ordinary web request, exactly like any other link in the app, and carries nothing you entered. Removing the filing deletes all of it from the phone.
Exam sittings and guides
The Practice tab says how your knowledge of Switzerland is checked and lists no sittings, because there is no national test and no national calendar: your canton decides. That note, and the guides in the Guides segment, ship inside the app. Showing them makes no network request, and the day each guide’s facts were read from the law and from SEM is printed on the guide itself. A sitting date you add, and which guides you have opened, are stored on your phone only.
Passport
The facts on the Passport tab (validity, fee, where to apply, dual citizenship and the notes on the Swiss passport’s design) ship with the app and are shown without any network request. If you add your name or a photo on the You tab, the Passport tab displays them; they are the same name and photo described above, and nothing else is collected. Opening the official page on ch.ch opens it in the in-app browser; the page loads from that site, and none of your data goes with it.
Documents you attach
On the Path tab you can attach a document to a requirement (a language certificate, a residence permit, a payslip, a test result) with a name and, if you want, an expiry date. The file stays on this phone and we never receive it.
Documents are written inside the app’s own storage with iOS file protection switched on, so the system keeps them encrypted and unreadable while your iPhone is locked. The name and the expiry date you give a document are kept alongside it, in the same place. Files up to 15 MB are accepted; anything larger is refused with a plain error rather than trimmed. If you set an expiry date and turn milestone alerts on, the name you gave the document is used as the title of that alert, and like any notification it can appear on your lock screen. That is worth knowing when you name something sensitive. Only that name leaves the vault; the file itself never does.
Removing a document deletes the file, and deleting the app deletes all of them. They are never uploaded, we never see them and we keep no copy anywhere else. Attaching copies the file into the app: the photo or file you picked stays where it was, in your photo library or in Files, and remains your own copy.
One thing worth knowing: these files are deliberately kept out of your iPhone backup. If you back your device up to iCloud or to a computer, your documents are not part of that backup, so they cannot reach another phone that way. The cost is worth stating plainly: restoring a new phone from a backup, or setting one up from your old one, will not bring your documents back, and you attach them again. That is the version of this we can stand behind. Papers this sensitive should not travel further than the phone you chose to put them on. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot easily get again, and attach only what you actually need.
Reminders and alerts
Alerts for the dates in What’s coming, and the daily practice reminder, are local notifications, and so is the news alert; they are off until you turn them on. Your phone schedules them from information already on it, so they use no server of ours, no push service and no device token. Nothing about them reaches us: not that you switched them on, not when one fires, not whether you opened it. The settings are stored on your device.
What a notification says is worth knowing, because like any notification it can appear on your lock screen. A Daily 5 reminder quotes one of the questions in that day’s round; the reminders are scheduled up to two weeks ahead from what is on your phone, and a day’s reminder is withdrawn once that day’s round is done. An alert for a date in What’s coming carries the title of that date, which for a trip includes the destination you named, so name a trip with that in mind. A news alert carries the story’s headline. An alert for a reply window you logged carries the date of the letter and the note you wrote when you logged it, so write that note with the lock screen in mind. Tapping any of them opens the screen it names inside the app, and nothing about the tap leaves your phone.
Widgets
You can add Belong Switzerland widgets to your home screen and to the Lock Screen: where you stand, your longest stay abroad, Today’s five and the newest story from The Local Switzerland. A widget shows what the app already holds, run through the same rules, and nothing else. The app keeps a copy of your own entries, which the widgets read, in a container Apple sets aside on your device for the app and its widgets, so a widget can read it without the app running. That copy does not leave your phone, and no server of ours is involved in drawing a widget. Whatever a widget shows is visible to anyone who can see your home screen or Lock Screen, so remove the widget if that matters to you. The widgets show figures only while your subscription is active and show nothing until your situation is set up, and the news widget makes no request of its own: it shows the story the app last fetched.
Recommending the app
The Recommend Belong Switzerland button on the You tab opens your phone’s own share sheet with a short message and a link to belongswiss.app. You choose whether to send it, to whom and with which app, and that app handles it under its own terms. The link carries no code or identifier and the app sends us nothing when you share it. We never learn whether or to whom anything was sent. Nothing is tracked, counted or rewarded.
Subscriptions and payments
Belong Switzerland Pro is an optional auto-renewable subscription at CHF 34.00 per year in Switzerland, with a 7-day free trial. The price that applies is the one the App Store shows you when you subscribe.
Payment is handled entirely by Apple through your Apple Account. We never see your card, your billing address or your name. Apple reports sales to us only in aggregate, as numbers, with no way to identify individual subscribers, and Apple’s own privacy policy governs that transaction.
Diagnostics
If you have turned on Apple’s optional analytics sharing in iOS Settings, Apple may send us crash and performance reports in a form that does not identify you. We use them only to find and fix problems. You can turn this off at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements.
We add no crash reporting of our own to the app.
Where personal data goes
The app sends us nothing, so no personal data travels from your phone to us. Where personal data about someone in Switzerland does reach a company named on this page, this is where it goes and what makes that lawful under Swiss data protection law:
- Belong Europe ApS is in Denmark. Switzerland recognises Denmark as providing an adequate level of data protection, in Annex 1 of the Swiss Data Protection Ordinance.
- Cloudflare, which serves this page, our terms page and belongswiss.app, is Cloudflare, Inc. in the United States. It is certified under the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and the same annex recognises organisations certified under that framework as providing an adequate level of protection.
- Apple handles your subscription payment and any diagnostics you choose to share as a company in its own right, under its own privacy policy, not on our behalf. What Apple passes on to us identifies no one.
- The Local receives the news request directly from your phone, as described above, and handles it under its own privacy policy. We are not part of that request.
Your data and your rights
Because your data never reaches us, there is no account for us to export, correct or delete. You already hold all of it, and deleting the app deletes it. Belong Europe ApS is established in Denmark, so the GDPR governs how we handle personal data. Under the GDPR you keep your rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection against any personal data a company actually holds about you.
If you are in Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), in force since 1 September 2023, applies as well, and you have the rights it gives you. They include the right to be told whether we process personal data about you and what it is, to have it corrected or deleted and to receive it in a common electronic format.
If you believe we have mishandled personal data, you can contact us first. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In Switzerland that is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) at edoeb.admin.ch. Because we are established in Denmark, you can also complain to the Danish Datatilsynet at datatilsynet.dk.
Children
Belong Switzerland is made for adults navigating their own immigration and nationality path. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes to this policy
If we change how the app handles data, we will update this page and its effective date, and we will say so in the app when the change is material. In particular, this page is updated before any feature that makes a new kind of network request ships.
Contact
Questions about this policy: hello@belongeurope.com.