Free time tracking apps are everywhere. Toggl, Clockify, Harvest, RescueTime — most of them offer generous free tiers. But have you ever stopped to ask: if the product is free, how does the company make money?
The answer, in most cases, involves your data.
What most time tracking apps do with your data
When you sign up for a free time tracking app, you typically agree to a terms of service that allows the company to:
- ✓Analyse your usage patterns to improve the product
- ✓Share aggregated data with third-party analytics providers
- ✓Use behavioural data for targeted advertising
- ✓Store your data on servers outside your country or region
For many users, this is an acceptable trade-off. But for freelancers handling sensitive client work, teams operating under GDPR, or educators working with institutional data — it may not be.
What "your data" actually includes
Your time tracking data is more revealing than it might seem. Consider what a time tracker knows about you:
- ✓Which clients you work with and how much time you spend on each
- ✓Your working hours, patterns and productivity rhythms
- ✓The names of your projects and tasks
- ✓How your workload changes over time
This is sensitive business intelligence. For a freelancer, it could reveal your client roster and billing rates. For a company, it could expose project timelines and staffing levels.
GDPR and time tracking
If you're based in the EU — or if you have employees or clients in the EU — the General Data Protection Regulation applies to how your time tracking data is stored and processed.
Many popular time tracking apps store data on US-based servers and share data with US-based third parties. Under GDPR, this requires specific legal mechanisms (like Standard Contractual Clauses) and may not be appropriate for all use cases.
EU-based employers subject to mandatory time tracking requirements under national law need to be particularly careful about which tools they use.
What to look for in a privacy-first time tracker
When evaluating a time tracking app for privacy, ask:
- 1Where is my data stored? (EU vs US servers)
- 2Is my data shared with third parties? If so, which ones and why?
- 3Can I export my data at any time?
- 4Can I delete my data completely?
- 5How does the company make money if the product is free?
The alternative
Keeping Time is built on a simple principle: your time tracking data belongs to you. We store data in Europe, we don't share it with third parties, we don't run ads, and we're transparent about our business model (a future paid plan — not your data).
It's free during beta. You can start in seconds.