For the people being tracked
What HelloTime can and cannot see.
Your employer has started using HelloTime, or is thinking about it. You did not choose it, and you are entitled to know exactly what it does. This page is written for you, not for them.
We are not going to tell you this is not monitoring. HelloTime records when you work, and depending on what your employer switches on it can record where you clocked in, how active you were, and screenshots of your work screen. What we can tell you precisely is where the line is — and there is a line, enforced in code, not just promised in a policy.
What it records
Several of these are optional and off unless your employer turns them on. Where that is the case, it says so.
When you clocked in and out
Both the time your device reported and the time our server recorded. If the two disagree, your manager sees both — that protects you as much as it protects them.
Where you were at the moment of a punch
Only if your employer has turned on GPS or geofencing. It is the location at the instant you clock in or out — not a continuous trail of your day.
Hours against projects and tasks
What you booked time to, so timesheets and client invoices can be built without anyone chasing you for a spreadsheet.
How much you typed and clicked — as a number
An activity level: a count of keyboard and mouse events per interval. It says you were active. It does not say what you did.
Which apps and sites were in the foreground
Only if your employer has turned app and URL tracking on for your project. Names of applications and domains, not the contents of what is inside them.
Screenshots — only if switched on, and never silently
Screenshots are optional per project and per user. When they are on you get a visible indicator and a notification at the moment of capture. There is no silent mode to turn on.
Leave, shifts and payslips
Your own requests, balances and pay documents — which you can read and download yourself.
What it never records
These are not settings your employer can switch on. The capability does not exist in the product.
What you type
HelloTime has no keylogger. Keyboard events are counted, never recorded. Your passwords, messages and documents are never captured as text — there is no code in the product that could.
Your clipboard
Nothing you copy is read or transmitted.
Your camera or microphone, on a schedule
There is no background camera or audio capture. The camera is used at the moment you take a clock-in selfie or a face check, and nothing else.
Your face, on our servers
If your employer uses face clock-in, the face template is created on your own phone, encrypted on your own phone, and compared on your own phone. Only a pass or fail result reaches HelloTime. Uninstall the app and the template goes with it.
Anything on your personal phone outside the app
HelloTime reads no other apps, no SMS, no call log, no photo library and no browsing history from your device.
You, when you are off the clock
The desktop tracker records while a timer is running. Stop the timer and it stops.
The face-recognition architecture — why the template stays on your phone and what that trades away — is documented in full on our security page, including the parts that are less flattering to us.
What you can do
These are things the product lets you do. They are not a statement of your legal rights, which depend on where you work and on your employer’s own policies — your local data-protection law may give you more.
See your own record
You can open your own attendance history and download your own payslips without asking anyone.
Correct a wrong punch
Raise a regularisation. A manager approves or rejects it, and the before-and-after values are written to an audit log with who changed what. Corrections are not silent edits.
Nobody signs off their own request
Leave and timesheet approvals always route to somebody else. Self-approval is not possible in the product.
Ask what is switched on
Which of the optional capabilities above are enabled is your employer's decision, and they can show you. If you are not sure what applies to you, that is the question to ask.
How long it is kept
Nothing accumulates indefinitely. Deletion runs on a clock.
- Screenshots and activity history
- Auto-deleted on a retention clock set by your employer's plan — 60 days, 180 days or 2 years. This is enforced by the product, not by policy alone.
- Face templates
- Erased after 30 days of inactivity, or immediately when you are offboarded.
- Attendance and timesheet records
- Kept for the employment relationship plus whatever period your local law requires — typically around three years under Indian labour law and the US FLSA, longer in regulated industries.
Data-protection notices, sub-processors and the full retention policy are on our privacy policy, DPDP notice and trust centre.
If something looks wrong
Start with your manager or HR — they control the settings and they can show you what is switched on for your team. HelloTime is the software vendor; your employer decides how it is configured and is the data controller for your records.
If you believe the product itself is doing something this page says it does not, we want to know. Write to [email protected] with the subject “Employee privacy question”. We would rather answer an awkward question than have you assume the worst.
Rolling HelloTime out to a team?
Send them this page before the first clock-in, not after. The fastest way to fail a rollout is for people to discover monitoring rather than be told about it.