No tracking.

What stays on your Mac

Everything the app knows about you is in files you can open, inside your Library folder:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Contralto/undo-journal.json: the previous value of every setting the app changed, so Restore everything can put it back.
• ~/Library/Application Support/Contralto/clipboard.json: your clipboard history, if you turned it on. Text copied from password managers and other concealed sources is never recorded. Clear it from the Clipboard screen at any time.
• ~/Library/Application Support/Contralto/dock-backup.plist, display-journal.json, installed.json, updates.log: the Dock as it was before the app changed it, the display modes it can restore, which apps it installed for you, and a line per update check.
• ~/Library/Application Support/Contralto/trial.json and two extended attributes on the Application Support folder: when the trial started and, after you buy, your licence key with its seat id. No keychain entry.
• ~/Library/Application Support/Contralto/diagnostics/: crash summaries, only if you turned on "Keep crash reports on this Mac" in Settings. They stay there; you decide whether to paste one into an email.
• ~/Library/Application Support/Contralto/snips/: your last twenty screenshots taken with Win+Shift+S, PrintScreen or the Mac's own keys while the app was running, as PNG files, oldest deleted first. Delete any of them in Finder, or set the number kept on the Keyboard screen.
• ~/Library/Caches/Contralto/downloads/: an app you asked to install, while it is being checked. Deleted once the app is installed.

The keyboard engine stores no keystrokes. It looks at each key press only to decide whether it is one of the shortcuts you turned on, rewrites it if so, and forgets it. Window previews for Alt+Tab exist only while the switcher is open. Screenshots are taken by macOS itself, not by the app, which needs no Screen Recording permission for them; Copy text and Quick redact in the Snips editor read the picture with the text recognition built into macOS, on your Mac, and the words go to your clipboard and nowhere else.

Every connection the app can make

Three, each one started by something you do. Nothing runs in the background on its own except the licence confirmation and, if you allowed it, the update check.

1. Activating and confirming a licence

Licences are sold by Polar (Polar Software, Inc.), the payment processor and merchant of record for Contralto: the checkout, the receipt and the licence key come from Polar, and its privacy policy covers what it keeps about your purchase. The app talks to Polar's licence server (api.polar.sh) four ways:

• When you enter a key and click Activate: the key, our store's identifier and the name of this Mac (the computer name from System Settings), so the key can count this Mac as one of its seats.
• Every 7 days while a licence is active: the key, our store's identifier and this Mac's seat id, to confirm the licence still stands. Without a connection the app keeps working for 14 days.
• If an activation is refused because every seat is taken: one more request with the key and the store identifier only, to learn how many Macs the key covers so the message can say so.
• When you click Deactivate this Mac: the key, the store identifier and the seat id, to free the seat.

Nothing else is sent: no serial number, no hardware fingerprint, no email, no account.

2. Checking for updates

If you allow automatic checks in Settings, the app asks this site (contralto.app) for its update feed about once a day; you can also click Check for updates yourself. The request carries the app's version and the updater's version in its user-agent string and nothing about you or your Mac: system profile reporting is switched off in the app. When you accept an update, the app downloads it from this site and refuses it unless its signature matches the key built into the app.

3. Installing apps from the Apps screen

When you click Install, the app downloads the chosen program from its maker's own server, the same request a browser would make, identifying itself as "Contralto". Programs hosted on GitHub are looked up through the GitHub API to find their latest release; one entry reads its maker's mirror list first. The maker's server sees a download from your Mac; the app sends nothing about you.

Links

Buy, Support, the privacy policy, the Polar customer portal, an app's Website link and the links in the guide open in your web browser. The app itself never fetches those pages, and the guide inside the app loads no web fonts or scripts.

What we do not do

• No analytics or usage statistics, ever, opt-in or otherwise.
• No crash reports are sent. Kept locally only if you ask.
• No account. The licence key is the only thing that identifies a purchase.
• The privileged helper that turns the firewall on for you never uses the network.
• No cookies on this site, no third-party scripts, no fonts fetched from anyone else's server.

Contact

Questions about this policy: support@contralto.app.