Skip to main content

Privacy Policy

The short version: Purrchiver doesn’t collect anything about you. No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking, no account, no cloud sync, no third-party services. The app runs entirely on your Mac. The only data that ever leaves your Mac is something you explicitly choose to email us — a crash report or a sanitized diagnostic log — and even then, it’s scrubbed first and goes through your own mail client.

If that’s enough for you, you’re done. The rest of this page explains the specifics in case you need them.

What we don’t do

Purrchiver does NOT:

  • Collect personal information of any kind
  • Track usage, behavior, sessions, or feature engagement
  • Send telemetry, analytics, diagnostics, or beacons to any server
  • Use third-party analytics services (no Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Amplitude, no Firebase, no Segment, no Sentry, no anything)
  • Include third-party advertising SDKs of any kind
  • Show ads, sponsored content, affiliate links, or rewarded prompts
  • Sell, share, or rent any data — we have none to sell
  • Require an account, login, registration, or email address
  • Sync your archives, settings, or activity to any cloud service
  • Use cookies (there’s no web component in the app)
  • Fingerprint your device, network, or hardware

The above isn’t a “best effort” promise. The Purrchiver binary contains no analytics SDKs and no network-tracking code, period. You can verify this independently — see “Verifying these claims” near the end.

What stays on your Mac (and only on your Mac)

Some information is stored locally on your Mac so the app works correctly. None of it leaves your Mac unless you explicitly take an action that sends it.

Local-only data:

  • Your Purrchiver settings — Default view (single-pane / dual-pane), default compression format, default action when opening archives, file-type associations, and similar preferences. Stored in standard macOS preferences (~/Library/Containers/com.coreydaley.purrchiver/Data/Library/Preferences/).
  • Folder access permissions you’ve granted — When you pick a folder via “Choose Folder…” in the dual-pane file browser, macOS grants Purrchiver access to that folder for the current session via App Sandbox’s user-selected file mechanism. The access is in-memory only — closing the window drops it, and you’ll need to pick the folder again next launch. Nothing about it leaves your Mac.
  • Crash reports in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ — If you turn on Error reporting in Settings → General (off by default), Purrchiver checks that folder on launch for .ips files macOS wrote when it crashed. The App Sandbox lets an app read its own crash files there without you picking the folder. The check stays on your Mac — nothing is emailed until you click through the prompt and hit Send in Mail.
  • Archive passwords are session-only. When you type a password to unlock an encrypted archive, it lives in the open window’s memory for the duration of that session and nothing else. Purrchiver does not write archive passwords to the macOS Keychain, to app preferences, to unified logs, or anywhere on disk. Closing the window discards the password. You can verify this in Terminal: security find-generic-password -s "Purrchiver" returns “could not be found” because there is nothing there.
  • Recent archives list (if implemented) — A local list of recently-opened archives may be kept for the “Recent” menu. This list is stored in preferences, never transmitted.
  • Application logs — Purrchiver writes diagnostic events to macOS’s unified logging system (os.log). These logs live on your Mac like any other app’s logs. They never auto-transmit. You can view them with the macOS Console app, search for subsystem:com.coreydaley.purrchiver.

The two things that can leave your Mac (only if you explicitly choose)

Both are opt-in, never automatic, and both go through your own mail client. Purrchiver has no server, no API, no upload endpoint — it can’t send anything on its own.

1. Crash reports

If you turn on Error reporting in Settings → General (it’s off by default), and Purrchiver crashed last time it ran, you’ll be offered the chance to email a sanitized crash report. Three things worth knowing:

  1. It’s never automatic. Sending requires you to click a button after reviewing what’s being sent. If you don’t click, nothing leaves your Mac.
  2. The report is sanitized before you see it. Your username and home directory path are scrubbed. File names and file contents are never included — only system-level crash information (stack traces, library versions, the macOS version, the Mac model).
  3. It goes via your own email client. Purrchiver doesn’t operate a crash-collection server. The “Send report” action opens your default mail client with a pre-filled message addressed to corey@purrchiver.app. You can review, edit, or cancel before sending.

2. Sanitized diagnostic logs

If something’s misbehaving and you want to send a log alongside a support email, Settings → Advanced → Send sanitized log to developer captures the last hour of Purrchiver’s unified-log entries, scrubs your username and home path, and lets you preview the exact bytes that will leave before opening your mail client. Same as crash reports: nothing transmits until you click Send in Mail.

That’s the complete list. There’s no other surface in Purrchiver that can transmit data off your Mac.

Required Reason API usage (Apple Privacy Manifest)

Per Apple’s requirements (effective May 2024), Purrchiver declares the following Required Reason API usage in its bundled PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy file:

  • NSPrivacyAccessedAPICategoryFileTimestamp — reasons C617.1, DDA9.1, 0A2A.1, 3B52.1 — Purrchiver reads file modification timestamps when showing archive contents, preserving them on extract, sweeping its own cache directory, and preserving mtime into newly-created archives. Used only within the app context; never transmitted.
  • NSPrivacyAccessedAPICategoryDiskSpace — reason E174.1 — Purrchiver checks available disk space before extraction to warn you if an archive won’t fit. Never transmitted.
  • NSPrivacyAccessedAPICategoryUserDefaults — reason CA92.1 — Purrchiver reads its own preferences via NSUserDefaults. The reads are scoped to its own preference container; no other app’s preferences are accessed.

No other Required Reason APIs are used. No third-party SDKs are bundled, so no third-party Required Reason API declarations apply.

App Sandbox and macOS permissions

Purrchiver runs under Apple’s App Sandbox with these entitlements:

  • com.apple.security.app-sandbox — full sandbox enabled
  • com.apple.security.files.user-selected.read-write — read/write access only to files you’ve explicitly chosen (via Open dialog, drag-drop onto the app, or the dual-pane folder picker)

Purrchiver has NO entitlement for:

  • Outgoing network connections (the binary cannot make network requests)
  • Incoming network connections
  • Camera, microphone, contacts, calendar, photos, or location
  • Bluetooth, USB, or hardware devices
  • Apple Events (no scripting or controlling other apps)
  • Inheriting parent process privileges

If macOS prompts you for permission to access a folder, that’s the normal sandbox security check, not a data-collection attempt. Purrchiver only sees what you explicitly grant access to.

Third-party services

Purrchiver uses zero third-party services. Specifically:

  • No cloud storage (no iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive integration)
  • No authentication providers (no Sign in with Apple, no OAuth)
  • No content delivery networks called from the app
  • No remote configuration services
  • No A/B testing infrastructure
  • No feature-flag services
  • No remote update mechanisms (Purrchiver updates only via the Mac App Store)

The app includes vendored third-party libraries (libarchive, UnRAR, LZMA SDK, libzstd, liblz4) plus Apple’s AppleArchive framework — these are compiled into the binary at build time. None of them make network calls from within Purrchiver.

Marketing website (purrchiver.app)

This website uses Cloudflare Web Analytics — a privacy-preserving analytics service that:

  • Uses no cookies
  • Collects no personally identifiable information
  • Doesn’t track you across other sites
  • Is GDPR/CCPA compliant without requiring a consent banner

If you’d rather not be counted in the aggregate visit statistics, blocking the static.cloudflareinsights.com domain in your browser will do that. Nothing on this website requires the analytics to function.

The website does not set any other tracking cookies, run any other analytics, or share any data with third parties.

Children’s privacy

Purrchiver is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect any information from any user, regardless of age. The “no data collection” stance applies universally.

Your rights under GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations

Since Purrchiver doesn’t collect, store, or transmit any personal data, requests under GDPR, CCPA, or similar regulations (right to access, right to deletion, right to portability, etc.) are simple to fulfill: we have nothing about you to access, delete, or port.

If you’ve sent a crash report via your email client, that report exists in our support email inbox. You can request its deletion at any time by contacting corey@purrchiver.app with the subject line “Privacy: delete my crash report” and we’ll delete the relevant emails. (We don’t index or retain crash reports beyond what’s necessary to diagnose the underlying bug.)

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the change will be reflected here with an updated “Last updated” date below. Material changes — anything that changes what data Purrchiver collects, stores, or transmits — will also be announced in the Purrchiver release notes for the version that introduces the change.

This policy applies to the version of Purrchiver currently distributed via the Mac App Store. If you’re running a development build or a pre-release version, additional logging may be active that the production version doesn’t have; any such pre-release builds are clearly marked.

Verifying these claims

You don’t have to take our word for any of this. You can verify the no-network-traffic claim directly:

  1. Open Activity Monitor → Network tab while using Purrchiver. Purrchiver should show 0 bytes sent and 0 bytes received throughout normal use.
  2. Use Little Snitch or LuLu (third-party network monitors) to inspect outbound connection attempts. Purrchiver makes none.
  3. Inspect the app’s entitlements with codesign -d --entitlements - /Applications/Purrchiver.app — there is no com.apple.security.network.client (or …network.server) entry, so the kernel refuses outbound and inbound socket connections regardless of what’s in the binary. The entitlements are the binding constraint; everything else is corroboration.

If you find any network activity coming from Purrchiver that contradicts this policy, email corey@purrchiver.app immediately and we’ll treat it as a P0 bug.

Contact

Privacy questions, concerns, or correction requests:

  • Email: corey@purrchiver.app
  • Subject line: prefix with “Privacy:” so it routes correctly
  • Postal contact available upon request for jurisdictions that require it

The developer is Corey Daley, operating as an individual Apple Developer (not a corporate entity). Responses are best-effort and typically arrive within a few business days.

Effective date: 2026-05-23 Last updated: 2026-05-23

This policy was written by hand to be as clear as possible. If anything here is unclear, that’s a bug — let us know.