Privacy

The short version

Padrail has no account and no sign in. It runs on your Mac and reads your trackpad there. Your touches never leave your Mac: Padrail does not record, keep or send them.

What does leave your Mac is what a licence check and an update check need, described below. This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.

What Padrail sees on your Mac

Finger positions on the trackpad, as macOS reports them. Padrail uses each touch the moment it happens, to tell a slide or a tap from normal use, and keeps none of them.

With the Accessibility permission it also sees pointer moves and mouse clicks, so it can hold the pointer still during a slide and keep a corner tap from turning into a click. It sends the volume, brightness, keyboard light, mute, play, pause and track keys, and the keys or scrolling of any edges you give an app. It does not read what you type, what is on your screen or what is in your apps.

To give an app its own edges, Padrail notes which app is in front. To list your Shortcuts in its panel, it reads their names. It keeps neither.

What Padrail keeps on your Mac

Your settings, in Padrail's preferences on your Mac.

In the version bought from this site, your licence key once it is activated, in your login Keychain.

What leaves your Mac

The version bought from this site talks to Polar, to activate your licence key and then to check it while your Mac is online: at most once a day, or once an hour after Polar refused the key, so a refusal that was a mistake clears on its own. Activating carries:

• the licence key;
• a label for the Mac: the name you gave it in System Settings, so you can tell your Macs apart in Polar's customer portal;
• an anonymous id for the Mac: part of a one way hash of its hardware id, never the id itself;
• the Padrail and macOS version numbers.

The daily check, and freeing a Mac, send the key and that Mac's activation id. Polar handles all of this under its privacy policy.

That version also checks padrail.com for new versions of Padrail. It asks you before it checks on its own, and you can always check by hand from the menu. A check downloads a list of versions from padrail.com and sends no profile of your Mac; Cloudflare logs it like any visit to this site (see below).

Nothing else. No analytics, no crash reports, no ads.

Buying

Polar is the merchant of record, so Polar collects your payment details, email address and billing address for tax at checkout, under Polar's privacy policy. We never see your card number.

We see the order in Polar: the name and email address you gave, your country, the amount and the licence key. We use your email address only to answer you and to handle a refund. No newsletter, no marketing.

Email

When you write to support@padrail.com, we keep the conversation so we can answer it and help you later. Replies are sent through useSend, an email delivery service. We do not add you to any list.

This website

padrail.com is a static site served by Cloudflare. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics, advertising or tracking scripts, and the font comes from padrail.com itself. Like any web server, Cloudflare processes your IP address, browser user agent and the address you asked for to deliver the page and block abuse, and keeps those logs for a short time under its own terms.

The buy buttons open Polar's checkout, which is Polar's site, under Polar's privacy policy.

The Setapp edition

If you use Padrail through Setapp, it works the same and keeps the same things on your Mac. What it sends differs in two ways:

• No licence key and no Polar. Setapp handles access, billing and updates.
• Setapp's framework inside Padrail tells Setapp when Padrail is opened and used, which is how Setapp pays the apps its members use. No touches, settings or anything about your apps go into it. Setapp's privacy notice covers what Setapp does with it.

Children

Padrail is a general purpose utility and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children, beyond what a purchase or an email needs.

Changes and contact

This page changes when Padrail does, and the date at the top says when it last did. Questions, or a request to delete what we hold about you: support@padrail.com.