General questions about data policy

General
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HI,
I’ve recently discovered AppControl and as somewhat privacy focused person instantly went to check apps privacy policy, but found it lacking. My questions are:

  1. You’re writing that app collects “little to no” data. And it means that some data gets collected. So, which data gets collected by the app?
  2. App has privacy mode. As I understand in this mode app has no connectivity to the network at all. Is it correct?(I’m asking only because even after installing app in privacy mode it still has “Check for updates” feature in settings)

These questions arousing only due to lacking information on relevant pages and my feedback would be to add more details.

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@Eva

Thanks for asking about our privacy/data policy. We are a small indie development team that has experience selling shareware-style software for over 10 years, so we don’t have any experience or interest in collecting/selling user data.

In fact, I don’t think resource usage data has any significant value to anyone, but maybe I am mistaken since I never worked in that world and have no interest in doing so. Our team doesn’t like apps that spy or collect user data, so we made AppControl so it can detect and kill those types of apps.

When we launched AppControl a few months ago we put on our home page “If others enjoy AppControl we plan to offer optional premium features someday in the future” so it would be clear we are not a data collection company.

  1. Privacy Policy - AppControl It depends on what settings you turn on (you must give consent it asks for in AppControl with this setting). “if you choose to turn on the optional suspicious app detection feature (off by default), AppControl checks launched executables against a malware database.” Please read the section here to confirm what is collected if you turn on that optional feature. It’s a file name, hash, and publisher details of executables. A publisher means it’s the name of the company that signed the executable, for example Chrome may say “Google”.
  2. When we first launched AppControl a user in the TechPowerUp forum tested our privacy mode in detail and found a bug where we accidentally still had connectivity if it was turned on after a normal install. We fixed the bug here if you check the March 12 update AppControl Changelog . You should be able to run AppControl in privacy mode along with a third party network monitor and confirm we shouldn’t have any connectivity. However, some network monitors do display a connection that’s only local between our process and Windows service, so if you are seeing that then that means our user interface communicates with our Windows service (a local Windows Service only on your PC with data only on your PC) to show you your resource usage.
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Thanks for the reply!
But I think it would be easier to just say:

  1. We don’t collect any data unless you enable this specific feature.
  2. Yes.

:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
The app itself is super. I recommended it to a couple of my friends who aren’t very tech-savvy.

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Yes, I agree that’s a good explanation, thanks! I always try to be detailed on the forum because it lives here forever and others can read/understand it in the future.

We are against data grabbing apps… creepy AI stuff… etc… ourselves, so we are against that kind of thing.

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