Privacy Policy

Overview

We respect your right to privacy. We aim to collect as little data about you as we can, while providing you with the service you expect. Broadly speaking, we collect some amount of data when you visit our web site, use our apps, purchase our apps, or send us diagnostic information for debugging purposes.

This policy describes the data we collect, how it is handled, and what your options are for limiting our collection of it.

Data Sharing

The data we collect from you is not shared with any other entity, except as described in the “Services We Use” section below. As a Limited Liability Corporation organized in Massachusetts, United States, we may be required by law in some situations to share data with law enforcement or other government agencies.

Services We Use

Your data may be collected by third-party services that we use when you purchase our apps or contact us for support. Here are links to the privacy policies of companies whose services we use, and a description of when and why we use their services:

  • Apple. Most of our apps are available for purchase through Apple’s Mac or iOS App store. Because our apps run on Apple’s macOS and iOS based devices, information about your use of our apps may be collected by Apple.
  • Stripe. We use Stripe to process direct sales by credit or debit card. The information we share with Stripe is detailed in the “Direct Purchases” section below.
  • PayPal. If you choose to use PayPal during checkout, our site will send you to PayPal where they may request additional data from you.
  • Help Scout. We use Help Scout to handle customer support emails to [email protected], and to follow-up on any crash reports you submit to us with our apps’ built-in crash reporter.
  • Slack. We use Slack to facilitate discussions about our software. If you choose to join our company’s Slack community, all the data you share within that community is archived by Slack. We may periodically make backups of this data on our own servers.
  • Twitter. We use Twitter to broadcast news about our products and to answer customer support inquiries.
  • Facebook. We use Facebook to broadcast news about our products and to answer customer support inquiries.
  • Campaign Monitor. We use Campaign Monitor to manage our customer email lists for marketing purposes. Your name and email address will be shared with Campaign Monitor when you purchase our apps directly, unless you opt out of receiving news from us via email.

Visiting Our Sites

When you visit our web sites, including https://redsweater.com and https://help.redsweater.com, metadata including your IP address and your web browser’s user agent string are recorded by our web server software. We use these logs to perform statistical analysis about the number of visitors we receive, and to detect attempted attacks on our servers by third parties.

Software Update and News Check

Our apps include built-in support for communicating with our web servers to check for updated versions of our software, and to check for important news updated pertinent to your use of our software.

Versions of our apps that are downloaded directly from Red Sweater’s web site include functionality for automatically checking for updated versions of the software. This functionality can be disabled completely in the Preferences panel of each app.

All of our apps include functionality to automatically contact our servers for critical news announcements. This functionality can be disabled in MarsEdit, but cannot be disabled in our other apps.

Our software update and news check features include anonymous information about your Mac, including the model number, number and speed of CPUs, and amount of RAM. MarsEdit additionally includes anonymous information about the types of blog systems you have configured. This information is used to prioritize future development of our apps to better suit the needs of our users.

Direct Purchases

When you purchase licenses to our software from the Red Sweater Store, we collect information required to complete the transaction via Stripe or PayPal, depending on your preferred payment method.

We collect your name, address, and email address for all direct purchases. We retain this information in our database to facilitate recovery of your license information if you lose your license information. We also use your email address to contact you with information that is pertinent to your use of our software. You may opt out of these emails at any time by following the directions in the email, or by contacting us directly.

For credit and debit card purchases, we provide your name and address to Stripe to prevent fraudulent use of card information. Your credit card number and CVV code are transmitted directly to Stripe but are never transmitted to our servers. We retain information about your purchase including the brand of credit card, but do not save the credit card number.

App Store Purchases

When you purchases a license to one of our apps from Apple’s Mac App Store, we do not receive any of your personal data. When you launch one of our apps after downloading it from the Mac App Store, we use the anonymous data from Apple’s App Store Receipt to confirm the app is licensed for use on your device. We also use this anonymous data to confirm your eligibility for discounts when upgrading to newer versions of our apps. When you select an older version of one of our apps that has been downloaded from the Mac App Store, we transmit the anonymous receipt data to our servers for validation with Apple. We do not keep a permanent copy of this receipt data.

Customer Support

When you contact us for support via email to [email protected], we store a copy of your inquiry, our response, and any follow-ups, on servers operated by Manuscript, a third-party service. We periodically request and store backups of this data. We retain customer support interactions so we can reference past interactions when you contact us for support with any of our products.

When you contact us for support via Facebook or Twitter, those companies may collect and store data about your inquiry. We do not currently collect or store data on our servers about those inquiries.

Crash Reporting

Many of our macOS apps include a built-in crash reporter that is designed to detect a crash (when the app stops running unexpectedly), and offer you the choice of reporting the crash to us.

When a crash is detected, you will be prompted with an alert describing the crash and giving you the opportunity to send data about the crash to our servers. You may be prompted to grant access to your Contacts database. If you approve the request, our software will only access the “Me” card from your Contacts database, and use it to pre-populate the email field in the crash submission. We use your email address to follow-up on crash reports when we are able to offer workarounds, or when we want to request more information about a crash to improve our chances of permanently fixing the bug that caused the crash.

When you agree to submit a crash report, all of the information that will be sent to our servers is shown in the crash reporter interface. Typically, this data includes any notes you add to the crash report, diagnostic information about the crash, generated by our crash reporter, and an excerpt of your Mac’s console log including messages that are specifically pertinent to our apps.

The information you submit when you report a crash is transferred to the same service, Manuscript, that we use to manage customer support inquiries. Effectively, you can consider a crash report as being handled identically to a support email that contains all the same information that a crash report includes.

Policy Clarification

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions or concerns about our handling of your data, or to request that we delete the data we may have stored about you.

This document may be revised to clarify our policies or to update them to reflect our current handling of customer data. Here is a list of the major changes to date:

October 10, 2018:

  • First published.

September 28, 2022:

  • Removed Manuscript from, and added Help Scout to, Services We Use.
  • Updated URLs for Red Sweater to remove hyphen from the domain name.