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Better Software for macOS

Privacy Policy

No-Nonsense Overview

publicspace.net is a one-man operation supported by a handful of contractors and services. I am trying to make a living as an independent software developer by building great products that individuals and (why not) companies are willing to spend a few dollars on.

As a Mac software developer, my business lives and dies with my reputation and I am proud of mine and do not want to undermine it in any way.

In the normal operation of publicspace.net, I collect information for the following purposes:

  • establishing which products to build
  • figuring out how to make the products better
  • finding the right way of selling the products
  • being able to tell whether or not you are a customer
  • filing my tax return & complying with regulations (sigh)

I really do not want the responsibility of dealing with sensitive data, so I outsource the payment process altogether to resellers who are much better able to guarantee the safety of your credit card information. I, myself, do not have your credit card number and I have no way of getting it.

For the purposes of customer support, it is beneficial to you and to me that I can establish that you are a customer. In the case of App Store purchases, I cannot even find out whether you are a customer or not unless you show you me your App Store receipt.

I do analyze the data that I collect from my website and the payment data that I receive from my resellers to optimize my products, website and marketing. If I did not, I would not be able to make a living off my software and it would disappear.

I am looking at aggregate data in order to see large trends, e.g. “French customers want to buy in EUR”, “Mac users are not interested in Windows products”, “Everybody hates colored backgrounds”, “20 USD is too much for most people”, “The new welcome screen irritates people”.

The only time that I will look at your personal data is when you make a request for support or if something goes wrong with your sale.

Purchasing Process

My main reseller is BMT Micro and the publicspace.net shopping cart transfers you to BMT Micro’s website once you have selected which product you wish to purchase and before you start filling out any personal details that are necessary for making the purchase.

As soon as a purchase is made, BMT Micro’s web server contacts my web server with some of the purchasing information (not including credit card information) and our server sends you an email with your unlock code. We store some of this information on the web server to power the self-service unlock code database that allows you to retrieve your unlock codes by using your email address. We also receive a payment confirmation email from BMT Micro with the same information. We store purchasing information for accounting, compliance and other business reasons.

You can also buy versions of most of our software via Apple’s App Store. Apple does not provide us with any personal information about who purchases our software. So we are unable to establish whether you have bought something from us or not.

Occasionally, we participate in off-site bundles and promotions where you can buy our software through a third party. The information we receive about those sales usually includes the email address, the person’s name and the product purchased. We store this information to enable us to establish whether you are customer or not, e.g. to service requests for upgrades, lost unlock codes and product support.

Cookies

Our website sets three cookies when you visit the main website. The first is a unique identifier that is used to track an individual user across a single or multiple sessions on our website from the same browser. The other two cookies are used to maintain the consistency of the information that you are shown across a single and multiple sessions.

Log Files

Our website uses standard web server technology and therefore maintains standard access and error logs. The standard requests to the web server are stored in these log files and these include your IP number, the url that you requested, your user agent string (i.e. your web browser), etc.

Beyond this standard logging, our web server logs the values of the cookies that we described in a “cookies” section and purchase confirmations for BMT Micro.

Analytics

We mainly rely on our own website analytics for business purposes. Our statistics scripts work out sales data and allow us to correlate sales with website visits. In this context, we frequently use A/B Split testing on the files that we serve and we may serve different content to different user segments depending on traffic source, country and computing platform. You may, for example, be shown a different page when you visit from a Mac than if you visit from a Windows PC or an iOS device. Visitors from different countries may see different web pages and users may be enrolled in different A/B split tests at random. Split tests help us to find the right marketing message, product features & product defaults.

Blog

Our (much neglected) blog at http://www.publicspace.net/blog/ runs on a self-hosted copy of WordPress, which we try to keep up to date. We have disabled comments and user creation to collect as little data as possible.

Third Party Tracking

We do not use third party analytics or advertising packages that would allow you to be tracked across multiple sites. Some of the content that is being served from our website, such as custom fonts, images & libraries, may be hosted on external websites. Tracking code is endemic on the internet and is often hidden in social media buttons and third party libraries. We make every reasonable effort not to erroneously include such tracking code.

Hosting, Content Delivery Network, Tools & Services

This website uses Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network to speed up the loading of static content such as software downloads, images and other assets. We are hosted on the VULTR Infrastructure Cloud.

In the normal operation of our business, we use a collection of third party tools and services, some of which may be web-based, have an online component or use online storage. We use products and services from reputable sources and rely on their ability to keep our data safe.

Mailing Lists

We have an opt-in mailing list to which you can subscribe or unsubscribe at any stage. A link to the opt-in mailing list is included in the application menu of all our Mac software.

We do not share our mailing list with anybody.

Information Sharing

We do not routinely share information with anybody and try not to collect sensitive information in the first place. We certainly do not sell information to third parties. Of course, if we were under a legal obligation to provide information to a government agency or a court of law, we would obviously comply.

Communications with Partners & Contractors

We keep an archive of all our email communications, including sales confirmations, exchanges with partners and customers. In the normal interaction with our customer support team and our resellers, your particulars such as your name, email address and product purchase history may be communicated within this group using appropriate tools. These exchanges are of the “Can you help {customer name} with installing {product name}” or “Can you find the unlock code for {email address}?” variety.

Automated Software Updates

The Mac products that you can download from our website include the Sparkle framework, which is used to keep Mac applications up-to-date. Almost all non-Mac App Store applications use this framework as the standard solution to automated software updates.

While our applications are running, Sparkle will periodically send a request for information about the latest app version to our website. It will include information about the specific version of the product that you are using and anonymous information about your trial progress (e.g. the trial information & registration status). If it finds a new version which is compatible with your system, it will download and install it automatically or after prompting you (depending on your update settings). No personal information (beyond that necessary for making an HTTP connection) is transmitted.

For Mac App Store and App Store purchases, macOS manages the updates.