Privacy Policy

The short version

Twinkle Lights collects no data about you. It has no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking, and it sends nothing to us. The app runs in Apple’s sandbox without permission to use the network. Your settings are stored on your Mac and, if you leave iCloud sync switched on, in your own iCloud account.

Responsible party

The controller under Art. 4(7) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is:

Our legal notice required by German law: Impressum.

The app

What we collect

Nothing. The app contains no analytics, crash-reporting or advertising code and makes no network connections of its own. We never see how you set up your lights or how you use the app.

What stays on your Mac

The app stores its settings locally, inside its own sandbox folder on your Mac: for example the layout, colors (including any colors you picked yourself), bulb size, twinkle pattern, snow settings and the switches in General. To remove them from this Mac, delete the app and the folder ~/Library/Containers/de.keitgen.twinklelights. If iCloud sync was on, a copy of the settings stays in your iCloud account.

If you add the Holiday Countdown widget, macOS keeps the widget’s own settings (which holiday it counts down to and the Christmas date) with your other widgets.

iCloud sync

While “Sync with iCloud” is switched on in General (it is on unless you switch it off), the app keeps the same settings on every Mac signed in to your Apple Account. The settings travel through Apple’s iCloud key-value storage, in your own iCloud account. Apple runs this service under its own privacy policy; we have no access to it and never see your settings. Switch it off on a Mac, and that Mac stops syncing.

Your screen

To place the lights, the app reads the size and arrangement of your displays and the position of the menu bar on each one. It does not look at what is on your screen and does not read the content of any window. Day and night follow the light or dark appearance of macOS; the app does not use your location.

Download through the Mac App Store

Twinkle Lights is distributed through Apple’s Mac App Store. Apple processes your download and any payment under its own privacy policy; we have no access to that data. We receive only aggregated figures from Apple, never your name, e-mail address or payment details.

Crash reports from Apple

If you have chosen in macOS to share analytics with app developers (System Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements), Apple may give us anonymized crash reports and usage statistics. Apple collects and anonymizes these; you can switch this off there at any time.

This website

This website sets no cookies, uses no analytics or tracking, and loads no fonts, scripts or other resources from other companies. The lights and the snow on the page are drawn by your browser.

The website is hosted externally, by a hosting provider that processes data on our behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). When you visit it, the web server records technical access data in its log files: IP address, date and time, the page requested, the referring page and your browser’s user agent. We need this to deliver the site and keep it secure (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The logs are deleted once they are no longer needed for that purpose.

E-mail

If you write to us, we use your e-mail address and message only to answer you (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR) and delete them once they are no longer needed, unless the law requires us to keep them.

If you choose Contact Support in the app’s settings, it opens a draft e-mail in your mail app that already contains technical details to help us find the problem: the app version, the macOS version, your Mac model, your language and region, and most of the app’s settings (including any colors you picked yourself). The app sends nothing on its own. The details reach us only if you send the e-mail, and you can read, change or delete them before you do.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to data portability. Since the app collects no data, these rights will mostly concern e-mails you sent us. Contact us at support at keitgen dot de.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. Ours is the Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit Rheinland-Pfalz.

Changes

If the app ever starts handling data differently, this policy will change before the app does, and the date at the top will show when.