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Privacy Policy

As we personally hate when companies track us, Downie never collects data that can be traced back to you. When it collects data, we make sure that there's no personal information transmitted or collected and that it's 100% anonymous. All data collection can be turned off in Preferences > Privacy Policy.

You may ask yourself "Why are you collecting any data at all then?" - well, the answer is very simple - it helps us focus on features that you are using - and we have no way of knowing which features are being used without collecting the information that they are being used...

Every user is different and has different workflows. And we respect this and want to allow users to use our app the way they want to - but we cannot make adjustments if we are unaware about how the app is being used. There are three categories of data that Downie may collect and they are explained below in detail.

Disclaimer

Firstly, please keep in mind that all of this is written with the best intentions to be as transparent as possible. If you believe that any information here is inaccurate, unclear or even missing, please contact us, we'll provide additional information and update this article.

The important thing to remember is:

  • everything is 100% anonymous, we care that the feature is or isn't used - not by whom. We really don't care about who in particular uses which feature (there's no value in that for us).
  • we don't pass or sell any data to anyone else - this is why we don't use Google Analytics, but instead we have built a custom solution from the ground up with privacy in mind
  • if you don't trust us, you can easily review sent data using e.g. Proxyman (https://proxyman.io)
  • you can disable the analytics, but please keep in mind that if a lot of users using some feature disable analytics, that feature may be removed in the future as we will not see it being used and therefore discontinue it (that's the entire purpose of all of this - to know what features are and aren't used)

Analytics

These are not some deep analyses of you and your data as you may imagine, but they are just counters that tell us how many users have used a certain feature. For example, if you disable the Dock icon in Preferences > General, this may send an event downie.dock.icon.toggle.true to our servers (meaning that you've toggled the option to show the Dock icon). The data passed to our servers contain nothing but the event identifier (i.e. "what just happened"), but no personal information is included.

On the server side, this causes a simple thing - the event's counter gets incremented. You can imagine this as a person sitting on a bench counting people who went by - at the end, there's a number how many people went by, but the person has no idea who went by. This is very much the same - just the server counting how many people switched an option, used a feature, etc.

Note: Features that we do not see being used may be removed in future releases and we may not update their functionality.

Site Statistics

Downie supports 1000+ sites and the sites come and go. There are integrations for sites that are no longer available - the owner shut them down, or they moved, merged with another site, etc. You can imagine that going through all the entries manually e.g. every 6 months would be very tedious.

This is why Downie sends an anonymous information (very much like the analytics above, it's just a site name and a counter) about the site the download originates from. This allows us to automate the process of clearing dead integrations - we compare the integrations in the app against those that show in the database that they have been used and remove those that haven't. This allows us to regularly clean up the code and decrease required source code maintenance.

On the other hand, sites that we see being used actively may gain additional functionality, like search, playlist support, better metadata extraction, etc.

The data sent contains no personal information, it's only the website name that gets sent.

Top Downloads

Downie has a feature that allows you to view what videos are downloaded by other users - it lists a few top downloads. This is based on anonymously collected links and a counter in a similar way as all above.

Again, no personal information is sent or transmitted. It's a simple database with a link and a counter. Links that haven't been downloaded for more than 30 days get periodically purged.

Other Connections Made During Launch

If you run any network filtering tools that alert you when connections are made, you may have noticed Downie making a few connections during launch. These connections do not collect any data. The connections that you may see:

  • Paddle-related connections to activations servers for license validation (not applicable for Setapp builds).
  • download of a .plist messages file - which may be used for informing about certain issues - for example, if there's some issue that affects a lot of users and we're working on a fix, we may inform you via an in-app message. These messages get pulled from our site on launch, no information is sent with this request, it's a simple GET request.
  • list of top downloads may be loaded on launch - see the information about top downloads above