Privacy Policy

1. What this policy covers

This Privacy Policy applies to two distinct surfaces, and the distinction matters because they behave very differently:

• The DockShift desktop application — the open‑source Windows software you install from a GitHub release.
• This marketing website — dock-shift.vercel.app, where you're reading this page right now.

2. The DockShift application

DockShift is local‑first by design. There is no DockShift account and no cloud sync. The only DockShift‑owned server endpoint the app ever contacts is the optional Help improve DockShift heartbeat described below — and only if you've turned it on.

• AI provider keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama) are encrypted using your operating system's keystore (Windows Credential Manager). They never leave your machine to anywhere we control.
• Workspace snapshots, clipboard history, screenshots, notes, and voice transcripts are written to your local app data folder (%APPDATA%/DockShift). They are not synchronised, uploaded, or backed up by us.
• Updates — when you install a new version, the installer contacts GitHub's release infrastructure to fetch the binary. GitHub's privacy policy applies to that request.

"Help improve DockShift" — opt‑in usage data

The app ships with a setting called "Help improve DockShift" in Settings → Privacy. It is off by default. Nothing is sent until you turn it on, and you can turn it off again at any time.

When (and only when) it is enabled, the app sends a small heartbeat once per launch and roughly once every 24 hours while running. The heartbeat contains:

• An anonymous install ID — a random UUID generated on first launch and stored locally. It is not tied to any account, email, or device fingerprint, and there is no way for us to map it back to a person.
• App version (e.g. 0.9.3) — so we can see how quickly people upgrade.
• Operating system family, release, and CPU architecture (e.g. win32 / 10.0.22621 / x64) — so we know which Windows versions to keep testing on.
• Locale (e.g. en-US) — helps us prioritise localisation work.
• Realtime activity — the timestamp of each heartbeat, used to compute aggregate daily / weekly / monthly active installs. We do not record what you do inside the app, just that it was open.
• Approximate location (country and city) — derived server‑side from the IP address of the heartbeat request via Vercel's edge geo headers. Your raw IP address is never stored; it is hashed with a server salt and truncated, and the hash is used only to spot abusive ping floods if they ever happen.

We do not collect: prompts or AI responses, document content, clipboard contents, file paths, screenshot data, voice transcripts, API keys, account identifiers, or any kind of behavioural event stream beyond the heartbeat. The endpoint is a single POST that looks like the bullet list above — nothing more.

Heartbeat records are stored in Upstash Redis with a 13‑month inactivity expiry; an install that stops pinging for 13 months is garbage‑collected automatically.

If you ever want your install ID forgotten before that, email us (see § 7) with the ID (you can find it in Settings → Privacy once telemetry is enabled) and we'll delete it.

When you send a prompt to an AI provider through DockShift, the request travels directly from your computer to that provider's servers. We are not a middleman. Their respective privacy policies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter, etc.) govern that data.

3. This website

The marketing site uses three analytics tools, all in aggregate reporting mode — we look at totals, not individual visitors:

• Vercel Web Analytics — aggregate counts of page views, top referring sites, top pages, and visitor country. No cookies, no individual user tracking, no cross‑site identifiers.
• Vercel Speed Insights — Core Web Vitals (page load, interactivity, layout shift) sampled to help us tune performance. Also cookie‑less.
• Google Analytics 4 — aggregate page views, referrers, device class, and approximate location (country / city level). GA4 sets first‑party cookies named _ga and _ga_* in your browser; these contain a random identifier used to estimate unique visitor counts. The cookies are scoped to dock-shift.vercel.app and are not shared with other sites. Default GA4 retention is 2 months for event data; we have not configured longer retention.

We do not use Facebook Pixel, advertising trackers, session recording tools (Hotjar, FullStory), or cross‑site fingerprinting libraries.

If you'd rather not be counted by Google Analytics, you can install Google's official opt‑out browser add‑on, enable "Do Not Track" / "Global Privacy Control" in your browser, or use any standard content blocker (uBlock Origin, Brave Shields, Pi‑hole). We don't penalise blocked visitors — the site works identically with the trackers off.

4. Third‑party services we link to

Several buttons on the site send you to external services: GitHub (repository, releases, issues, sponsors, discussions), Buy Me A Chai, and the various AI providers DockShift can connect to. When you click through, those services' own privacy policies apply — we have no visibility into what they collect.

Separately, the GA4 script we embed is loaded from googletagmanager.com and reports to Google's analytics servers. Google's processing of that data is governed by Google's privacy policy.

5. Your rights

Because we don't collect personally identifiable information, there is no account to access, no profile to export, and nothing to delete. If you do have a privacy concern that isn't answered here, please get in touch.

6. Changes to this policy

If we meaningfully change this policy, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and note the change in the project's release notes.

7. Contact

Privacy questions: thisissalah.dev@gmail.com or open an issue at github.com/Salah-XD/dockshift/issues.