Privacy
What data does BrighterMac collect?
Nothing about you, and nothing about how you use the app. There is one exception and it is the licence check, which sends your licence and a pseudonym of your Mac — never your name, your email or your activity. This page says exactly what that means.
Last updated 22 September 2026. Data controller: Webkompaniet AS, organisation number 999 529 860, Oslo, Norway.
The app
BrighterMac has no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reporting. There is no account to create and nothing that reports what you do with it. Your settings — whether the boost is on, your battery threshold, whether it starts at login — are stored in macOS user defaults on your own Mac and never leave it.
The licence check
The version you download from this site confirms your licence with our server: once when you activate it, and every 45 days after that, quietly and without asking you anything. The Mac App Store version does not do this at all — Apple handles entitlement there, and that edition never contacts us.
What the check sends. Two things: your licence identifier, and a pseudonym of the Mac it is running on. The pseudonym is a one-way hash of a hardware identifier — the same input always gives the same 32-character value, but the value cannot be turned back into your computer, and it is not a serial number, a MAC address, an Apple ID or anything Apple or anyone else would recognise. It says this is the same Mac as last time and nothing more. The check sends no name, no email address and nothing about how you use the app.
What we store, and why. We keep a record of which machine pseudonyms a licence has been activated on. That is the whole purpose: it is what makes a licence cover a set number of Macs instead of an unlimited number. We keep it until you remove the Mac from the licence, and in any case no longer than 18 months after the last time the licence was confirmed.
The two timestamps, and why they exist. The record carries two times, and we would rather name them than let you find them. For each Mac we store when its licence was last confirmed — roughly once every 45 days. This is what lets us move your licence to a new Mac automatically: when you activate one Mac too many, the one you have used least recently makes room, and "least recently" has to be measured against something. Without that time the limit could only refuse you. The second time is per licence rather than per Mac, and it is what tells us the record can be deleted as unused.
Each value is overwritten rather than added to, so there is no history: we can see that a pseudonymous Mac confirmed its licence at a particular moment, and nothing before that. We cannot see when you used the app, how often, or what for. We also keep a short list of the times a Mac was removed to make room for another, for 30 days, so that a shared key cannot rotate through an unlimited number of machines. That list holds times only — no machine identities.
What the check does not send or store. No email address, no name, no country, no IP address, no raw hardware identifier, and nothing about your use of the app. The activation record has no field for any of them.
Before you buy, none of this happens at all. The app never contacts our servers before a purchase — not during the first days of the trial and not afterwards, however long you keep using it that way. We store nothing about you in the meantime: no identifier, no installation count, nothing. The licence check described here begins only once you enter a licence key you have bought.
Why this counts as personal data anyway. A pseudonym is still personal data under the GDPR, because it is tied to a licence and a licence is tied to the email address that bought it. We are not going to argue our way out of that with a technicality. It is a record about you, you can ask to see it, and you can ask us to delete it.
Your IP address
When BrighterMac checks your licence, our hosting providers (Google Cloud and Cloudflare) record the IP address of the request in their own operational logs, as any web service does. Google's logs are kept for 30 days. Cloudflare keeps its own under its own policy. We do not store your IP address ourselves, and our own logs never contain it — they hold the method, the path, the status and how long the request took, and the licence service is written so that an IP address cannot be written to them.
There is one place we do use it, and it would be dishonest to leave it out: the service counts requests per address so that nobody can hammer it. That count lives in the running server's memory, is never written to disk, and disappears when the server scales down. It is a use of your address, not a record of it, and the activation record has no field where an IP address could be kept.
This website
No analytics, no tag manager, no pixel, no cookie banner, because there are no cookies to consent to. The page you are reading loads its stylesheet and its few lines of script from the same origin and nothing from a third party — the type you are reading is the one already on your Mac, which is also why there is no font request to anybody.
Cloudflare serves these pages and keeps ordinary request logs, which include IP addresses, under its own retention policy. We do not use them to build a profile of you and we do not connect them to purchases.
If you buy directly from us
Payment is handled by Stripe. Stripe receives the information needed to take a payment — your card details, your email address, your billing country — and is the controller of that data under its own privacy policy. We receive the purchase record and your email address so that we can send you the app and a receipt, and so that we can process a refund if you ask for one.
We never see your full card number. We keep the purchase record for five years after the end of the financial year it falls in, because Norwegian accounting law (bokføringsloven) requires us to and gives us no choice about it.
If you buy through the Mac App Store
Apple handles the entire transaction. We receive aggregate sales figures from Apple and no personal data at all — we do not know who you are, and we could not contact you if we wanted to.
If you email us
We keep the correspondence so that we can help you and remember what we said. Nothing more is done with it.
Who else is involved
We use four companies to run this, and no others. Each one is named here because a list you cannot check is not a disclosure.
- Stripe takes the payment and holds your card details, your email address and your billing country. Stripe is the controller of the card data under its own privacy policy.
- Resend sends the email containing your licence key, and therefore handles your email address. We use its EU region.
- Google Cloud runs the licence service, in its Finnish region, so the activation records stay inside the EEA. Its request logs record the IP address of each licence check for 30 days.
- Cloudflare serves this website, sits in front of the licence service, and keeps ordinary request logs — including IP addresses — under its own retention policy.
Apple is not on this list because Apple is not our processor: if you buy through the Mac App Store, Apple is the seller and we never see the transaction.
Your rights
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a correction, ask for a copy, or ask us to delete it. In practice there are three things that could exist: a purchase record, an email you sent us, and your activation record.
Deleting your activation record. Email us the address you bought with. That is all we need — there is no form, no account and nothing else to supply. We delete the whole activation record: every machine pseudonym tied to the purchase, both timestamps, and the list of removal times. We do this without asking why. The run itself takes under a minute; we promise nothing slower than the month the GDPR allows.
What deletion does and does not mean, said plainly. Your licence key keeps working. The next time the app checks in, a new record is created, because the record is the machine limit — deleting it does not switch the limit off. If what you want is to stop using the app on a Mac, remove the licence from it in the app instead: that frees the slot and it does not come back.
Three things do not go with it, and you should hear that from us rather than discover it. The purchase record at Stripe stays for five years after the end of the financial year, because Norwegian accounting law requires it and we cannot delete it on request. The email containing your licence key sits in our email provider's logs under its own retention. And the request logs at Google Cloud and Cloudflare expire on their own — 30 days at Google, Cloudflare's own policy at Cloudflare — rather than on our command. Everything that is ours to delete, we delete.
Write to [email protected]. It is a real address read by a person, and it is the same address for a data request as for anything else.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change means we would start collecting something, we will say so plainly rather than quietly widen a paragraph.