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Glassine collects nothing. There are no accounts, no analytics in the app, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no servers. What you write stays on your Mac, in plain Markdown files you can see in Finder.

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iCloud

If you keep your library in iCloud Drive, your documents sync through your own iCloud account under Apple’s terms, exactly as any file in iCloud Drive does. Glassine never sees them in transit and has no way to. Apple’s iCloud privacy terms are at apple.com/legal/privacy. The Mac App Store version runs in the App Sandbox. It holds the sandbox’s permission for outgoing connections because Review, which draws the page with the system’s web view, cannot start without it, and for the one thing below that you can turn on.

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Sync with GitHub (only if you turn it on)

Settings → Library → Sync can keep the library in a private GitHub repository of yours. With it connected, Glassine sends the documents in the library to GitHub’s API — and only those: not the settings, not how you use the app — under GitHub’s privacy statement. The token you give it stays in the Mac’s keychain. With sync off, which is how Glassine comes, the app opens no connection of its own and there is nothing it would send. See sync with GitHub.

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Checking for updates (direct download only)

The version downloaded outside the App Store updates itself with Sparkle, an open-source framework. Once a day it fetches a small file — the update feed — from glassine.ink. That request carries the version of Glassine you are running and, like any web request, your IP address; Sparkle’s option to send a profile of your Mac is off. glassine.ink counts those checks — how many a day, and which version — through Vercel’s Web Analytics, which sets no cookie and keeps no IP address (it tells visitors apart by a hash that changes every day), so that the number of copies in use is known; nothing else about the request is kept. When a newer version exists, the disk image is downloaded from GitHub, whose privacy statement covers that download. Settings → General turns the check off. Nothing about your documents, your library, or how you use the app is ever sent — except the documents themselves to GitHub, when you have connected sync.

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Changes

If this ever changes, the change will appear first in PRIVACY.md, in the same repository as the code that does it, and then here.

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Contact

Open an issue at github.com/a-libre/glassine/issues.