Privacy policy.

What we collect

Nothing. There is no analytics, no usage tracking, no crash reporting that leaves your Mac, and no identifier of any kind. There is no sign-up, no profile, and no server that knows you exist.

What stays on your Mac

Everything Hammock remembers lives on your machine and never leaves it:

• Settings, in the standard macOS preferences.
• Clipboard history, snippets and shelved files, as ordinary files in your Application Support folder. You can delete them at any time.
• Your licence and trial status, in the login Keychain and preferences.
• OCR and the colour picker run entirely on-device through Apple’s Vision framework. Captured images and recognised text are never uploaded.
• The diagnostics log, if you switch it on in Settings → General to help us chase a bug, is a plain text file in ~/Library/Logs/Hammock. It never leaves your Mac on its own — you decide whether to send it — and it names files, apps and windows you used, which is why it stays off unless you turn it on. Crashes are recorded there too.

Network connections

Hammock makes three kinds of outbound connection on its own, and none of them carries your files, your content or an account identity:

• Update checks — it asks our update server whether a newer version exists, through Sparkle. A standard version query.
• Licence activation — when you enter a licence key, it asks our endpoint to confirm the key is valid and to register this Mac against your 3-machine limit.
• Trial check — on a fresh install it asks the same endpoint when this machine was first seen, so the 14-day trial cannot be restarted by wiping local state.

The last two send a one-way SHA-256 hash of your Mac’s hardware UUID. The raw identifier never leaves your machine, the hash cannot be reversed back into it, and it is not tied to anything else about you. Nothing else about your Mac, your files or your usage is ever sent.

There is a fourth kind, and it only ever happens because you asked for it: creating a share link uploads one encrypted file to our server. It is off until you switch it on, it never runs in the background, and it gets its own section.

Share links

The Shelf can turn a file into a link you send someone. It is off by default, lives behind a switch in Settings → Shelf, and nothing is uploaded unless you press the button. This is the one part of Hammock that puts your data on our server, so here is exactly what happens to it.

Your Mac encrypts the file before anything is sent, and puts the decryption key in the part of the link after the #. Browsers never send that part to a server, so the key never reaches us. The file’s name, size and type travel in a second encrypted block. What we hold is ciphertext we cannot open: not the contents, not the file name, nothing.

That key is kept on your Mac, in your login Keychain, so that copying the same link a second time hands you the same link back instead of uploading the file all over again. It is stored per link and marked device-only — never synced to iCloud, never carried to another Mac by a backup or Migration Assistant, and unreadable while your Mac is locked. Revoking a link, or letting it expire, deletes the stored key with it. None of this changes what we hold: the key never leaves your Mac and we never receive it.

What we can see, because handing bytes to a recipient requires it:

• The size of the encrypted file, and the times it was uploaded and downloaded.
• The IP addresses of whoever uploads or downloads, as any web server sees.
• The expiry you picked and how many downloads are left.
• The same one-way device hash the licence check uses — sharing needs an activated licence, so every upload is attributable to one. It identifies a Mac, not a person, and it is the only identifier involved.

And three things worth knowing before you send one:

• Anyone with the full link has the file. The key is part of the link, so treat the link as you would the file itself and send it over a channel you trust.
• A password gates access; it does not add encryption. Setting one makes our server refuse to hand over the encrypted bytes without it. The file’s own key is still the one in the link.
• The recipient’s page is JavaScript we serve. Decryption happens in their browser, but the code doing it comes from us — so a recipient is trusting our server not to serve bad code, in a way the sender, whose encryption happens inside the notarised app, is not. That is inherent to opening an encrypted file in a browser instead of an app, and we would rather say it than imply otherwise.

How long we keep it: you choose 1, 3, 7 (the default) or 30 days, and optionally a download limit; a link carries at most 95 MB. When a link expires, reaches its limit, or you revoke it from the Shelf, the record and the encrypted file are deleted. An hourly sweep and a storage-level expiry rule are the backstops for anything the first delete missed. Nothing is kept afterwards — and since we never had the key, there was never anything readable to keep.

Permissions

macOS permissions are requested only for the feature you switch on, and only when you switch it on. Accessibility powers window snapping, layouts, app and window switching, the palette, clipboard, snippets and Sweep; Screen Recording powers on-device OCR; Automation powers the Shelf’s Finder stash and Files & Folders its screenshot catching; Bluetooth is read only by the notch chip that shows a device’s battery. Awake, Breaks, Auto-Quit, the notch HUD and the colour picker require no permission at all — Screen Recording is optional for the picker and only buys the zoom loupe — and Focus dims with none either, using Accessibility only, when you have granted it, to tell which window you are working in. You can revoke any of them in System Settings at any time. The full table is on the download page.

Payments, and the two third parties

Using Hammock involves nobody but you. Buying it involves exactly two companies, and neither is given anything beyond what the sale needs:

• Polar is our merchant of record. Polar takes the payment and your email address, and sends you the licence key and the receipt. We never see or store your card details — Polar handles them under its own privacy policy. What reaches us is your licence key, your order, and the email address to support it with.
• Cloudflare serves this website and the licence endpoint, so it processes the ordinary connection data any web host sees, such as your IP address, in order to deliver the page and answer the request.

This website

The site sets no cookies and runs no analytics — no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts, no fonts or icons loaded from anyone else’s server. The only thing it stores in your browser is your light/dark choice, in localStorage, so the page does not flash the wrong colours next time. Clearing your browser data removes it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes we will update the date above and note anything significant in the changelog. Because Hammock collects nothing, changes will almost always be clarifications rather than new data practices.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Write to support@gethammock.app, or use the contact section on the support page.