Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-18

PrinceShade is a macOS menu bar utility that dims your screen and adjusts its color warmth. This policy explains exactly what data the app handles, where it goes, and the choices you have. It is short on purpose.

The short version: PrinceShade collects no personal information. Your settings stay on your Mac. Anonymous crash reports are sent only if you leave that option enabled, and you can turn it off at any time. Nothing you do in the app is used for advertising or tracking.

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What stays entirely on your device

All of your PrinceShade settings — brightness, warmth, schedules, per-display configuration, app-exclusion list, keyboard shortcut, and preferences — are stored locally in macOS's standard preferences system on your Mac. This information is never transmitted anywhere and never leaves your device.

Anonymous crash reports (optional, on by default)

PrinceShade can send anonymous crash and error reports to help find and fix bugs. This is handled by Sentry (opens in new tab), a third-party error-monitoring service acting as our data processor.

What is sent:

• The fact that a crash or error occurred, with a technical stack trace describing where in the code it happened.
• A short trail of recent app events ("breadcrumbs") such as "app launched" or "system woke from sleep" — used to understand the sequence of events before a crash.
• A per-installation random identifier (a UUID) so distinct affected installations can be counted. It is generated on your device, is meaningless outside the app, and is not linked to your name, Apple ID, email, or any other identity.

What is not sent:

• No IP address.
• No device name, account name, or user name.
• No usernames or home-folder paths. Captured paths are stripped to the file name on a best-effort basis (see the scrubbing note below).
• No file contents or document data.
• No screenshots or screen contents.
• No location data.
• No advertising identifiers.

All text included in a report is run through an automated scrubbing pass before transmission. On a best-effort basis it strips the home/sandbox prefix from file paths — so your username and home-folder location never leave your Mac, reducing any captured path toward just the file name — and redacts anything resembling a secret marker, as a defense against accidental leakage.

Retention: Crash reports are automatically deleted after 30 days — Sentry's retention period for our plan.

Your control: Anonymous crash reporting is on by default. You can turn it off at any time in Settings → Diagnostics → Error Reports. When this setting is off, PrinceShade makes no network connections to Sentry at all.

Feedback you choose to send

The app itself sends no feedback messages. If you want to get in touch, the support page has a feedback form. When you submit it, the following is sent to the developer:

• The message text you type, and the category you pick (bug report, feedback, or feature request).
• An email address — only if you choose to enter one. The email field is optional, is never pre-filled, and is used solely so the developer can reply to you. It is not added to any mailing list and is not used for marketing.

The form submits to the developer’s own server (an AWS Lambda function), which emails the message to the developer’s support inbox using Amazon SES (opens in new tab). Your message and email address are used only to read and reply to you — never for tracking, advertising, profiling, or sharing with third parties, other than the bot check described below. Submissions are kept only as long as needed to handle your request and are then deleted.

Bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile): To block automated spam, the form runs Cloudflare Turnstile (opens in new tab), a widget loaded from Cloudflare's servers. To validate your submission, Cloudflare receives your IP address and a few browser / connection signals. Per Cloudflare's Turnstile Privacy Addendum linked above, Cloudflare uses them to detect and block bots and to improve its bot detection. This site sets no cookies of its own; the Cloudflare widget may use its own cookies while it runs, as described in Cloudflare's Cookie Policy (opens in new tab).

Website server logs

Visiting this website — even without using the feedback form — generates standard web-server access logs, captured by our CDN (Amazon CloudFront) for every request. Each entry records your IP address, browser/user-agent string, referring page, and the URL requested. Raw logs are kept for 90 days, then automatically deleted.

Once a month, an internal traffic report is generated from that month's logs to review overall traffic trends. IP addresses are truncated in that report — the last part of the address is replaced with zeros — so the report itself can't be tied back to a specific address; the raw logs behind it still hold the full address until they are deleted. The report is for internal use only and is never published or shared with third parties. This site sets no cookies and runs no client-side analytics or tracking scripts — CloudFront's access logs, described here, are the only visit data collected, and exist solely to operate and secure the site.

Location

PrinceShade does not use your location and does not request location access. It contains no CoreLocation code.

What PrinceShade never does

• No advertising, ever.
• No analytics-style tracking of how you use the app.
• No selling or sharing of data with data brokers.
• No linking of any collected data to your identity.
• No third-party tracking SDKs.

Children

PrinceShade is a general-purpose utility and is not directed at children. It collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date at the top will be revised and the updated policy will be published at the same URL.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data can be sent through Settings → Diagnostics → Send Feedback in the app, or via the support page.