This policy explains what the Hourbloom app for Mac and the website hourbloom.app do with information about you. Hourbloom is made by an independent developer — the seller shown on Hourbloom’s App Store page (“we”). We are the controller for the little personal data described here. Questions: [email protected].
Data that stays on your Mac
Everything you enter — clients and projects, tasks, hourly rates, time entries, payments, monthly goals, notes and the screenshots you attach to them — is saved in Hourbloom’s folder on your Mac. Hourbloom also keeps a copy of that folder’s data once a day (the last 30 copies) in the same place. Settings → Data → Show in Finder opens it.
We have no copy of this data and can’t see it. To delete it, delete that folder: deleting the app alone doesn’t remove it. If you back up your Mac (for example with Time Machine), your backups include it too.
No account
Hourbloom has no sign-up and no login. Pro purchases are tied to your Apple Account by the App Store.
Microphone and calls
To notice a call, Hourbloom checks every few seconds which apps are using the microphone, through the list of audio processes that macOS (Core Audio) provides. That needs no microphone permission: Hourbloom never opens the microphone, receives no audio, and hears and records nothing. For messengers it also checks whether the app is playing sound, to tell a call from a voice message. The name of the call app is used on your Mac to open notes and switch the timer to a call task.
Screen Recording permission
macOS shows the titles of other apps’ windows only to apps with the Screen Recording permission. Hourbloom uses it for two things:
- While a browser is using the microphone, Hourbloom reads the browser’s window titles to tell a Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Jitsi call from anything else (a voice message, a lesson on another site). It reads titles only — it doesn’t capture what’s on your screen for this.
- When you press the screenshot button in the notes window, Hourbloom takes the screenshot you asked for and saves it with your notes on your Mac.
When a Google Meet page shows the meeting’s name (“Meet – Weekly sync”), Hourbloom names the call task after it. Like any task name, it stays on your Mac and goes into a client’s sheet only if you sync that task. Apart from that name and the screenshots you take, nothing from your screen is kept, and screenshots are never sent anywhere.
The permission is optional: without it, calls in Zoom, Teams and other desktop apps are still noticed. To stop Hourbloom reading window titles, turn off Calls in a browser in its Settings, or turn the permission off in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording.
Google Sheets (optional)
If you connect Google in Settings, you sign in on Google’s own page in your browser. Hourbloom asks for:
drive.file— access only to the spreadsheets Hourbloom created or that you picked in Google’s file picker. Not the rest of your Google Drive.- Your email address (
openid,email) — shown in Settings so you can see which account is connected.
Hourbloom writes into the client’s sheet what you see before you confirm: dates, hours and task names, and in sheets it creates, the title with the name you typed in Settings, your hourly rate and totals. All of this goes directly between your Mac and Google; it never passes through us. The sign-in tokens are stored on your Mac. Google handles the data under Google’s Privacy Policy.
Hourbloom’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We don’t use this information for advertising, don’t sell it, and no person reads it.
To disconnect, use Settings → Connections → Disconnect. You can also remove Hourbloom’s access at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
Usage statistics
To learn which features are used and where people get stuck, Hourbloom sends a small number of events that don’t identify you to TelemetryDeck, an analytics service of TelemetryDeck GmbH in Germany. These events are:
- the first launch, onboarding steps and the first timer;
- a summary once a day: time tracked as a range (for example “2–4 h”) and how many times the panel was opened, how many sessions, notes and calls there were;
- which screens are opened;
- a call noticed or ended: the call app’s name (for example “Zoom”), and its duration and number of notes as ranges;
- the notes window opened, and from where;
- Google Sheets connected, synced, or an error;
- the Pro screen shown and from where, a trial started, the plan bought, or a purchase restored;
- which app you imported from (for example “Toggl”);
- the type of an error, without its text.
TelemetryDeck’s library adds technical details to each event: the app and macOS versions, the Mac model and screen size, language, region and time zone, some display and accessibility settings (such as dark mode), the hour and day of the week, and counters such as when the app was first opened and on how many days and in how many sessions it has been used. Your install is identified only by a random identifier that is hashed on your Mac and hashed again with a secret salt by TelemetryDeck, so neither we nor TelemetryDeck can tell who you are. According to TelemetryDeck, IP addresses are not stored.
Never sent: your name; the names of your projects, tasks or clients; rates, earnings or payment sums; the text of notes or your screenshots; meeting names or window titles; email addresses or anything from your Google account.
To turn the statistics off, switch off Usage statistics in Hourbloom’s Settings; nothing more is sent from then on. We use these events on the basis of our legitimate interest in fixing and improving the app (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Events are kept for a limited time (currently 3 months) and then deleted.
If you’ve agreed in macOS to share analytics with app developers (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements), Apple may also share crash reports and usage statistics with us. Apple decides what these contain, and they don’t identify you.
In the App Store’s “App Privacy” section, this is listed as Identifiers (Device ID), Usage Data (Product Interaction) and Diagnostics (Other Diagnostic Data), not linked to you and not used for tracking.
Purchases
Hourbloom Pro is sold through the App Store, and Apple processes the payment. We receive no card details, name or address — only the App Store’s confirmation that your purchase is active, which the app checks on your Mac, and Apple’s summary sales reports. Apple’s Privacy Policy applies to the payment.
Email to support
If you write to [email protected], we receive your email address and what you send. The mail is forwarded by Cloudflare Email Routing to the developer’s mailbox (Gmail). We use it only to answer you (our legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) and keep it no longer than needed to help you, at most two years after the last message.
The launch list
If you leave your email on the home page to hear when Hourbloom is out, we store that address, the site language and the time in a Cloudflare KV store and use it for one email on launch day, with a link to unsubscribe. We do this because you asked us to (your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). Write to [email protected] to have it deleted at any time; we delete the whole list within a month after launch.
This website
hourbloom.app is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. To deliver the site and protect it from abuse, Cloudflare processes technical data such as IP addresses (our legitimate interest in a safe site, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Visitors in Ukraine see the Ukrainian version first: Cloudflare tells the site which country a visit comes from, and the site keeps nothing of it. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits without cookies and without identifying visitors. The site sets no cookies of its own and loads nothing from companies other than Cloudflare; Cloudflare may set a short-lived security cookie when it checks for bots.
We don’t track visitors across websites and don’t let anyone else do so on hourbloom.app, so the site works the same whether or not your browser sends a Do Not Track signal.
Who else receives data
| TelemetryDeck GmbH, Germany | Usage statistics |
|---|---|
| Apple | App Store purchases; crash reports if you agreed to share them |
| Your own sheets, only when you use Sheets sync; the support mailbox | |
| Cloudflare | Website hosting and visit counts; forwarding email to support; the launch list |
We don’t sell data and don’t use it for advertising or tracking. Cloudflare and Google may process data outside Ukraine and the EU, including in the United States: Cloudflare under its data processing agreement with us, which includes the EU’s Standard Contractual Clauses, and Google under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. Under Article 29 of Ukraine’s Law “On Personal Data Protection”, these transfers rest on Cloudflare’s contractual guarantees and, for support emails, on the need to answer you. TelemetryDeck is in Germany, which Ukrainian law treats as a country with adequate protection.
Your rights
Under the GDPR and similar laws you can ask to access, correct or delete your personal data, to restrict or object to its processing, and to receive it in a portable format. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.
Most of your data never leaves your Mac, so you control it directly: edit it in the app, export it to CSV, or delete it. Usage statistics can’t be linked to you, so we can’t find “your” events — turning statistics off stops new ones. For anything else, including support emails, write to [email protected]. We reply within 30 days.
Children
Hourbloom is a work tool and isn’t aimed at children. We don’t knowingly collect children’s personal data; if you believe a child has sent us some, write to [email protected] and we’ll delete it.
Changes
If this policy changes, we’ll update it here and change the date at the top. If a change matters for how your data is handled, we’ll also say so in the app’s update notes.
Contact
[email protected]. Help with the app is in Support; subscriptions and refunds are in the Terms of Use.