Privacy Policy

The short version

Hex Marks the Spot collects no data about you. It has no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. It cannot send anything anywhere: the app runs in Apple’s sandbox without permission to use the network. The colors and palettes you keep are stored on your Mac and nowhere else.

Responsible party

The controller under Art. 4(7) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is:

Our legal notice required by German law: Impressum.

The app

What we collect

Nothing. The app contains no analytics, crash-reporting or advertising code and makes no network connections. We never see which colors you pick, what you save, or how you use the app.

What stays on your Mac

So that the app can do its job, it stores the following locally, inside its own sandbox folder on your Mac:

• Your picked colors (the history of up to 500 picks), scratchpad and favorites.
• Your saved palettes: their names, colors, creation dates and whether you marked them as favorites.
• Your settings, such as the color formats you chose.

This data never leaves your Mac through the app. You can clear the history and delete palettes inside the app at any time. To remove everything, delete the app and the folder ~/Library/Containers/de.keitgen.ColorPicker.

Screen Recording permission

macOS calls it Screen Recording, but the app uses it for one small thing: while you are picking a color, it reads the pixels immediately around your pointer to show them enlarged in the magnifier loupe. Those pixels are held in memory only to draw the loupe. Nothing is recorded, saved or sent. The permission is optional; without it the app uses the loupe built into macOS.

Images you use for palettes

When you drop or choose an image to extract a palette, the app reads it on your Mac to find its main colors. The image itself is not saved; only a palette you decide to keep is stored, as described above. The app can open only the files you choose.

Clipboard

The app writes a color code to your clipboard when you click a copy button, or after each pick if “Copy picked color to clipboard” is switched on in Settings. It never reads your clipboard.

Sharing

When you use the share button, the app hands the color codes as plain text to the macOS sharing menu. Where that text goes is your choice, and the app you pick handles it under its own terms.

Purchase through the Mac App Store

Hex Marks the Spot is sold through Apple’s Mac App Store. Apple processes your purchase and payment data under its own privacy policy; we have no access to it. We receive only aggregated sales figures from Apple, never your name, e-mail address or payment details.

Crash reports from Apple

If you have chosen in macOS to share analytics with app developers (System Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements), Apple may give us anonymized crash reports and usage statistics. Apple collects and anonymizes these; you can switch this off there at any time.

This website

This website sets no cookies, uses no analytics or tracking, and loads no fonts, scripts or other resources from other companies.

The website is hosted externally, by a hosting provider that processes data on our behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). When you visit it, the web server records technical access data in its log files: IP address, date and time, the page requested and your browser’s user agent. We need this to deliver the site and keep it secure (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The logs are deleted once they are no longer needed for that purpose.

E-mail

If you write to us, we use your e-mail address and message only to answer you (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR) and delete them once they are no longer needed, unless the law requires us to keep them.

If you choose Contact Support… in the app, it opens a draft e-mail in your mail app that already contains technical details to help us find the problem: your Mac model and processor type, the macOS version, the app version, your language and region, how many displays you use, whether Screen Recording is allowed and the keyboard shortcuts work, the app’s settings, and how many colors and palettes you have saved (never the colors or palette names themselves). The app sends nothing on its own. The details reach us only if you send the e-mail, and you can read, change or delete them before you do.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to data portability. Since the app collects no data, these rights will mostly concern e-mails you sent us. Contact us at support at keitgen dot de.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. Ours is the Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit Rheinland-Pfalz.

Changes

If the app ever starts handling data differently, this policy will change before the app does, and the date at the top will show when.