GlanceCam Privacy Policy
By using GlanceCam, you consent to this Privacy Policy and to the Terms of Service; please take a moment to review both documents before using the app.
GlanceCam approach to privacy is simple: your data belongs to you.
All your camera settings (IPs, usernames, passwords, etc.) and all preferences are stored only locally on your machine: no sync, no servers, nothing that can pose a risk to your privacy and security. The same strict approach applies to your camera feeds: using those locally stored strings, GlanceCam directly accesses your video streams without involving any server, cloud service or third party; only you can view what your cameras are streaming.
This means that GlanceCam’s developer - me, Cesare Forelli, hi! - cannot collect or monitor any personal data (absolutely nothing) stored, accessed and viewed inside the app, and actually by default does not know your identity, because all transactions are processed by Apple’s App Store, which does not share Customers informations with developers.
The only exception to the absolute anonimity and absence of personal informations leaving your machine can occur when you manually initiate a support request from inside the app, because in that case GlanceCam auto-generates a configuration report and inserts it in an email draft for you to review, redact where needed, approve and send. This means that with support requests, which again are only ever explicitly started by you if you need assistance, your email address, possibly your name (or other informations that you include in your signature or anywhere else in your message) and by default configuration parameters pertaining GlanceCam setup on your machine and previous in-app purchases are collected and pasted inside an email draft to help the developer provide better support. In this scenario you can, are invited to (multiple disclaimers ask you to carefully evaluate what to send and what to redact) and indeed should remove personal informations such as public IPs and passwords before sending your message; effective support requires some informations to be shared, but you have complete control of the details you provide in your support request.
Support requests that are received and contain enough informations for possibly establish a remote connection (username + passwords + public IP address + external port), despite the disclaimers provided inside the app and in the body of the draft, might be deleted immediately, even without actually providing support, and in all cases will be purged within 1 month from the moment the support request is completed either with a positive or negative feedback from the User. So, really, don’t send me those personal informations: I will never accept to try connecting to one of your cameras for troubleshooting issues - the privacy implications are simply unacceptable to me - and it’s very likely that I will be able to help you without knowing your password.
To improve the experience with in-app purchases and subscriptions, starting with version 3.0 GlanceCam uses a service named RevenueCat. RevenueCat provides GlanceCam’s developer with data on when a User first uses the app, when they last used the app, and how much money they spent, and when, on in-app purchases in the app. These informations do not contain your name, email address, GlanceCam configuration (camera strings, credentials, etc.) or any other personal information: they are not intended to “track you” and univocally identify you “as you”, but are meant to provide anonymous usage and sales analytics. Only if you manually initiate a support or feedback request from inside the app, among the informations that GlanceCam includes in the auto-generated draft is a ticket identifier that, when actually sent in the email, can allow to view the analytics mentioned above inside RevenueCat’s dashboard, if necessary to provide support (for instance for billing issues); to reiterate it, it’s nothing personal - no credentials, no cameras, no IPs or other geographical or personal informations - but for full transparency it’s important that you are aware of this possibility. You can also review RevenueCat’s privacy policy here.
Starting with version 4.3.1, at launch GlanceCam performs a single HTTP GET request to the glancecam.app server to check if a JSON file containing urgent messages from the Developer is available for download, and retrieves such file for displaying it in case it finds it; this is part of a system built to make possible to deliver urgent notifications (for instance, compatibility problems with upcoming versions of macOS) without adopting third-party invasive notification libraries: GlanceCam checks if a file containing messages is online on the glancecam.app website (and 99.9% of the time, it won’t be and a 404 status code will be returned by the server), without sending out any information about the app, cameras or identifiers of sorts: the app just asks if the file is there, and the server does not log those requests. This is the best way I could find to send urgent notifications to Users in case of something urgent occurs (for instance, a new macOS version with compatibility issues) without sacrificing the strict privacy approach GlanceCam always puts first.
Apart for the single HTTP GET request mentioned in the paragraph above, GlanceCam does not communicate with any server run by the development team or other third-parties not mentioned in this document, with the only exceptions of Apple servers if you enabled the option to share your diagnostics and usage informations with Apple and, as detailed in the previous paragraph, of RevenueCat.
If you have any questions regarding this document, please contact me via email at support@cdf1982.com.
I reserve the right to modify this document; when I will do it, I will publish those changes on this page, updating the following modification date.
Last revision: August 10, 2024 (added paragraph about the HTTP GET request for urgent messages included since version 4.3.1)