Privacy Policy

In short

There is no Macora server

We operate no backend, no account system and no analytics. Nothing you do in Macora is reported to the developers. There is no telemetry to opt out of, because there is none to collect.

When Macora connects to the internet, it connects directly from your machine to the service you asked for — Google Calendar if you signed in, your mail server if you added a mailbox, a weather API if you added a location. Those requests do not pass through anything we run.

Macora is free software under GPL-3.0. Every claim on this page can be checked against the source code.

Google user data

Calendar access, in detail

Calendar sync is optional and off until you sign in from Settings → Online Accounts. If you never sign in, none of this applies.

What Macora asks for

calendar.readonly	Read your calendars and their events, so the calendar app, the desktop widget and reminders can show them.
calendar.events	Create, edit and delete events — the actions you perform in the calendar app itself.
email	Read the address of the signed-in account, so Macora can display which account is connected and drop its cache when you switch to another one.

Where it goes

Calendar events are fetched from Google's API directly by your machine and cached on disk so the calendar opens instantly and reminders survive a restart:

• ~/.local/state/macora/calendar/state.json — cached events and sync tokens.
• Your system keyring (Secret Service) — OAuth access and refresh tokens. If no keyring is available, they fall back to ~/.config/macora/credentials.toml, created with owner-only permissions.

Both live on your machine, readable by your user account. They are never uploaded anywhere.

What Macora never does

• It does not transfer your Google data to us or to any third party.
• It does not use your Google data for advertising, profiling, or training any model.
• It does not sell your data. There is no revenue path in this project at all.
• No human reads your calendar data — no one but you has access to it.

Macora's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Removing access

You can revoke it at any time

Sign out in Settings → Online Accounts. Macora deletes the stored tokens and the cached events immediately; the calendar goes back to empty.

To cut access off from Google's side as well, open your Google account permissions and remove Macora. The stored refresh token stops working on the next sync attempt.

To erase every trace by hand, delete ~/.local/state/macora/calendar/ and, if it exists, ~/.config/macora/credentials.toml.

Other services

The rest of the network traffic

These are the only other outbound connections Macora makes, each tied to a feature you turn on:

Weather	open-meteo.com receives the place name you type, to find it, and then its coordinates, so it can return a forecast and air quality. Macora does not look up your position from your IP address or any other sensor.
Mail	Off until you add a mailbox in Settings → Online Accounts. Macora finds the server from the address — a known provider, the domain's mail exchanger, or imap. plus the domain — and connects to it directly over IMAP with TLS. The app password you enter is kept in your system keyring. New messages are read on your machine to show a notification and find one-time codes. When you copy a code, the email it came in is moved to that mailbox's Trash, unless you turn off Delete code emails after copying in Settings → Notifications.
Album art	When a media player publishes cover art as a web address, Macora downloads that image to display it. The address comes from the player; typical hosts are the CDNs of the service you are listening to.
Updates	App Center installs software through your distribution's package manager, so package traffic goes to the repositories your system is already configured to use — and to Flathub, if you add it on App Center's Sources page.

Each of those services has its own privacy policy, and its handling of the request is governed by that policy rather than this one.

Everything else

Local data, changes, contact

Macora stores ordinary desktop state on your machine — settings, window positions, wallpaper choice, file manager history, thumbnails, clipboard history, your list of mailboxes and the last message seen in each. It is all under ~/.config/macora/, ~/.local/state/macora/ and ~/.cache/, and it never leaves the device.

Macora is not directed at children under 13 and collects nothing that would let anyone identify a user, of any age.

If this policy changes, the new version replaces this page and the date at the top changes with it. A change that affects how Google user data is handled will be described in the release notes as well.

Questions about this policy: open an issue at github.com/macora-desktop/macora/issues.