Your face stays yours.
Winq is built so that it can't leak what it sees: video is processed on your Mac and never stored or sent. This page explains exactly what Winq does with data.
The camera
- Winq reads the camera at up to 1280 × 720 and at most 15 frames per second.
- Each frame is analysed in memory by Apple's Vision framework, on your Mac, then discarded within milliseconds.
- Frames are never written to disk, uploaded, or shared with anyone, including us.
- The camera stops when you pause Winq (⇧⌘G), when your Mac locks or sleeps, and when you quit.
What Winq stores on your Mac
- Your settings, in
~/Library/Application Support/Winq/config.toml. - Calibration: average head angles and eye measurements per screen. Numbers, not pictures.
- What it learned from clicks: head angle and screen position at recent clicks, to improve accuracy.
- Your license activation, signed so it only works on this Mac.
Settings → General → Reset Winq erases all of it.
What goes over the network
- License checks to Polar (api.polar.sh): your license key, an activation id, your Mac's name, and an anonymous device hash (a salted SHA-256; the hardware id itself never leaves your Mac).
- Update checks to GitHub: a request for the latest version file. You can turn this off in About.
- Anonymous usage counts to Amplitude, our analytics processor, unless you turn them off in Settings → Privacy & camera → Share anonymous usage data. Details below.
No crash reporting, no advertising identifiers.
Usage data from the app
To learn what works and what needs fixing, the app sends a few counts, tied to a random id made when Winq is installed:
- That Winq was installed, opened, finished setup, and used on a given day, with how many minutes it was tracking.
- How many gaze switches happened that day, and how often you undid one within two seconds. That tells us when gaze misfires.
- Your Winq and macOS versions, your plan (trial, free or bought), whether the camera is allowed, and clicks on Buy.
- If you buy and activate a key, your Polar customer id, so your purchase and your use count as one person.
Never: camera frames, face measurements, where you look, window titles, the apps you switch to, or file paths. Turning the setting off sends one last "turned off" event and then nothing more.
This website
The site uses Amplitude to count visits, downloads and checkouts, including recordings of page interactions (not keystrokes in forms). Visitors in the EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland are asked first, and nothing loads unless they agree. After Winq opens for the first time, it shows a welcome page that links the download to the install, using the same random id.
Processors
- Amplitude: product analytics for the website and the app.
- Polar: payments and license keys. Polar tells our server about purchases, renewals, cancellations and refunds, which we record in Amplitude against your Polar customer id.
Payments
Purchases are handled by Polar as merchant of record. Polar processes your payment details and email under its own privacy policy; we see your email, what you bought and your license status.