Privacy

The short version

Orbshot is a Mac app that works on your Mac. Every screenshot, every recording, every frame of a video and every character of text it reads off the screen stays on your machine. None of it is uploaded, and there is nowhere for it to be uploaded to — Orbshot has no storage account, no media server and no sync.

One thing does leave: a check that your licence is real. That is the whole of it, and the rest of this page describes it precisely.

What never leaves your Mac

• Screenshots, scrolling captures and screen recordings, including anything in the History folder.
• Anything Orbshot reads with OCR, and anything it detects as sensitive in order to blur it. Text recognition runs on the Mac, in Apple's Vision framework.
• Camera and microphone input. Both are recorded only into the file you are making.
• The names of your windows and applications, which the capture overlay reads in order to let you pick one.
• Your settings, shortcuts and editing history.

What Orbshot sends when it checks a licence

Orbshot contacts api.orbshot.com when you activate a licence, at most once a day afterwards to renew the token that says the licence is live, and when you release the seat. That request contains:

• Your licence key. It is what is being checked. It is stored only as a salted hash, so it cannot be read back out of our database — not by us either.
• The signed licence token this Mac was issued. Sent when renewing it, and when releasing the seat. It names the seat and nothing about you.
• A one-time activation code. Only when you press “Open in Orbshot” on this website. It lives ten minutes and works once.
• A one-way hash of this Mac's hardware identifier. It is how a seat is counted. It is a hash — the identifier itself never leaves the Mac, and the hash cannot be turned back into it.
• The name of this Mac, as it appears in Sharing settings. So that when a licence runs out of seats we can tell you which Macs are holding them. A list of anonymous hashes would be useless to you.

Nothing else is attached — no usage statistics, no crash reports, no identifiers for advertising, and no list of what you captured. If Orbshot cannot reach the server it carries on working; a licence check that fails changes nothing.

What this website keeps

• Your email address, from signing in. Firebase Authentication holds the account; we store the address alongside your licence.
• Your licences: the plan, the number of seats, when the period ends, and a hash of the key.
• One row per Mac using a licence: the hash above, the Mac's name, and when it last checked in.
• A record of licence events — issued, activated, released, claimed — kept as evidence if a payment is ever disputed.
• A count of recent activation attempts per network address, where the address is stored as a hash and only ever compared with itself.

Signing in uses Firebase Authentication, which is operated by Google. It sends you a link by email and keeps the resulting session in your browser's own storage. There are no advertising cookies on this site and no third-party analytics.

Where it is kept, and for how long

The licence database and the servers that read it run in Google Cloud in Singapore (asia-southeast1). Licence records are kept while the licence exists and for as long afterwards as we may need to answer a payment dispute. Activation codes and the rate-limit counters delete themselves.

Asking for a copy, or for deletion

Write to support@orbshot.com from the address on the account. We can send you everything held against it, and delete it — deleting an account releases its licence, so tell us if that is not what you meant.

Changes

If this page ever has to say that more leaves your Mac than it says today, it will say so before the version that does it ships, not after.