Privacy Policy

Effective 30 August 2026 · hardredact.com

The short version

Your documents never leave your computer.

HardRedact does all of its work — reading your file, finding personal information, removing it, and verifying the result — on your own machine. There is no account, no cloud processing, and no analytics of any kind.

The application makes exactly one network request in its entire lifetime: when you enter a licence key, it sends that key to be verified. Nothing about any document is ever transmitted.

Who we are

HardRedact is published by [LEGAL ENTITY] of [BUSINESS ADDRESS]. For anything in this policy, write to hello@hardredact.com.

What the application never collects

This list is not aspirational. There is no code in HardRedact that transmits any of it, and there is no server to receive it.

Your documents, or any part of their contents.
File names, folder paths, page counts, or file sizes.
The personal information the software detects, or your decisions about it.
The audit certificates it produces.
Usage analytics, feature telemetry, crash reports, or error logs.
Your IP address, device identifiers, advertising identifiers, or location.

HardRedact has no user accounts. You never create one, and we hold no profile about you.

What happens on your device only

Document contents, detected findings, the redacted output, and the audit certificate are all produced and stored locally. The redacted file and its certificate are written where you choose to save them. Your original file is never modified and never deleted.

Your licence record is stored in the macOS Keychain on your device. It contains your licence key, the date of activation, and a random installation identifier. It contains nothing about your documents.

You can confirm all of this yourself: disconnect from the network entirely and HardRedact will open, detect, redact, verify and certify a document without complaint. Only licence activation requires a connection.

The one thing that is transmitted

When you activate a licence, HardRedact sends a single request to our licensing provider, Polar, containing exactly three values:

Value	Why
`key`	The licence key you typed, so it can be confirmed as valid and unused.
`organization_id`	Identifies the product. It is the same for every customer and says nothing about you.
`activation.label`	A random installation identifier generated on your device, so a licence can be limited to a number of machines. It is not a hardware serial number and cannot be traced back to your computer.

After a successful activation the application does not contact anything again. There is no periodic re-check, no update ping, and no background connection.

When you buy a licence

Purchases are handled by Polar, which acts as merchant of record. You give your name, email address and payment details to Polar, not to us. We never see or store your card details. We receive the order record — typically your email address and what you bought — so that we can issue your licence and provide support.

Polar processes this information as its own controller for payment and tax purposes. Please read [CONFIRM POLAR ENTITY NAME AND PRIVACY POLICY URL] for how they handle it.

When you email us

If you write to hello@hardredact.com we hold your message and address so we can reply and keep a record of the support we have given. Please do not send us documents containing personal information — we do not need them to help you, and HardRedact is designed specifically so that nobody has to.

This website

hardredact.com serves static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and embeds no trackers or social widgets. Web fonts are requested from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address in the ordinary course of serving those files. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs for security and reliability.

How long anything is kept

Licence records — for as long as the licence exists, so that support and reissues are possible.
Purchase records — as long as tax and accounting law requires, typically seven years.
Email correspondence — up to two years after the conversation ends, then deleted.
Anything about your documents — never held, so there is nothing to keep or delete.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to receive a copy in a portable form, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to complain to your data protection authority.

Because we hold so little — essentially your email address, your licence key and your order record — these requests are quick to answer. Write to hello@hardredact.com and we will respond within 30 days.

Where the law requires a legal basis: we process your purchase and licence information to perform our contract with you, and we keep purchase records to meet our legal obligations.

International transfers

Our licensing provider and our web host may process the limited information described above on servers outside your country. Where that happens, it is done under the safeguards those providers have in place for international transfers. Your documents are not involved, because they never leave your machine.

Children

HardRedact is a professional tool and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes we will update the effective date at the top and, for anything material, say so on this page. We will never change it in a way that starts collecting your documents — that is the product, not a setting.

Contact

hello@hardredact.com