Privacy
Effective 3 August 2026.
Cosmic Capture Kit is a screen capture tool that runs on your computer. It has no accounts, no sign-up, and no servers of ours behind it. This page says plainly what the app does with your data, and what leaves your machine.
Your captures stay on your machine
Screenshots and recordings are written to the folders you picked in Settings. Whatever the scanner reads stays in the app, on your machine. None of it is sent anywhere on its own.
There is exactly one way a capture leaves your computer: you connect a cloud account yourself, then press Upload on a capture. Nothing uploads automatically, and there is no background sync.
Cloud accounts, if you connect one
Connecting an account is optional and always starts with you, in Settings. When you do connect one:
- The upload goes straight from your computer to that provider. It does not pass through anything of ours, because we run nothing in the middle.
- It lands in your own storage, in your own account. On Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox it goes into a single folder named "Cosmic Capture Kit", and the app asks each of them for the narrowest permission that reaches only that folder: on Google Drive it can touch only the files it created itself, and on OneDrive and Dropbox it is confined to one app folder. Nothing else in your drive is reachable.
- YouTube is the exception, and you should know why before you connect it. YouTube has no folders, and the permission it offers covers managing your YouTube videos, including deleting them. It is that wide because YouTube's narrower upload-only permission cannot delete a video at all, and the app has to be able to take one back off your channel in two moments: when you cancel an upload that has already gone through, and when you press Undo just after one finishes. That is the whole of what the delete power is used for. Nothing is ever deleted on a schedule, and nothing is touched that you did not just upload.
- We never ask for your name, your email address, or your profile. The sign-in permissions that would reveal who you are are deliberately left out.
- The app remembers a random identifier for each connected account. It is generated locally and says nothing about you.
You can disconnect an account at any time in Settings, which deletes its stored sign-in from your computer.
Where sign-in tokens are kept
When you connect a cloud account, the provider gives the app a token. That token is stored in your operating system's own secret store: Secret Service on Linux, the Keychain on macOS, and Credential Manager on Windows.
If that store is unavailable, for example on a machine with no desktop keyring running, the token falls back to a file in the app's configuration folder that only your user account can read. Tokens are never passed on a command line, where other programs on the machine could see them.
The debug log
The app can write a debug log, for when something goes wrong and you want to send us something useful. It is off by default and you turn it on yourself in Settings, under Health.
When it is on, it records what the app did, never what you captured. It does not write file paths, file names, window titles, clipboard contents, scanned or recognized text, audio, pixels, user names, host names, or network names. Where a path matters for diagnosis, the log records its shape instead of the path: the file extension, how long the name was, how deep the folder was, and whether the folder existed and was writable. That is enough to tell "the folder is gone" apart from "it was read-only", with none of your filesystem in it.
The log is a plain file on your computer. Nothing uploads it. It reaches us only if you decide to send it.
The update check
The app checks whether a newer version exists. It fetches one small file from the project's public GitHub release page:
That request is a plain download with nothing attached: no identifier, no account, no machine fingerprint, and not even the version you are running. The app downloads the file and does the comparison locally. GitHub, as the host, can see the IP address making the request, the same as any web page you open.
The check runs when you open the Settings window. If you keep the tray or menu bar helper running, it also checks when that starts up, and turning off "Notify me when an update is available" in Settings stops that one. An update is only downloaded when you press Install.
What the app never does
- No analytics, no telemetry, no usage statistics, no crash reporting.
- No advertising, and no data sold or shared with anyone.
- No accounts of ours, no registration, and no license check. There is no licensing machinery in the app at all, on any platform.
- No servers of ours at all. There is nothing to send data to.
Scanning and other local features
QR codes and barcodes are decoded inside the app. Text recognition runs through
tesseract, a program installed on your own machine. Neither one contacts an
online service, so what you scan is never seen by anyone else.
Joining a Wi-Fi network from a scanned QR code hands the details to your own system's network manager, on your machine.
Your settings, your capture folders, and your list of connected accounts are ordinary files in your user profile. They stay there.
Children
Cosmic Capture Kit is a general purpose tool and is not directed at children. It collects nothing from anyone, of any age.
Changes to this policy
If the app's behavior changes in a way that affects this page, the page changes with it, and the effective date at the top moves. Meaningful changes are called out in the release notes.
About this website
This documentation site is static and has no comment system. It is hosted on GitHub Pages, so GitHub can see the IP address of visitors in its own server logs. The page fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser fetches them from Google when the page opens.
The site uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages help people, and only if you say yes. A consent banner asks on your first visit; analytics stays off until you accept, and rejecting changes nothing about how the site works. If you accept, Google Analytics sets cookies and collects the pages you view, the rough region you are visiting from, and basic browser and device information. Google processes that data as the service's provider. You can change your answer any time by clearing the site's cookies, which makes the banner ask again.
Contact
Questions, or something on this page that does not match what you observe? Open an issue: