Privacy

The short version. Noisy Laptop plays sounds when your Mac does things. It has no account system, no advertising, and the Mac app has no analytics at all. It does not read your screen, your files, your keystrokes, your microphone or your camera. The only thing the app ever sends anywhere is a licence key, and only if you buy Pro. The website counts anonymous, cookie-free events so we know which sounds people like — details below.

This policy covers the Noisy Laptop Mac app and the website at noisylaptop.com. The controller of any personal data described here is Garded LLC, 150 Central Park S, New York, NY 10019, USA, contactable at thisdudestartedsomething@gmail.com.

The Mac app

• No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no crash reporting. There is no telemetry of any kind. We do not know how many people use the app, which sounds are popular, or whether you opened it today.
• No system permissions. The app requests no Accessibility, microphone, camera, screen recording or file access. It reacts to notifications macOS already broadcasts: power source, sleep and wake, screen lock, connected devices, network reachability and app launches.
• Call detection reads a flag, not content. To notice that a call started, the app checks whether any other process currently has a camera or microphone running. That is a yes/no property the system exposes. No audio or video is opened, recorded, analysed or transmitted, and the app never learns which app is using the device or what is being said.
• Your settings stay on your Mac. Which triggers are on, which sounds they play, volumes and the recent-events list are stored locally in the app's preferences and in ~/Library/Application Support/Noisy Laptop/. The events list is held in memory and never leaves the machine.
• Your own sounds stay on your Mac. Clips you add through My Sounds are copied into ~/Library/Application Support/Noisy Laptop/CustomSounds/. They are never uploaded, synced or inspected.
• Licence checks. If you buy Pro, activating, deactivating or periodically re-validating your licence sends your licence key and your Mac's name (so you can tell your activations apart in your own list) to Lemon Squeezy's licence API. Nothing else is sent, and nothing is sent at all in the free version.

This website

• No cookies, and no consent banner to click past. The site is a set of static files on Netlify. It sets no cookies, runs no tag manager and carries no advertising script. Nothing is stored on or read from your device, which is why you are not being asked to agree to anything.
• Anonymous product analytics (Mixpanel). We use Mixpanel to count what happens on the page. In outline: pages viewed and their paths; how far down the page you scrolled and which sections you reached, and how long you stayed; sounds played — the pack, the clip's name, the moment it belongs to, where on the site it was played from, and whether it finished or was cut off; packs previewed, opened and chosen; searches, recorded only as how many characters were typed and how many sounds matched, plus whether a play followed within thirty seconds; every deliberate click in the interactive Mac demo, including which of its windows were opened and which method was used to share from it; Typing Beat in detail — that it started and why it stopped, how long it ran, the peak typing speed and intensity reached, whether Backspace and Enter were used, styles, kits and drum sounds chosen, whether the “your own sounds” panel was opened and how many files were added to which slot, and whether the beat's share link was copied; clicks on Download and on Get Pro, and where on the site they happened; a phone visitor sending the link to their Mac, and by which method; and pokes of the mascot. The purpose is narrow and product-only: which sounds and packs people actually play, whether the site works on their device, and whether any of it leads to a download. The complete list is kept in web/docs/ANALYTICS.md.
• Context sent with each event. Every event also carries coarse context about the visit: the host your visit came from (the host only, never the full address of the page you came from), any campaign tags in the link you followed, whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer, a rough screen-size band, your operating system and browser family (never the full user-agent string), whether you have reduced motion or site sound switched on, and running counts for the visit such as how long you have been here and how many sounds you have played. This is deliberately coarse: it is what tells us, for example, how many visitors are on a Mac and could actually install the app.
• The analytics cannot identify you or follow you. Mixpanel is initialised with its persistence disabled, so it writes no cookie, writes nothing to browser storage, and never assigns you a lasting identifier. There is a single temporary identifier that joins up the events of one visit so a sequence can be read as a sequence; it is generated in memory when the page loads, is never written to your device or anywhere else, and ceases to exist when you close the tab. Nothing can be joined to an earlier or later visit, to another website, or to a purchase. Practically: we can see that a pack was played and what happened next in that visit; we cannot see by whom, or that the same person ever returned. It also means Mixpanel cannot report unique visitors or retention for this site, which is the trade we chose. Mixpanel receives your IP address in the course of the request and uses it for coarse location before discarding it under its own policy; we do not attach it to anything.
• Errors and speed. If the site's code throws an error we send the error message, the file it came from and the first few lines of its stack, so it can be fixed. We also send three standard page-speed measurements once per page. Neither carries anything about you.
• Do Not Track is obeyed. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, the analytics code is never even downloaded. Content blockers that block Mixpanel have the same effect, and the site works identically either way.
• We never send anything you type. No email address, no search text, no Typing Beat sentence, no pack idea, no file name, no message you compose in the demo. A search is measured only by its length and its number of results. Typing speed is measured from which keys were pressed (Backspace, Enter, “a letter key”) and never from which letters, so no sentence can be reconstructed from what we hold.
• Sound previews are ordinary audio files served from this site. We log that a sound was played, as an anonymous event, in the terms above.
• Audio you supply to the page — a file dropped into a custom-sound preview or into Typing Beat — is read in your browser and never uploaded.
• Typing Beat turns what you type into a drum pattern in your browser. The text you type is not transmitted and is not stored beyond the page you are on. We record how the demo was used — that it started and stopped, how fast and how hard, which styles, kits and sounds were chosen — never a character of the sentence itself. Sounds you add to it are decoded and kept in your own browser; we are told only how many were added and to which drum slot, never the files or their names.
• Browser storage. The site uses a small amount of local storage for your own convenience: whether you have seen the interactive demo's hint, one Typing Beat preference, and — in an IndexedDB database called noisy-typing-beat — any drum sounds you added to Typing Beat. All of it lives in your browser, is readable only by this site, and is removed if you clear site data.
• Suggesting a sound pack. If you use the “suggest a pack” form, the idea you write and, if you choose to give it, your email address are submitted through Netlify Forms so that we can read them and reply. Giving an email address is optional.
• Hosting logs. Netlify, our host, may keep standard server logs including IP addresses for security and abuse prevention, under its own policy.

Buying Pro

Purchases are handled by Lemon Squeezy, which acts as the merchant of record. They collect and process your payment details, handle sales tax and VAT, and email you a licence key. We never see or store your card details. What we can see is the order information Lemon Squeezy shows a seller, such as your email address, the country used for tax and the licence keys issued. See the Lemon Squeezy privacy policy.

Who else is involved

• Netlify — hosting for this website, and processing of the suggest-a-pack form.
• Mixpanel — anonymous product analytics for this website only, with no cookies and no identifier. See the Mixpanel privacy policy.
• Lemon Squeezy — merchant of record for Pro purchases, and the licence API the app talks to.
• Google Fonts — the site's typefaces.

These providers may process data outside your country. We do not sell or share personal data with anyone else, and there is nothing to sell.

How long anything is kept

Purchase records are kept for as long as tax and accounting rules require. Suggest-a-pack submissions are kept until they have been read and acted on, and are deleted on request. Website analytics events are kept in Mixpanel under its standard retention; because they carry no identifier, they cannot be traced back to a person, by us or by anyone else. Nothing on your Mac is kept by us at all, because it never reaches us.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to ask what personal data is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to its processing, or to receive a copy. Email thisdudestartedsomething@gmail.com and we will deal with it. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

Children

Noisy Laptop is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. Some sound packs are marked as adult humour and are never selected by default.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes will be noted on the website.