Legal Information
I’m responsible for the contents of christiantietze.de, tableflipapp.com, wordcounterapp.com, and calendarpasteapp.com. In accordance with German laws like §5 Telemediengesetz and §55 Abs. 2 RStV, here’s my contact data:
Christian Tietze
Dostalstr. 18
D-33647 Bielefeld
+49 177 6467763
My VAT identification number: DE287457787.
Disclaimer
Accountability for content
The contents of our pages have been created with the utmost care. However, we cannot guarantee the contents’ accuracy, completeness or topicality. According to statutory provisions, we are furthermore responsible for our own content on these web pages. In this context, please note that I am accordingly not obliged to monitor merely the transmitted or saved information of third parties, or investigate circumstances pointing to illegal activity. Our obligations to remove or block the use of information under generally applicable laws remain unaffected by this as per §§ 8 to 10 of the Telemedia Act (TMG).
Accountability for links
Responsibility for the content of external links (to web pages of third parties) lies solely with the operators of the linked pages. No violations were evident to me at the time of linking. Should any legal infringement become known to me, I will remove the respective link immediately. So please report incidents!
My App’s Privacy Policies
Data from Purchases
When you purchase an app, I’ll keep a record of the order that includes the purchase details plus your email and name. This is necessary to e.g. recover lost license codes. My e-commerce provider FastSpring keeps a purchase record and has more details in their privacy policy.
App Crash Log Privacy
If you opt in to sending crash logs, I will have a copy of your crash logs.
When one of my apps sends a crash log, it sends only the text of the crash log. You can opt in to send your email address with the crash log, but you don’t have to. But then I cannot get back with follow-up questions.
The server will, as described below, store some information of the data upload, including the time of day and your IP address.
Crash logs are stored privately and are kept confidential.
However, I may make significant parts of a crash log available publicly when there’s no personal identification in that part of the crash log. For example, I might share something like this:
Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff42df0668 _CFRetain + 65
1 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff42cf8b46 -[__NSCFString retain] + 14
2 libswiftCore.dylib 0x00007fff6e756ffe swift_bridgeObjectRetain + 62
3 de.zettelkasten.TheArchive 0x000000010a2c1099 0x10a2ad000 + 82073
4 de.zettelkasten.TheArchive 0x000000010a2f0519 0x10a2ad000 + 275737
This indicates the point of failure in the app and is entirely for the purpose of fixing crashing bugs. It does not tell anyone anything about you or your machine.
WordCounter Privacy
The WordCounter (https://wordcounterapp.com) logs what you type as you type it to increase your score.
The app does not store what you typed, though, so your passwords and confidential data is always safe. All the app does, basically, is to flick an internal switch like “does this keystroke indicate a word has ended?”
The app also stores your records, but never what you typed. It never transmits any text to anyone. The storage consists of:
- Log files for debugging, and
- Your actual word counts.
The app keeps a daily log of events that are of interest for debugging, like “the app went to sleep” or “auto-save the results”. You can inspect that stuff in Console.app > User Reports > WordCounter to see for yourself. Even these boring details are never shared with me: You have to send me these files deliberately. On top, they are deleted once they get a couple of days old.
The word counting statistics derived from your typing, the real data that is saved permanently is stored in an open, inspectable format here:
~/Library/Appliation Support/WordCounter
The WordCounter tracks your keyboard input and increases a tally when a word is finished. To do that, it keeps a couple of key presses from the past in memory, until a word delimiter is registered; it then flushes the cache of recorded and increases the count by 1. A delimiter may be a space or punctuation after a couple of non-space characters, for example.
In other words, the app does process text you type. The app is oblivious to what you actually write. If a malicious application peeked at the contents of the WordCounter app in your computer’s memory, it would only find a couple of numbers, not any passwords you may have typed.
The app does from time to time contact my server at update.christiantietze.de – that’s where updates are stored, and the WordCounter checks for newer versions regularly by default. It will not transmit any of your data, I will not be able to identify you and your update habits; all that is transmitted is your computer’s IP address. You can inspect all this with tools like Little Snitch that intercept outgoing traffic. I don’t even collect your macOS version. You can disable this in the settings if you’d rather download updates manually than having the app communicate with a web server.
On the surface level, my app is virtually indistinguishable from the input mechanism of a keylogger, which is one of the worst kinds of malware to get! That’s also why the App Store does not permit sales of an app like the WordCounter: Apple can’t guarantee that nothing bad happens, so they don’t permit observing your keyboard, period.
With all that in mind, I promise I do not track your keystrokes and never store anything you type to keep your information safe.
Tracking, Cookies, and 3rd Parties
I don’t use cookies on this website myself.
The comments are powered by Disqus, and your visit to my pages is transmitted to them, too, when the contact forms load. You have to accept Disqus’ terms and policies first, though. You login information are handled by Disqus, not me.
You can disable cookies in your browser.
Tracking of website hits
I do use TelemetryDeck to collect anonymized usage data to discover blog interactions and traffic streams because TelemetryDeck does not collect any personally identifiable information. I don’t know who you are, and neither does TelemetryDeck. You can read more about TelemetryDeck’s privacy policy at https://telemetrydeck.com/privacy
On christiantietze.de, I do use session-cookies of VG Wort in Munich, Germany, to let them measure how many people read my articles. I get compensated when I hit a certain threshold of visits per post. The money comes from a “tax” e.g. printer manufacturers have to pay (see the German Wikipedia for info). The usage of this cookie is in accordance with Art. 6 Paragraph 1 DSGVO (aka GDPR).
The data handling is actually done by INFOnline GmbH, Bonn, Germany. You can opt-out completely by having them set an opt-out cookie, ironically, affecting all (German) websites that participate.
Server logs
My web server automatically collects data for every page you visit as you visit it. Your browser transmits this data, and you can control this from your browser or via plugins, if you want.
The log files on my server include
- browser name and version
- your computer’s operating system
- the referrer URL
- the host name
- the time of access
- your IP address
This data is not combined with anything else. This is in accordance with Art. 6 Paragraph 1 DSGVO (aka GDPR).
Amazon affiliate-links
Links to Amazon.com are often affiliate links. When you click on these, the shop will give me a share of a few % for any product you buy. This does cost you nothing. Using these links does not set any cookies or transfer your IP. Only when you click on them and visit their shop will Amazon know about you. On their pages, the privacy policies of Amazon apply.
External content
External fonts are served by Google Fonts. According to them, (2018-05-26) they do not set cookies during the process. Also, when the fonts are loaded from their server, the result will be cached by your browser for a year without your computer reaching out to their server again.