Privacy Policy

In short

• There is no account, no sign-in and no profile. BugBnB doesn’t know who you are and has no way to find out.
• It never reads, copies or uploads what’s in your Trash. It measures how big the Trash is, how many items are in it and how old the oldest one is — and that measurement never leaves your Mac.
• Two things use the network: a daily update check, and one anonymous signal when the app starts. Both have an off switch, and both are described below.

What stays on your Mac

Your settings, your guest list, your check-in rules, the Trash readings and where you put the desktop bin all live in BugBnB’s own preferences on this Mac. None of it is synced, backed up to anyone or sent anywhere. Drag BugBnB to the Trash and delete its preferences, and it is all gone.

Counting copies, not people

BugBnB is free and isn’t on the App Store, so its author has no other way of knowing whether anyone actually uses it, or which versions of BugBnB and macOS are still worth supporting. So when the app starts it sends a single signal — “a session started” — through TelemetryDeck, an analytics service built for exactly this and nothing more. There are no other signals: no screens, no clicks, no features used, no errors.

What travels with that signal:

• A random identifier standing for this installation. It is generated on your Mac, derived from nothing about you or the machine, then salted and hashed before it is sent and salted and hashed again on arrival. Neither we nor TelemetryDeck can turn it back into anything.
• Which version and build of BugBnB you run.
• Your macOS version, Mac model, processor architecture, screen size and scale factor, and time zone.
• Interface language, region, text direction, and whether you use the light or dark appearance.
• How many times BugBnB has been started on this Mac, on how many separate days, and how long those sessions lasted.

What does not:

• Your name, email address or any account — BugBnB has never asked for them.
• Anything about your files: not your Trash, its contents, filenames, paths, sizes or dates.
• Anything you do in other apps, on other sites, or anywhere outside BugBnB.
• Your IP address. TelemetryDeck never stores it — not in its database, not in its logs. It reads the country from the address and discards the address itself. Times are rounded to the hour on arrival.

These signals are processed by TelemetryDeck (a German company) on servers in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Germany. Their own privacy policy is at telemetrydeck.com/privacy, and their SDK — the code that builds the signal — is open source, so anyone can check what it does.

To switch it off: BugBnB › Settings › General › Privacy › “Count this copy anonymously”. With it off, none of the above is even created — no identifier, no signal, no request. The choice survives “Reset to Defaults”, because turning somebody back on quietly would be the worst kind of reset.

The update check

Once a day BugBnB fetches a small file from bugbnb.threep.top to see whether a newer version exists. Nothing about you, your Mac or your Trash is attached to that request. Like any request to any website it does tell the server your IP address and which version asked, because that is how the web works; those server logs keep the site running and are used for nothing else. Updates are signed, and none of them installs without your OK. You can turn the check off in Settings › General › Updates.

The permissions BugBnB asks for

• Full Disk Access (required). macOS protects the Trash folder, and without this BugBnB can’t measure it. It reads sizes, item counts and dates. It does not open, read or copy the files themselves.
• Accessibility (optional). Finds exactly where the Trash sits in the Dock, so the guests gather in the right place. It is not used to read what’s on your screen or what you type.
• Automation › Finder (optional). Lets Finder do the emptying when you choose Empty Trash, so locked items are handled properly. Used at that moment and no other.

Things BugBnB doesn’t do

No ads. No advertising SDKs, tracking pixels or third-party trackers of any kind. Nothing is sold, rented or handed to anyone for any purpose. No profiles, no cross-app or cross-site tracking, no crash or diagnostic logs uploaded, and no cookies — the app has no web view at all. And it never deletes anything on your Mac unless you ask it to.

This website

bugbnb.threep.top has no analytics and sets no cookies. It remembers which language you picked in your browser’s local storage, on your device, and nothing else. Every font and image is served from the site itself, so opening it doesn’t call out to anybody. The web server keeps ordinary access logs to stay online and serve downloads.

Your choices, in one place

• Stop being counted: Settings › General › Privacy.
• Stop the update check: Settings › General › Updates. You will then need to come back here for new versions.
• Take back any permission in System Settings › Privacy & Security. BugBnB will say what stops working.
• Remove everything: drag BugBnB to the Trash and delete its preferences file. There is nothing on a server to ask us to erase, because there is nothing on a server that is yours.

If this changes

If BugBnB ever sends something else, this page says so before that version ships, and the date at the top moves. Anything that changes what leaves your Mac is called out in the release notes too, so an update can’t quietly change the deal.