Privacy
What we hold, why we hold it, and for how long. Written to be read rather than to be complied with.
The short version
- No third-party analytics, no advertising networks, no tracking scripts, no fingerprinting.
- These marketing pages set no cookies at all. Signing in to your account sets one, and it keeps you signed in — nothing else.
- We never see what is on your screen, what you have open, or what you type.
- Your IP address is kept for 90 days for fraud detection, then shortened — 12 months if your licence was revoked or reported itself modified, or if the address requested a free trial. We geolocate it to a country and no further.
What the application sends
While CtrlFlick Recon is running it checks your licence with us. Each check sends:
- Your licence key.
- A hardware identifier — a set of one-way hashes derived from components of your PC. These cannot be reversed into serial numbers or into any identifier we could match against anything else.
- Your computer’s name, in plain text. This one is not a hash, deliberately: it is what lets you tell “DESKTOP-GAMING” from “WORK-LAPTOP” on your account page when you want to know which machine holds your licence. If your computer name identifies you, so does the entry on that page.
- The version you are running.
That is the whole payload. It does not include your files, your screen, your keystrokes, the programs you run, or the games you play.
What the server observes
Your IP address arrives with any connection, as it does with every website. We keep it for 90 days against the licence check, because “this key was used from forty networks this week” is how licence sharing is detected. After 90 days it is shortened so it no longer identifies a connection. We resolve it to a country only, which is done at the network edge before it reaches us — there is no lookup service and no third party involved.
Two situations keep it longer, for 12 months: a licence we have revoked, and a licence whose own copy of the program reported that it had been modified. Both are records of something we acted on or something the software measured, and both are the kind of thing that gets disputed months later — a record that is already gone cannot answer the dispute in either direction. If your licence is in good standing, this does not apply to you and the 90 days above is the whole of it.
The address a free trial is requested from is kept for 12 months for the same reason, and then shortened. The record that a particular machine has had its trial is kept for good — that is what stops the same PC taking an unlimited number of them — but it identifies the machine, not you.
The IP kept against a licence check is never joined to the page-view records below. They are separate on purpose.
Page views on this website
We count page views, server-side, in our own database. There is no script in this page doing it, nothing loaded from another company, and nothing that follows you to another website. What is recorded is the page, where you came from if a link sent you, the country, and an IP address that is already shortened when it is written — the last part is discarded before the row is stored, not later.
This is why there is no cookie banner on this site: there is nothing to consent to. It also works with JavaScript switched off, because it does not use any.
Connecting Discord
You can connect a Discord account to your licence account. It is optional, it is not a way to sign in, and nothing about your licence depends on it — your licence key works on its own whether you connect one or not.
If you do, we ask Discord for one thing: who you are. That gives us your account id and your username, and nothing else. We do not receive your email address, the servers you are in, your friends, or your messages — and we cannot read your messages, because the permission that would allow it is not one we ask for.
We also do not see what you are playing. Disconnecting it on your account page removes both the id and the username immediately, and leaves no record that there was ever one there.
Cookies
Three, all strictly necessary, none used for tracking:
- Signing in to your account sets one that keeps you signed in. It holds a signed reference to your customer record and an expiry.
- The checkout sets one while an order is in progress.
- The admin panel sets one for staff. It is of no use to you.
None of them are readable by anyone else, none are shared, and none exist until you do something that requires one.
What is kept, and for how long
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Email address, password hash, payment provider’s payer reference | Your account and your purchases | While the account exists, then 30 days |
| Discord account id and username, if you connect one | Somewhere to reach you about your licence | Until you disconnect it, or the account is erased |
| Computer name | Showing you which machine holds your licence | While that machine is active, then 30 days |
| Hardware hashes | Enforcing one PC at a time | While the activation exists |
| IP address against a licence check | Detecting licence sharing and fraud | 90 days, then shortened |
| … where the licence was revoked or reported itself modified | Evidence for a dispute about that decision | 12 months, then shortened |
| IP address a free trial was requested from | Stopping unlimited free trials | 12 months, then shortened |
| Shortened IP, page, referrer, country | Knowing which pages are read | 12 months (shortened from the start) |
| Orders, invoices and tax records | We are legally required to | 7 years |
Your data, on request
Sign in to your account and you can download everything we hold about you — your orders, your licences and your machines — as a JSON file, immediately and without asking anyone.
Deleting your data
Email support@ctrlflick.com and we will remove your personal details. Two honest caveats, because they are true of any business selling software and are usually left unsaid:
- Order and tax records stay for seven years. We are required to keep them and cannot delete them on request. What we can do is detach them from your identity, which is what we do.
- The licence audit log is append-only. Records of issue, activation, revocation and refund are what make the log trustworthy, so entries are never edited or removed. They are pseudonymised instead.
- Your software keeps working. Being forgotten is not a cancellation: anything you have paid for runs until it expires, and the name your PC reported is removed from our records without stopping it. What ends is our ability to reach you — there is no address left, so the licence cannot be renewed and you cannot sign in to the account area. Download your data first if you want a copy of it.
Who else sees it
- Our payment provider handles the payment itself. We never receive or store your card details.
- Our email provider delivers your licence key and receipts.
- Our network provider sits in front of this site, as it does for most of the web, and passes on your IP address and country.
We sell nothing to anyone, and there is no advertising network involved at any point.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that affects what we collect, the change applies from when it is published, and we will say so rather than editing quietly.