MacFart is a local app. We built it to run in your menu bar, not to feed a pipeline. This page explains exactly what leaves your Mac and why — in plain English, one section at a time.
Short version
- No tracking, no analytics, no telemetry.
- No accounts. Your license is your identity.
- Recordings, imports, and settings live on your Mac — not on our servers.
- We see your email, country, and the fact that you paid — nothing else.
What stays on your Mac
Every sound you record, every file you import, every preference you set, every process MacFart names in a banner — all of that stays in ~/Library/Application Support/io.macfart.app/. None of it is uploaded anywhere. Deleting the app (or the folder) removes it completely.
What we learn when you buy a license
Purchases run through a standard commerce processor (Paddle or Gumroad, depending on region). We receive the following from them: your email address, the country your card was issued in, and the fact that a payment succeeded. We store a license key that's tied to your email so we can reissue it if you lose it. Nothing else.
License activation
When you paste your license key into MacFart, the app pings our server once to verify it's real and not revoked. That ping contains your license key and a coarse device identifier (so you can't share a single license across ten Macs). It does not contain your name, email, IP (beyond normal TLS handshake metadata), or anything about what's on your machine.
Fartify — the community jukebox
When you publish a clip to Fartify, we do four things with it: (1) transcode to a normalised 5-second AAC-in-M4A; (2) strip all embedded metadata (album art, GPS, artist, comment — everything); (3) hash the result for de-duplication; (4) upload it to our own Nextcloud server, not a third party. The resulting public URL is what other users stream.
The only identifier attached to a public Fartify entry is a handle derived from the last four characters of your license key (e.g. @mf-9x2k). Your email is never shown. Reports you file are tied to your license key so we can weigh trust over time, but reports are never public and never shared with the person you reported.
You can delete any fart you uploaded at any time from the Mac app — that removes the row in our database, the public share, and the file itself in Nextcloud. Copies that other users imported into their own local sound packs are theirs, since they downloaded them.
Updates
MacFart checks for new versions using the standard Sparkle framework. That check reaches our update feed and returns an appcast XML. No personal data is sent in the request.
Crash reports
If MacFart crashes, macOS offers to send a diagnostic report to Apple. You control that in System Settings. We don't run our own crash pipeline — the standard Apple one is what we read.
Third parties
The website is hosted statically. The app talks to our license server and (when v1.2 ships) the marketplace API we operate. We don't use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Mixpanel, Posthog, Segment, or any other tracking SDK. No ads, anywhere.
Your rights
If you're in the EU, UK, California, or anywhere with a data protection regime, you have the right to see what we hold, fix it, or delete it. Email [email protected] from the address you bought with. For the license record that's basically the email + key + purchase country — we'll confirm and delete on request. Note that wiping the license also revokes your ability to activate MacFart, so save the key first.
Kids
MacFart is a joke app for Macs. It is not targeted at children. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.
Changes
If we ever change this policy materially, we'll update the "last updated" date and, if you have an active license, email you the diff before the change takes effect.
Contact
Anything, anytime: [email protected].