Privacy Policy

Summary

You can browse MacBase without an account, and nothing tracks you while you do: there are no analytics, no ads and no tracking cookies. If you sign in to list an app, we keep what we need to run your account and show your listings, we never sell it, and we never post anything to X, GitHub or Google for you.

When you browse

• Searches go to our server to find matches, and aren’t kept.
• Your light or dark choice is saved in your browser’s storage, if you pick one, and never sent to us.
• App icons and screenshots from the Mac App Store load from Apple’s servers, which see the request the way any website does.
• The Ask AI buttons open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok or Google with a question about the page. What you do there is between you and them.
• Our server’s logs record each request: the address it came from, the page and the browser. We use them to keep MacBase running and secure, and delete them after 30 days.

When you sign in

You sign in with X, GitHub or Google. From the one you choose, we get:

• your name, your email address and your profile picture, and from X or GitHub, your username there;
• an ID for your account there, so the same account signs you in next time.

We don’t keep the access the provider grants after you’re signed in, so MacBase can’t read your posts, repositories or mail, and can’t act for you. X often doesn’t share an email address; then we ask you for one.

When you set up your account, you add a username, and if you like a headline and a website.

While you’re signed in, we keep a session: a random key in a cookie, and on our side the time it started, the address it came from and your browser, which helps us spot a stolen one. A session ends when you sign out or after 7 days without a visit.

What’s public

Once you’ve set up your account, your profile page at macbase.app/@username is public: your name, username, profile picture, headline, X handle, website, when you joined, and your published apps. Search engines are asked not to list it until you have a published app. A published listing is public too, with a link to your profile. Listings appear on MacBase, in its Markdown pages and llms.txt, and in its public MCP, which AI assistants use to recommend Mac apps. Your email address is never shown.

When you list an app

• What you submit is kept with the listing: its name, words, links, icon, screenshots and the rest.
• The review reads your listing, your app’s Mac App Store page and your website, and sends the listing and those pages to an AI model to check it’s a real Mac app described honestly. Your email address and your account aren’t sent.
• The badge check visits the page on your website where you put the badge, now and then, to see it’s still there.
• Email comes from us about your account and your listings: a review’s outcome, a badge that went missing, or a change to these terms.

The newsletter and product updates

Two kinds of email are separate from your account emails: the weekly newsletter of new Mac apps, and product updates about MacBase. When you create an account, you get both, and you can turn either off in Edit profile or from any of these emails. You can also subscribe to the newsletter from the footer without an account. We keep the address, what it’s subscribed to, when it subscribed and when it confirmed. Nothing is sent until the address is confirmed, by the link we email to it or because it’s the verified email from your sign-in. Every one of these emails has a link to unsubscribe, and your mail app’s Unsubscribe button works too.

Cookies

MacBase sets two, both its own, and only when you sign in:

• better-auth.session_token keeps you signed in. It can’t be read by the page’s scripts, and goes when you sign out.
• better-auth.last_used_login_method remembers whether you used X, GitHub or Google, so the sign-in page can mark it. It keeps for 30 days.

Signing in also briefly sets cookies that protect the trip to the provider and back; they go once you’re signed in.

Who we share it with

We share your information with no one except the services that run MacBase for us, each only for that:

• our server host, where the site and its database run;
• Cloudflare, which stores a copy of your profile picture and the icons and screenshots you upload;
• Amazon Web Services, which sends our email;
• the AI model provider that reads listings for the review;
• X, GitHub and Google, when you sign in with them, under their own privacy policies.

We would disclose information if the law required it, and to no one otherwise.

How long we keep it

Your account and listings stay until you delete them, and a newsletter subscription until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it. When you delete an account, they’re gone from MacBase straight away and from our backups within 30 days. Copies that search engines or AI assistants already made are theirs, and fade as they look again.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what we keep about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing [email protected]. We answer within 30 days. If you’re in the EU or the UK, you can also complain to your data protection authority.

Changes to this policy

If this page changes, the new version is posted here with a new date, and if it changes what we do with your information, we email you first. The terms of use cover the rest.

Questions

Email [email protected]. A person reads every message.