Privacy notice — Throughline for macOS

Applies to: Throughline 1.0.2 (the macOS application)
Last updated: 2026-10-07
Publisher: Lucrative Pictures LLC, an Arizona limited liability company · postal address: PO Box 123, Flagstaff, AZ 86002, USA
Contact: privacy@throughlinepost.com · PO Box 123, Flagstaff, AZ 86002, USA

This notice covers the application. Buying a licence happens on the website, which is a separate system with its own notice.

The short version

Throughline runs on your Mac. Your footage, your audio and your projects stay on your Mac. There is no account, no login and no cloud project. We never receive your media, your transcripts, your file names or your project names.

Four things can leave your machine, and you control all four. One of them is reliability data: a short list of anonymous facts such as “an export finished in under a minute” or “a repair failed with a RuntimeError”. It is off unless you say yes, you can read every byte of it before and after it is sent, and it never contains your media or anything typed or spoken in it. They are all listed in full below.

1 · What we collect

Nothing, unless you opt in to reliability data. Out of the box the application sends us no usage data, no crash reports and no beacon on launch.

The first time you open Throughline it asks: Help improve Throughline — send anonymous reliability data? The answer pre-selected is No thanks. You can change your mind at any time in Settings → Advanced → Share reliability data, or from a terminal with throughline telemetry on / off. An organisation can switch it off on every Mac it manages, for good, by setting THROUGHLINE_TELEMETRY=never or placing an empty file named telemetry.never in /Library/Application Support/Throughline/.

1.1 · Exactly what is sent, if you say yes

It exists so we can tell whether Throughline is working on real machines and what to fix: which features succeed or fail, how often, on which kind of Mac, and whether the trial limits bite. It is never your media, never a file name, folder, path, transcript, caption, project name, case or client name, your licensee name, your licence key, your computer’s name or your user name.

Every value is a fixed word from a short list or a short code with no spaces, and the application refuses to send anything else — the check runs on every batch immediately before it leaves your Mac, and our server runs the same check again and discards anything that fails it. The complete list of fields, generated from that check rather than typed by hand:

There are four kinds of event: app_start (version, build, macOS version, chip family, memory range, licence state), feature_run (feature, outcome, duration range, error type, input format family, input size range), crash (exception type and a one-way hash of where in Throughline’s code it happened — never the error message) and trial_limit_hit (which feature).

The install id is a random number created on your Mac the moment you say yes. It is not derived from your hardware, and it is a different number from the activation label in §2, so the two cannot be joined. Declining creates no id at all.

1.2 · How and when

Events wait in a queue on your Mac and are sent at most once a day, over HTTPS, to telemetry.throughlinepost.com, using the same certificate checks as licence activation. The queue holds at most 500 events and anything not sent within 14 days is thrown away. Turning reliability data off deletes whatever is still queued.

You can see exactly what is sent. Settings → Advanced → View sent data shows the events waiting to be sent and, for every batch already sent, the exact bytes that went over the wire. throughline telemetry show prints the same thing.

1.3 · What we do with it

Our endpoint does not read or store your IP address. We keep each batch for 12 months and then it is deleted automatically. Counts without the install id feed a dashboard (success rate per feature and version, the commonest error types, crash-free sessions) and are kept for up to three months. We do not sell it, share it, or combine it with anything else — including your purchase record, which lives in a different system.

Deleting it. Email privacy@throughlinepost.com with the install id shown in Settings → Advanced → View sent data and we will delete everything stored under it and confirm when it is done.

Legal basis: your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at
any time with the same switch.

1.4 · What stays enforced in the code

The logging subsystem refuses to install any network-capable log handler, and the app forces HuggingFace’s telemetry off at startup so that a stray environment variable cannot switch it back on. Reliability data has one narrow door, described above, and it is shut until you open it.

2 · Your licence key

Your licence is verified on your Mac by checking a cryptographic signature against a public key built into the application. Day to day there is no licence server and no network call: we cannot tell whether, when or how often you run the software, and the app keeps working offline.

Activation is the one exception. When you first enter a subscription or trial licence key the application contacts our payment provider (Polar) once to confirm it, and re-checks it about once a month thereafter. That exchange carries exactly three things: the key, the application’s version number, and a label for this Mac so you can tell your Macs apart when you free an activation slot in your Polar account. The label is the chip name and a random six-character identifier created at install — for example Mac (Apple M1 Max) · 7f3a9c — never your computer’s name, your user name, your hardware serial or UUID. It carries nothing about your work: no footage, no transcripts, no file names, no project data. Between those checks the app runs entirely offline, which is deliberate — this software is used in courthouses and on location where there is no network.

During a free trial only, each use of a feature the trial limits is also counted with Polar when the Mac is online, so the trial’s limit holds if the app is reinstalled. That request carries the trial key, the same activation identifier, and the number of uses to add — nothing about your work, and nothing that names the feature. Offline, the count is kept on this Mac and added at the next online use. A subscription key is never counted.

If you choose to bind a licence to one machine, the application stores a SHA-256 hash of your Mac’s hardware UUID. A hash is one-way — it cannot be turned back into an identifier for your machine. By default a licence is unbound and no hash is created at all.

3 · The other things that can leave your Mac

Each is off unless you turn it on. Reliability data, the fourth, is §1.

3.1 Cloud AI story recommendations — off by default

If you choose OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini as your story provider, Throughline asks for explicit consent, once per provider, and records it. After that, transcript text — never your video or audio — is sent to the provider you chose, using your own API key, under your own account with that provider.

We are not a party to that. You are the customer of that provider, their terms and their privacy policy govern what happens to the text, and we receive nothing. If you would rather nothing left the machine, use the Local provider: it runs on your Mac and refuses outright to connect to any address that is not loopback, so it cannot be pointed at a remote server by accident or by configuration.

3.2 Model downloads — only when you pick a model that is not bundled

Downloading a model is an ordinary HTTPS request to huggingface.co. They will see your IP address and user-agent, as any web server would. We are not involved in the request and receive no notification of it.

3.3 Update checks

There are none. Throughline 1.0.2 ships without an auto-updater, so the application never contacts us to ask whether a newer version exists. New builds are announced by email to licence holders and downloaded deliberately. If a later version adds an updater, this notice will be revised before it ships.

4 · What stays on your Mac

Preferences, licence file, consent record, caches (waveforms, fingerprints, analysis results), logs, the reliability-data queue and the record of what was sent, and everything you export. Locations:

~/Library/Application Support/Throughline/     preferences, licence, consent
    ~/Library/Application Support/Throughline/cache/   analysis cache
    ~/Library/Logs/Throughline/                    logs
    

Delete those folders and nothing of Throughline’s remains but the app itself. There is no “delete my account” button because there is no account.

5 · Files you open

The application reads the media files you point it at, and macOS asks your permission before it can reach folders such as Desktop, Documents, Downloads and removable or network volumes. Throughline requests only two capabilities: outbound network access, and read-write access to files you select. It does not request your microphone, camera, contacts, calendar or location.

Throughline never modifies or deletes your source media as part of syncing. Repair and transfer features act on files only when you explicitly invoke them.

6 · Children

Not directed at children. You must be at least 13 to use it, and at least 16 in countries where that is the age of digital consent.

7 · Your rights

Unless you opted in to reliability data, we hold no personal data about you, and there is generally nothing for us to access, correct, port or erase. If you did, §1.3 explains how to have it deleted. If you have bought a licence, the website holds your purchase record, and that notice explains how to exercise your rights over it under the GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, the LGPD, the APPI, PIPA, the Australian Privacy Act, the DPDP Act and the revised Swiss FADP.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — under any definition, in any jurisdiction.

8 · Changes

Material changes will be noted in the release notes and dated at the top of this file. The version bundled inside your copy of the application always describes that copy.