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Privacy Policy — Hecate Admin

Effective date: 2026-06-18 Developer: Matthias Morath

Hecate Admin is an authoring tool. It is used to create and publish the profiles that configure the capture app, and to set up the connection to your MQTT broker. It is not a data-collection app.

What we collect

No telemetry and no personal data. The admin app:

  • requests no location and has no camera;
  • runs no third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking;
  • sends nothing to the developer — there is no hosted backend.

What it handles

  • Profiles you author. A profile describes the fields and steps of a capture workflow. Profiles are configuration, not personal data, and must not contain secrets — they are broadly readable by the devices that subscribe to them.
  • Broker credentials. To publish profiles, the app connects to your MQTT broker with admin credentials. The password is held in the platform Keychain — never in plain text, never written to a profile, a provisioning QR, or a log, and never transmitted anywhere except to authenticate to your broker.

Where data goes

The only network destination is the MQTT broker you configure. The admin app publishes profiles there (as retained messages) at your direction. It transmits nothing to the developer or any third party, and there is no advertising, profiling, or cross-app tracking.

Storage and security

  • Profiles and connection settings are stored on your device.
  • The broker password is held in the Keychain.
  • Connections to the broker can use TLS (mqtts) so data in transit is encrypted.

Your choices

  • Credentials: stored only on the device; remove them at any time.
  • Profiles: you author, publish and retire them; retiring a profile clears its retained message on your broker.

Diagnostic reports you send us

There is exactly one exception to everything above, and it is your decision every time: under Settings → Event log you can send us a report if you would like help. It never happens by itself.

  • You see the whole report before it leaves the device — nothing is added after that screen.
  • You decide each single time.
  • You send it from your own mail app. The app sends nothing in the background; there is no server of ours it could send anything to.
  • It contains: device and system version, app and core version, your plan (free/pro) and log lines. Never photos, location fixes, passwords, tokens or broker credentials — matching patterns are replaced before sending.
  • A comment and a reply address are optional. We use the address solely to answer that one report.

If you would rather keep the report or hand it to your own IT: "Share …" on the same screen gives you the same information as a text file, without us seeing any of it.

Desktop application (Windows, macOS, Linux)

This is the privacy policy of Hecate's desktop applications, Capture and Admin for Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no hosted backend of our own: your data goes to the MQTT broker you enter, and whoever runs that broker is responsible for it.

What we collect

The profiles you author and the broker configurations you create. The Admin captures no assets, reads no location and collects no analytics or advertising identifiers.

Permissions

The desktop applications ask for no permissions: no camera, no location, no Bluetooth, no access to your photos. A scanner presents itself to the operating system as a keyboard or as a serial port; the application reads only what it sends.

Where data goes

Captures and profiles go only to the MQTT broker you enter — encrypted with TLS, unless you switch TLS off yourself for a broker without encryption. There is no Hecate backend and no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking service. The licence is checked without a network. What happens to the data after it reaches your broker is up to its operator, not Hecate. An event log reaches Hecate only when you send it yourself from your e-mail program, after seeing it in full (see "Terms and privacy").

Storage & security

Settings, profiles, your captures, the licence and the event log are files in your user folder on this computer. The broker password lives in the operating system's keyring — the macOS Keychain, the Windows Credential Manager or the Secret Service on Linux —, never in plain text in a file and never in the log. The event log stays on the computer until you save it and pass it on yourself; passwords and credentials are replaced when you do.

Retention & deletion

You control retention on the computer: delete a capture or a profile and it is removed from local storage; deleting a capture also cancels its pending sends. The event log keeps at most two files of about one megabyte each and overwrites the older one. What has already reached your broker is kept there according to its configuration; Hecate cannot delete it there for you.

Third parties

The applications are built from open-source Rust libraries, among them rumqttc for the connection to the broker; the full list with their licences is under "About". No analytics, advertising or tracking libraries are included. The only network destination is the broker you enter.

Your rights

Because your data lives on your computer and on your broker, you can exercise most privacy rights directly — view and edit entries in the application, delete them from the computer, and manage retention on your broker (access, rectification, erasure). For anything else, contact the controller named below. Depending on where you live, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data-protection authority.

Controller & contact

Hecate is developed by MMM Software & Consulting. When you run Hecate against your own broker, you (or your organisation) act as the controller for the data you capture. Questions about this policy: by e-mail to info@hecateapps.com. Last updated: September 2026.

Children

Hecate is a professional utility and is not directed at children.

Changes to this policy

If the app's data handling changes, this page and the in-app privacy screen will be updated together.