Privacy policy

This policy describes what the program does today, in the version named above. It is written in the present tense on purpose: it states current behaviour rather than intentions. If a later version changes any of this, the policy changes with it, before that version ships.

What the app stores, and where

Everything StickyWords remembers between runs lives in three files in your own Windows user profile, under %APPDATA%\StickyWords\. They are ordinary files on your disk. You can open them, copy them, back them up or delete them at any time, and nothing needs the app's permission.

Your word lists

Word lists are .sws files that you create and save wherever you choose — a documents folder, a USB stick, a synced folder if that is what you want. StickyWords reads and writes the file you point it at and does nothing else with it. Fields it does not recognise are preserved and written back untouched.

A list is plain JSON, small enough to read and to email to someone else. That is a deliberate property of the format: the list is yours, and it is portable without the app's help.

The Windows registry

StickyWords writes one registry value, and only while Start with Windows is switched on in the Options menu: a standard entry under the current user's Run key, so that Windows launches the note at sign-in. Switching the option off removes the entry. Nothing else in the registry is written or read.

Pronunciation

When you press Pronounce, the word is spoken by SAPI 5 using a voice that is already installed on your PC. The audio is synthesised locally, by Windows, on your own machine. No text — not the word, not its meaning, not the language of the list — is sent to any server in order to be spoken.

If no installed voice can speak the list's language, the button does not simply fail: it turns into an install icon and opens the Speech page of Windows Settings, where you can add a voice. That opens a local Windows settings page; StickyWords is not involved in whatever you do there, and Microsoft's own terms and privacy statement govern any voice you choose to download.

Network connections

StickyWords opens no network connections. It does not check for updates, does not phone home, does not fetch content and does not report errors. You can run it on a machine that has never been online, and nothing about it degrades.

Two actions deliberately hand off to other software on your computer: the Pronounce button opens Windows' Speech settings when a voice is missing, and the About box opens this website in your default browser. In both cases StickyWords asks Windows to open something and then plays no further part.

What is not collected

To be explicit, StickyWords does not collect, generate or transmit any of the following:

• Names, email addresses, accounts or licence keys — there is no sign-up of any kind.
• Usage analytics, event tracking, feature-usage metrics or session recording.
• Crash reports or automatic diagnostics.
• Device identifiers, advertising identifiers, IP addresses or location.
• Your word lists, your words, or the statistics kept about them.
• Anything at all about other programs, files or windows on your computer.

There are no cookies, no third-party SDKs and no advertising libraries in the application.

Sharing and selling

Your data is not shared with anyone, sold to anyone, or used to train anything. This is not a promise about restraint — it is a consequence of the design. Nothing is collected, so there is no store of data anywhere for me or for anyone else to share, sell or be compelled to hand over.

Deleting your data

Delete the folder %APPDATA%\StickyWords\ and any .sws files you have saved. That is everything StickyWords has ever written, and once it is gone it is gone: there is no server-side copy, no backup held by me, and nothing to request the deletion of. Uninstalling removes the program; the folder is left behind so that an uninstall does not silently destroy your settings and statistics, which is why deleting it is a separate step.

Your rights

Data-protection law gives you rights to access, correct, export and erase personal data that an organisation holds about you. In the case of StickyWords there is nothing held: no personal data is transmitted or stored anywhere outside your own computer, so there is no account to access, no record to correct and no database entry to erase. Those actions are file operations you carry out yourself, on files you already own and can read.

Should a future version ever process personal data off your device, this policy will say so plainly and name who processes it, before that version is released.

This website

This site is a set of static pages hosted on GitHub Pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads no third-party fonts, scripts, images or trackers — every file the page requests comes from this domain. Nothing you do here is recorded by me.

GitHub serves the pages, and in the course of doing so its servers process technical information such as your IP address and browser user agent, as any web server must. That processing is GitHub's, described in the GitHub Privacy Statement and the general privacy statement. I have no access to those logs.

The download link points to a release file hosted on GitHub; following it is a request to GitHub, on the same terms. The Microsoft Store link, once it is live, will take you to Microsoft, whose own privacy statement applies from that point on.

Children

StickyWords is suitable for learners of any age and collects nothing from anyone, children included. Because no personal data is gathered at all, there is no age gate and no parental-consent mechanism — there would be nothing for either to protect.

Changes to this policy, and how to reach me

If the behaviour described here changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated. Material changes — anything that would cause data to leave your computer — will be described in the release notes of the version that introduces them, and the feature will be off until you switch it on.

Questions about this policy, or about anything StickyWords does with your data, are welcome at hello@firstpush.dev.

StickyWords 3.0.0, by Gytis Liutkus.