Desktop CrewPrivacy policy
For Desktop Crew 1.0 and this website. Effective:
Who we are
Desktop Crew is made and sold by SynthCORP LLC, Series N: Desktop Crew, a series of SynthCORP LLC, a Utah limited liability company in Woods Cross, Utah, USA ("we"). We're responsible for the small amount of personal information described under "Your license key" and "Important notices" below. Contact: support@desktopcrew.app.
The short version
Desktop Crew runs on your computer. It has no accounts, no ads, no analytics, no telemetry and no tracking. We receive nothing from the app. There is no crash reporter and no automatic update check.
The app connects to the internet in only two cases, and you control both:
- Weather, once you pick a town: your town's rough location goes to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway).
- Twitch chat, only if you turn on Streamer mode and enter your Twitch channel.
Like any internet connection, those services can see your computer's IP address when the app contacts them.
When you buy, the checkout (Link, a Stripe company) collects your payment details, and we receive your name and email address so we can send your license key and, if one is ever needed, an important notice about your purchase. Never marketing.
This website has no cookies, no analytics and no third-party scripts.
What leaves your computer
| When | What is sent | To whom | How to stop it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weather | Only after you pick a town in "Make it yours". Your town's latitude and longitude, rounded to 2 decimals (about 1 km), and an app identifier: the app's name and version and a link to the developer's public contact page (MET Norway requires this). Checked at start, every 30 minutes and when the PC wakes from sleep. With "No town (no weather)" nothing is sent. | MET Norway (api.met.no), under its own privacy terms. |
Tray > More > untick "Weather from …", or choose "No town (no weather)" in "Make it yours". |
| Twitch chat | Off by default; needs Streamer mode and a channel name. Your channel name and a random guest name. No login, no token, and the connection can't post. The app reads chat only for five commands. Viewers' names and messages are never shown, saved or sent anywhere. | Twitch's chat service, under Twitch's privacy terms. | Turn off Streamer mode, or remove the channel. |
| Buying | The app sends nothing. The buy button opens the checkout in your web browser. At the checkout you give your payment details, email address, name and country to Link (Sold through Link, LLC, a Stripe company), the merchant of record for the payment, which runs the checkout, charges any tax and sends your receipt. | Link, under the Link privacy policy, with Stripe as its payment processor (Stripe privacy policy). We see your order in Stripe's dashboard (your name, email address, country and what you paid), never your full card number. | — |
| Your license key | Not from the app. When a purchase completes, Stripe sends our key service the order, including your name and email address. The service makes your key and emails it to you. It keeps your order reference, the name in your key, the purchase date, the payment reference and a key ID, so a lost key can be resent and refunds can be recorded. It doesn't keep your email address or any card details. The email service keeps a copy of the email it sent (your address and your key) for 30 days. | Our key service, which runs on Cloudflare, and our email service, Resend. Both act only on our instructions. | Ask support@desktopcrew.app to delete your record; your key keeps working. |
| Important notices | Not from the app. Important notices about your purchase: a security fix, a problem with your key or the download, or the end of support. Taken from the order in Stripe; never marketing. Only when a notice is needed, we look up your email address in your order at Stripe and send the notice to it. We don't copy your address into the key service or keep a mailing list. | You, through our email service, Resend, which acts only on our instructions and keeps a copy of each email it sends for 30 days. | Ask support@desktopcrew.app not to send you these. We then can't tell you about a security fix, so check this site for new versions. |
What stays on your computer
None of these is sent anywhere. They live in your Windows user folder, %APPDATA%\desktop-crew (tray > More > "Open the crew's data folder"). Once a week the app also copies them, without your license key, into Documents\Desktop Crew\Backups (tray > More turns this off). If that folder syncs to OneDrive or another cloud service, the copies go to your own account, which we never see.
| File | What is in it |
|---|---|
settings.json | Your tray choices, and the list of programs the crew hides for. |
profile.json | What you tell the crew in "Make it yours": the name it calls you, your town (its name and coordinates rounded to about 1 km), your holiday region, birthdays you add (a name, a month and a day), which holidays you want, huddles per day, and your Twitch channel if you stream. |
crew-life.json | What the crew learns: roughly when you step away and come back (rounded to 15 minutes, fading out after about 9 weeks), reminders you dismissed, recent huddles, small daily counts for the last 30 days, and Crew Town's progress. |
crew-progress.json, crew-stories.json, comedy.json | Each crewmate's dream progress, who you adopted, the crew's stories and friendships, and which jokes they told when (so they don't repeat too soon). |
build.json | The monthly build: this install's pace, the last step you saw, its screen, the foreman and finishing touch you picked. Progress itself comes from your PC's date. |
diary\ | One file per day of notable crew moments, for "Today in Crew Town". A line can include the name the crew calls you. Old days aren't deleted automatically. |
rare-sightings.json | Which crewmate was golden on which day. |
license.json | When your trial started, when the app last ran, and your license key if you entered one. A key contains the name it was issued to. It's checked on your computer against a public key built into the app. There's no activation server. |
onboarding.json | Which introductions and tips you've already seen. |
last-version.json | The version of the app that last started, so a new version knows to back up the crew first. |
errors.log | Technical errors with the time, so a problem can be fixed. Never sent automatically. |
| Wallpaper files | Only if you turn on wallpaper mode (below). |
| Electron's working files | Caches for the app's own windows (the app is built on Electron), not your browsing. |
Pictures and clips
- Photos and 10-second clips go in
Pictures\Desktop Crew. Clips are recorded only when you ask; some photos are taken automatically for crew moments. They show only the crew's own layer, never your windows or desktop. - Crew cards go on your clipboard as a picture and a few lines of text. Nothing is posted anywhere unless you paste it yourself.
- The lock-screen picture is off by default. If you turn it on, the app refreshes one picture every 30 minutes and when you lock the PC; you point Windows' lock-screen slideshow at it yourself. It can show the name the crew calls you, a line from today's diary and a guess at when you'll be back, so anyone who can see your lock screen can see those.
Windows settings the app changes
- Start with Windows. The installed direct edition starts with Windows by default, so the crew is there each morning. Turn it off in tray > More > "Start with Windows". The uninstaller removes the entry.
- Your wallpaper, only in wallpaper mode.
Wallpaper mode (off unless you turn it on)
- Before the first change, the app backs up your wallpaper in
%APPDATA%\desktop-crew\wallpaper-backup: each monitor's picture path, the fit, the background colour, and a copy of each of your wallpaper pictures. An existing backup is never overwritten. - Your wallpaper comes back when you turn the mode off, while you hide the crew, when you quit the app, straight away after a crash (or at the latest at the next start), and when you uninstall.
- It refuses to start if your wallpaper is a slideshow, Windows Spotlight, or a tiled or spanned picture, because those can't be put back exactly.
- The backup is kept after it's used, renamed
wallpaper-backup kept <date and time>. Delete those folders yourself when you no longer need them.
What the app looks at, but doesn't save or send
- The title of the window you're using, every 1.5 seconds, only while comments are on and the crew is on screen, so they can joke about what you're doing. Quoting page titles is off unless you turn it on. Banking, payment, password, sign-in, health, legal, tax, private-browsing and email windows are never quoted. Turn comments off in tray > Talk, or with Ctrl + Alt + Shift + M.
- Where your windows are (position and size, no titles), so the crew can stand on them.
- Which programs are running, compared with the short list the crew hides for or goes quiet for.
- Which programs have a big window open, and the folder each was installed in, every 3 seconds, so the crew can hide while you play. The folder is checked on your PC and dropped. Turn this off in tray > "Hide while I'm gaming".
- AI coding sessions (Claude Code and Codex). The app looks at when the session files in
%USERPROFILE%\.claude\projectsand%USERPROFILE%\.codex\sessionswere last changed. To name each session's character after its project folder, and to skip sessions a program rather than a person started, it reads only small records written before any conversation: for Claude Code, the file each running Claude Code keeps in%USERPROFILE%\.claude\sessions(the app keeps only the session's ID, its folder and how it was started, not the session's title; for an older Claude Code that doesn't keep that file, the folder is found by matching folder names on your PC); for Codex, the first line of each session file. It never opens a Claude Code conversation, and in a Codex file it looks at nothing past the first line. Your conversations are never read, saved, shown or sent. To turn it off: tray > More > “A bot for each Claude Code session” or “A bot for each Codex session”; the app then stops looking at that tool’s files. Hiding the crew stops it too. - How long your PC has been idle, and whether it's locked, for "welcome back" moments and to pause building while you're away.
- Whether the PC is on battery and whether Windows asks for reduced motion, to slow the animation.
"Copy diagnostics" (only when you click it)
Tray > More > "Copy diagnostics (for support)" puts a short plain-text report on your clipboard. Nothing is sent: you read it and decide whether to paste it into a message to support.
It contains the app version and edition, the license state (not the key or the name on it), the Windows version, the Electron version, CPU threads and memory size, each screen's resolution and scaling, how many crewmates and AI agents are out, this month's build and its step, your tray settings, and the last 30 lines of errors.log.
It doesn't contain your name, town, birthdays, Twitch channel, window titles or license key. In the error lines your home folder is replaced with %USERPROFILE% and your Windows user name with <user>. Nothing else is filtered, so read it before you send it. The settings include the program names on your hide list, if you added any.
This website
No cookies, no analytics, no ads, no tracking pixels and no third-party scripts or fonts. The site and the installer download are served by Cloudflare, which, like any web host, handles your IP address and browser details to deliver the pages and protect them from attacks. Nothing tracks you across websites, so "Do Not Track" and Global Privacy Control signals change nothing here.
How long we keep it, and why
- The key record (order reference, name in your key, date, payment reference, key ID): for as long as we sell or support Desktop Crew, so we can resend your key and record refunds, or until you ask us to delete it. We use it only to deliver and support the license you bought. In EU and UK terms, the legal basis is performing our contract with you.
- Your email address for important notices: we don't keep it. It stays in your order at Link and Stripe, and we look it up there only when a notice is needed. In EU and UK terms, the legal basis is performing our contract with you (a problem with your key or the download, the end of support) and our legitimate interest in keeping the copy you bought safe to use (a security fix).
- The key email and any notice at our email service: 30 days.
- Your emails to support: as long as we need them to help you, then deleted.
- Purchase and tax records are kept by Link and Stripe under their own policies.
We don't sell or share personal information for advertising, and we don't use it for anything this page doesn't list. Our services are in the United States.
Your choices and rights
Write to support@desktopcrew.app to see the record we hold about you, correct it, get a copy, or have it deleted. We reply within 30 days, and usually much sooner. Deleting the record doesn't switch off your key. If you're in the EU or UK, you can also object to or restrict how we use it, and complain to your data protection authority.
Children
Desktop Crew isn't made for children, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from them. If you think a child has sent us personal information, write to us and we'll delete it.
Uninstalling and deleting everything
The uninstaller (Settings > Apps > Installed apps > More > Uninstall) puts your own wallpaper back if wallpaper mode was on, removes the Start with Windows entry and removes the program. It keeps %APPDATA%\desktop-crew, Documents\Desktop Crew (the backups) and Pictures\Desktop Crew on purpose, so a reinstall picks up your crew's progress. To remove everything, delete those three folders after uninstalling.
We keep nothing about you on our side beyond the key record described above.
Changes to this policy
If a future version sends or stores something new, this policy is updated before that version ships, with a new effective date at the top and a note in the release notes.
Contact
SynthCORP LLC, Series N: Desktop Crew, Woods Cross, Utah, USA. Email: support@desktopcrew.app.