TameChaos Studio App Privacy Policy

This policy describes how the TameChaos Studio application — the app you install and run on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Windows — handles information. It covers the application itself, on every platform it ships on.

Two other surfaces have their own policies, because they are different things doing different work: the tamechaos.com website is a static marketing site, and the TameChaos cloud application is a separate, sign-in-gated service on its own domain. TameChaos Field, the Android product, will publish its own policy when it ships.

Who we are

TameChaos Studio is published and operated by Stormbourne, LLC, which is the controller of the limited information described in this policy. TameChaos is the product; Stormbourne, LLC is the company behind it.

What Studio collects, in short

Two things, and both are optional — Studio is local-first, and it works with neither of them granted. Each is described in full below.

Nothing else is collected. Studio runs no analytics, sends no telemetry, carries no advertising identifiers, shares nothing with data brokers, and does not profile you.

Location

A facility in a Studio project carries a real-world location. You can set that location from your device’s GPS, and that is the only thing Studio ever uses location for.

• Only when you ask for it. Studio reads your location only when you tap “Set location from GPS” on a facility. It takes a single, one-shot fix while you are using the app, writes that coordinate onto that facility, and stops. There is no background location, no “Always” permission, and no location tracking of any kind.
• It stays on your device. The coordinate is stored only in your own encrypted project file on your device. It is never transmitted to us — we do not receive it, and we hold no copy of it.
• It is optional. A facility’s location can equally be typed in as a street address or dropped as a pin on the map, with no location permission granted at all. Decline the permission and everything else in Studio works exactly as before.
• Why the App Store label says “Precise”. Studio asks for accuracy of about ten metres, because a facility needs to land on the right site rather than in the right city. That is finer than the threshold Apple calls “Coarse”, so the honest declaration is Precise Location — used for app functionality only, not linked to your identity, and not used for tracking.

The optional Cloud account

Studio is local-first. Every editor works signed out, nothing you author requires an account, and you can use the app indefinitely without creating one. Signing in does one thing: it lets Studio pull the component catalog.

• How signing in works. Sign-in uses the OAuth 2.0 authorization-code flow with PKCE against Auth0, our identity provider. Auth0 operates the sign-in and holds the account record on our behalf; your password, if you set one, is never seen by Studio.
• What Studio keeps. From the identity token Auth0 returns, Studio keeps your user ID, email address, and name, in your operating system’s secure credential store — the Keychain on the Apple platforms.
• What it is used for. Authenticating the component catalog pull, and showing which account is signed in. Nothing else. It is not used for analytics, advertising, or profiling.
• What reaches us. Each time Studio pulls the catalog, it sends an access token that carries your user ID to the TameChaos catalog service, so the service can tell that an entitled account is asking. That request carries no part of your project with it.
• Signing out. Signing out removes the stored identity from your device. Your projects are unaffected — they were never tied to the account in the first place.

Your projects stay yours

Everything you author in Studio — the topology, the facilities and their coordinates, the bill of materials, your notes, and any photos you capture — lives in your own encrypted project file on your device. None of it is uploaded to us, and we have no way to read it.

Signing in does not change that. The account authenticates a catalog read; no project content travels in the other direction. This release of Studio has no cloud backup and no cloud sync of your projects — the catalog pull is the only network request the app makes. If you save or back up a project to a destination you choose yourself, such as a files app or a personal cloud drive, that copy is governed by whichever service you chose; it does not come to us.

What Studio does not collect

Studio contains no analytics software, no telemetry, no crash-reporting service that reports to us, no advertising identifiers, and no third-party tracking software. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with data brokers.

Studio does not track you in the sense App Tracking Transparency defines: we do not link data from Studio with data from other companies’ apps or websites for advertising or advertising measurement, and we do not share your data with data brokers. Studio therefore never asks for permission to track you.

None of the following categories is collected:

• Health & fitness
• Financial info
• Contacts
• Browsing history
• Search history
• Purchases
• Usage data
• Diagnostics
• Sensitive info
• Advertising identifiers

How long information is kept

• Facility coordinates. Kept for as long as you keep them in your project, and deleted when you delete the facility or the project. Because they are never transmitted to us, there is nothing on our side to retain or erase.
• Account identity. Auth0 holds the account record for as long as the account exists; on your device, the stored identity is cleared when you sign out. Operational records of catalog requests are kept only as long as we need them to run and secure the service.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of the account information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it and close the account. Email support@tamechaos.com and we will respond as required by applicable law. Closing the account removes the account record held by our identity provider.

Your project content and the facility coordinates inside it are not ours to produce or delete — they are on your device, and only you can reach them.

Children

TameChaos Studio is an engineering tool intended for professionals. It carries a 4+ age rating because it contains no objectionable material, not because it is directed at children. We do not direct Studio to children and do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes to this policy

If what Studio collects changes, this policy changes with it — before the change reaches you, not after. We will revise the effective date at the top of this page, and where a release changes what the app collects we will say so in that release’s notes as well.

Contact us

Questions about this policy, or about anything Studio does with your information? Email support@tamechaos.com or write to Stormbourne, LLC at the address above. Other ways to reach us are on our contact page.