Privacy Policy: Your Footage Never Leaves Your PC

1) What Stays On Your Computer

This section comes first because it is the most important thing to understand about GLworm. The App is a local video tool. The following never leaves your machine, and we have no way to see it:

Your gameplay recordings and any video you import.
The clips, montages, vertical reels, and overlays GLworm produces from them.
Thumbnails, previews, and every frame the App reads while analysing a recording.
The results of that analysis — detected kills, event timings and categories, and the tags on your clips.
Your in-game player handle, the games you add to the catalogue, and your per-game detection settings. You enter a handle so the App can recognise your own name in the kill feed; it is stored locally and is never transmitted.
Your library layout, folder choices, and app preferences.

These live in a database file on your own drive under %APPDATA%\GLworm and in the clips folder you choose, alongside the recordings wherever you keep them.

The detection runs on your computer too. Finding your highlights uses files installed with the App and runs on your own graphics card or processor. No picture and no text from your recording is sent to us or to anyone else.

2) Information We Collect

A. Account information

Accounts are created and managed through Firebase Authentication (a Google service). You can sign in with:

Google Sign-In — we receive your name, email address, and profile photo if you have one.
Email and password — we receive your email address. Your password is handled by Firebase Authentication and is never visible to us.
A sign-in link sent to your email — we receive your email address.

Firebase also holds an account identifier, whether your email is verified, and the date your account was created. That creation date is what the App uses to work out how much of your free trial is left.

The App keeps you signed in between sessions by saving your session securely on your own PC, using the credential storage built into Windows. Signing out removes it.

B. Subscription and payment information (Stripe)

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card details. Stripe processes your name, email, billing details, and payment method under its own policies.

What we store in our own database is limited to what is needed to know whether your subscription is live: a Stripe customer identifier, a subscription identifier, its status, and its current period end.

C. Plan data (Firebase Firestore)

We use Firestore to store the small set of records that answer “which plan is this account on”: the account document described above, the subscription record, and a hand-maintained list of ambassador email addresses.

Both the Site and the App read those records using your own signed-in credentials, and security rules allow an account to read only its own. Nothing about your videos or clips is stored there.

The App also records one install marker the first time you sign in on a given computer: your email address, your account identifier, the app version, whether you installed from the Microsoft Store or the downloadable installer, the date, and a count of how many times you have installed. It tells us how many people actually install and open GLworm. It is written once and never read back by the App, and it records nothing about what you do once you are inside.

The App keeps a copy of the answer on your computer so it still works for a while without a connection.

D. Website analytics and cookies

This Site uses Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages people visit and which buttons they press — page views, download-button clicks, and subscription-button clicks. Google Analytics sets cookies and collects a device identifier, approximate location derived from your IP address, browser, and device type.

Signing in also stores authentication state in your browser so you stay signed in between visits. We use no advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking.

The App has none of this. It gathers no usage statistics, reports nothing back to us, and sends no crash reports.

E. Technical data from normal network operation

Visiting the Site, signing in, or downloading the installer involves a request to a server, and those servers log ordinary request data such as your IP address, user agent, and the time of the request. This happens at our hosting and download providers (Google Firebase Hosting and Cloudflare) and at our service providers, for security, abuse prevention, and operations. We do not build user profiles from it and we do not store IP addresses in our own database.

3) How We Use Information

To create your account and keep you signed in.
To work out which plan you are on and which features are available.
To take payment and manage subscriptions, through Stripe.
To answer your support requests when you contact us.
To understand Site traffic in aggregate, so we know which pages are worth improving.
To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and diagnose technical problems.

We do not use your information to train AI models. The App does not collect gameplay data for that or any other purpose.

4) How We Share Information

We do not sell your personal information and we do not display third-party ads.

We share information only with the service providers that make the service work:

Google / Firebase — authentication, Firestore, server functions, website hosting, and Google Analytics on this Site.
Stripe — payment processing and subscription management.
Cloudflare — hosting the installer download.
Microsoft — if you install GLworm from the Microsoft Store, that distribution and any data Microsoft collects around it are governed by Microsoft’s own terms and privacy policy.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or to protect our rights and the safety of our users.

The open-source libraries built into the App (see section 10) are software components, not service providers. They do not receive your data by virtue of being included in the App.

5) Data Retention

We keep account and plan information for as long as your account exists, and delete it when you ask us to. Payment and transaction records are retained by Stripe and by us as required for accounting, tax, and fraud prevention. Analytics data is retained under Google Analytics’ standard retention settings.

Everything the App stores on your computer stays there until you delete it. Uninstalling the App does not remove your library or clips; you can delete %APPDATA%\GLworm and your clips folder yourself if you want them gone.

6) Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational measures to protect information. Traffic to our services is encrypted, plan data is protected by rules on our side that let an account read only its own records, and your sign-in session is stored in Windows Credential Manager rather than in a plain file. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we work to protect your data.

7) Your Rights & Choices

You can request:

Access to your personal information
Correction of information that is wrong
Deletion of your account and the personal information we hold about it

To make a request, email us at support@glworm.com. We may need to verify your request for security reasons. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA, including the right to object to or restrict processing and the right to complain to a supervisory authority.

You can also manage or cancel your subscription at any time through the billing portal linked from your account, and you can opt out of Google Analytics using Google’s browser opt-out add-on or your browser’s cookie controls.

8) Children’s Privacy

The Site and the App are not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If a child under 13 creates an account, account information such as name, email address, and profile photo may reach us through the sign-in provider.

If you are a parent or legal guardian and believe a child under 13 has provided personal information without your consent, contact us at support@glworm.com. We will promptly review the request and delete the information where required.

9) International Transfers

Our service providers (Google/Firebase, Stripe, and Cloudflare) may process and store data on servers located in different countries, including the United States. This means your information may be transferred and processed outside your country of residence, under the safeguards those providers maintain.

10) Open-Source Components & Your LGPL Rights

GLworm is built on open-source software. Two of those components — Qt (LGPLv3) and FFmpeg (LGPLv2.1 or later) — are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which gives you a specific right: you may replace those libraries with your own compatible builds and keep using GLworm with them.

GLworm links both dynamically, as ordinary .dll files beside the application, precisely so that right is exercisable.

The Microsoft Store version cannot offer this, which is why we also publish a plain installer. A Store package is sandboxed: its files are protected by Windows and cannot be substituted. The MSI installer below writes every file — the application, the Qt and FFmpeg libraries, and everything else — as ordinary files you can open, inspect, and replace.

To exercise the replacement right:

Install GLworm using the MSI installer above.
Open %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\GLworm.
Replace the library you want to change — for example Qt6Core.dll or avcodec-*.dll — with your own compatible build of the same version.
Start GLworm. It loads your library instead of ours.

The license texts are available from gnu.org (LGPLv3) and gnu.org (LGPLv2.1). Upstream sources are at qt.io and ffmpeg.org. We use unmodified builds of both.

Written offer. If relinking GLworm against your own build of Qt or FFmpeg requires more than replacing a library — for example the object files and build scripts needed to relink the application — email support@glworm.com and we will provide them at no charge beyond the cost of delivery.

GLworm also includes OpenCV (Apache 2.0), ONNX Runtime (MIT), DirectML (MIT), polyclipping (Boost Software License 1.0), Tabler Icons (MIT), and the Inter typeface (SIL Open Font License 1.1). These are attributed here and their licenses do not restrict your use of GLworm.

11) Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top. If changes are material, we may provide additional notice on this Site or in the App.

PrivacyPolicy