Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 9, 2026

1. Overview

Starkive (“we”, “us”, “our”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and your rights. By using Starkive you agree to the practices described here.

2. Data we collect

We collect only the minimum data necessary to provide the service:

  • Account data (Starkive Manifest): If you use Starkive Manifest, your email address, to create your account and send account-related email. The desktop Starkive Studio app needs no account for personal use.
  • Purchases: We collect nothing. Starkive Studio is sold only through the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store, and the unlock is read from the store entitlement already on your device. No email is attached to it and no purchase record reaches us.
  • No IP addresses: We do not store IP addresses in any database or log.

3. Data we do not collect

  • File contents: your files are encrypted on your device and never transmitted to our servers.
  • PDF contents: text recognised or analysed on your device stays there (see section 6).
  • PDF file data: on both Windows and macOS, every PDF is decoded in a separate process that has no network access and no access to your files, so the contents cannot leave your machine even in principle (see section 6).
  • Passwords or encryption keys: these stay on your local machine.
  • IP addresses: not stored beyond the immediate country-code lookup.
  • Payment card details: purchases are handled by Apple and Microsoft through their own stores; Starkive never receives or stores your card information, and never sees who bought it.

4. How we use your data

  • To authenticate your Starkive Manifest account, if you have one.
  • To improve the reliability and performance of the service.

5. Third-party services

Starkive uses the following third-party services:

6. On-device processing (Starkive PDF)

On macOS. Starkive PDF can summarize a PDF or answer questions about it using Apple’s on-device Foundation Models, and can read scanned or image-only pages using on-device OCR (Apple Vision). All of this runs entirely on your Mac. Your document text is never sent to Starkive, to Apple, or to any third-party AI service, and it is never used to train any model. These features require an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence enabled; where they are unavailable, the rest of Starkive PDF still works.

On Windows. Starkive PDF reads scanned or image-only pages using the text-recognition engine built into Windows, on your own machine. The recognised text is written into a copy of your document and is never sent anywhere. The current Windows release ships no generative AI feature: there is no summarise or ask-a-question function, and no language model is included or called.

Sandboxed decoding. On both Windows and macOS, the component that decodes a PDF runs as a separate process with no network capability, no access to your files, and no ability to launch another program. This is a containment measure, not a detection one: it limits what a malicious document could do, and it is not a claim that Starkive identifies malicious files.

7. Optional cloud backup

You may optionally connect a cloud provider to back up your encrypted Vault: Apple iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive. This is off by default and entirely at your choice. When you connect a provider, Starkive authenticates through that provider’s standard OAuth flow in a secure web session; we never see your provider password. Your Vault is encrypted on your Mac before it leaves the device, so only the encrypted file is stored on the provider you pick, at your direction — Starkive never receives a copy of the unencrypted data. Your use of these providers is also governed by their own policies: Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

8. Data retention

Starkive Manifest account data is retained for as long as your account is active. You can delete your account and associated data, or request deletion of any data we hold, by contacting us at support@depaloconsultingllc.com.

9. Your rights

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or port your personal data. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at support@depaloconsultingllc.com.

10. Security

All data in transit is encrypted via TLS 1.2+. Your Vault is encrypted locally with AES-256-GCM using a key derived from your master password via Argon2id; the key and your master password never leave your device. On macOS, credentials and OAuth tokens are stored in the system Keychain; on Windows they are protected with DPAPI. We apply the principle of least privilege to all database access policies.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We will notify registered users by email of any material changes. Continued use of Starkive after such notice constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy? Contact us at support@depaloconsultingllc.com.