Privacy

The short version

Your files stay on your device. Rote Workspace processes your selected files locally in your browser. Your file contents are not uploaded to our servers for processing. Rote Assistant, the desktop application, does not send your files, or anything about them, anywhere.

The website itself is ordinary web traffic: your browser loads its pages, scripts and a font, and we count visits and a few anonymous usage events with Umami, a privacy-focused analytics service that sets no cookies and does not store your IP address. We store an email address if — and only if — you type one into the wishlist or feature-request form. Our video tutorials are on YouTube, and nothing is loaded from YouTube until you press play on one.

Rote Workspace (in your browser)

Rote Workspace — the pages under /studio and the tools under /tools — runs in your browser. When you open a file, your browser reads it from your device and processes it in a background worker on the page. There is no account and no sign-in.

• File contents are not uploaded. No row, column name, cell value or file name is sent to our servers or to our analytics. The processing code makes no network requests.
• Downloads are made on your device. The cleaned or compared result is built in your browser and saved where your browser saves downloads.
• Saved workflows and settings stay in this browser.If you save a workflow or change a setting, it is kept in your browser's local storage on this device. A workflow holds the steps, never your data. You can export or delete workflows in the workspace, and clearing your browser's site data removes them.
• Closing the tab ends it. The file you opened is held only in the page's memory and is gone when you close the tab.

Rote Assistant (the desktop application)

Rote Assistant is in development. It is local-first: it reads files from your computer, works on them on your computer, and writes results to a location you choose. There is no account, no sign-in and no upload.

• Your files stay put. No file, row, column name or value is transmitted off your machine.
• No analytics inside the application. We do not collect usage statistics, crash reports or telemetry.
• Nothing is overwritten. Rote Assistant does not silently modify or replace a source file.

Because the application does not transmit anything, there is no server-side copy of your data for us to lose, sell or be compelled to hand over.

This website

If you join the wishlist, we store:

• the email address you enter;
• your answer to "what would you use Rote Assistant for?", if you write one;
• the platform you pick, if you pick one;
• the date and time you submitted the form.

That is the whole record. We use it once, to tell you the beta is ready, and to decide which platform to build for first. We do not sell it, share it or add you to anything else.

If you send a feature request, we store what you wrote, the area you picked if you picked one, and your email address only if you chose to give one.

The website sets no cookies of its own and runs no advertising scripts. Choosing a language is a plain link to another page, so no preference is stored for it. The site loads one webfont from Google Fonts, which means Google's servers see the request for that font file. YouTube's video player, if you choose to play a video, is described next.

Video tutorials (YouTube)

Our video tutorials — on /tutorials, the home page and the CSV-cleaning feature page — are hosted on YouTube, a Google service. Until you press play, a page shows only a preview image served from our own site, and your browser makes no request to YouTube or Google for the video.

• When you press play, the page loads YouTube's player from youtube-nocookie.com, YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode, and the video plays from YouTube. From then on YouTube receives what any website receives from your browser — including your IP address and browser details — and our site's address (not the page you are on).
• Inside the player, YouTube's terms apply. YouTube may store cookies or other data in your browser once you play a video, and may show its own ads. That is covered by Google's privacy policy, not this one.
• Nothing about your files is sent. The player's address holds only the video's ID and player options. Rote Workspace itself contains no video player: its tutorial link opens our tutorials page.
• Links to YouTube are ordinary links. "Watch on YouTube", the chapter times and the channel link open youtube.com, as any link to another website does.

We do not record whether you play a video. Our analytics (below) count the page view as usual and nothing more.

Visits and usage events

To see which pages people read and how they found the site, the website loads a small script from Umami Cloud, a hosted service run by the makers of Umami, an open-source analytics tool. Visit data is sent to Umami's servers and stored there on our behalf. For each page view — including moving between views inside Rote Workspace — it records:

• the page address and title, and the address of the page that linked to it;
• your approximate location, as worked out from the request — not your IP address, which is not stored;
• your browser, operating system and device type, your screen size and your browser's language setting;
• campaign tags in the link you followed (utm_ parameters), if any.

In Rote Workspace it also records a few anonymous usage events, so we can tell whether the tools are useful and whether people come back: a sample file was opened, a file of your own was opened, an operation was previewed, a result was downloaded, a workflow was saved, run or exported, and the Rote Assistant link was followed. Each event carries only its name and which tool it came from (for examplecleaner) — never a file name, column name, cell value, file size or row count.

It also records three events when a link is followed: a link into Rote Workspace from another page of the website (with the kind of page it was on, such as home or feature, and whether it was in the menu, the page or the footer), a workflow template downloaded (from any page, the workspace included), and the link into the workspace on a template's own page. A template event carries the template's name, only for one of our own templates (for examplebank-to-xero), and, for a download, the kind of page. These values come from a fixed list; none carries anything else. Like every event, each is recorded with the page it happened on, as a page view is.

Umami sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser's storage. The statistics are not linked to your email address or to anything you type into a form, and we do not sell or share them. Blocking scripts from cloud.umami.is stops the counting and does not affect the site or the workspace.

Removing yourself

Ask and we will delete your row. Since the record is an email address and at most two lines of text, there is nothing else to remove.

Page-view statistics are not tied to your name or email address, so we cannot pick out yours to delete.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, the date at the top of this page will change and the new terms will apply from then.