Privacy policy

What Site Pulse accesses

When you choose to connect a Google account, Site Pulse asks Google for these permissions:

• See and download your Google Analytics data (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly). Site Pulse uses it to list the Google Analytics 4 properties your account can see (property and account names, property IDs and time zones) and to read aggregate reports for them: active users right now and over the last 30 minutes, users today and yesterday, users in the last 7 days and the usual number of users by hour of the week. While you have a site’s detail open it also reads, for the last 30 minutes only, where its visitors are (countries, and the cities of a country you open), the titles of the pages they are viewing, the kind of device they use (desktop, mobile, tablet) and the names of the events their visits sent (such as page views or scrolls), all as aggregate counts. To find each site’s website address it reads the web data stream of the property (its default address, no visitor data). Access is read-only: Site Pulse cannot change anything in your Analytics account.
• Your email address and basic sign-in identity (openid and email). Site Pulse uses these only to show which Google account is connected and to tell several connected accounts apart.

Site Pulse doesn’t access any other Google data. It doesn’t see individual visitors to your websites; Google Analytics reports only aggregate counts.

Site Pulse doesn’t request any additional Google permission for this: the data streams and the detail reports are read with the same read-only analytics.readonly permission.

Without a connected account, Site Pulse shows a demo site with simulated visitors and makes no requests to Google.

Where your data is stored

Only on your Mac:

• For each connected account, your Mac’s Keychain stores the sign-in token Google issues, together with the account’s email address and its Google account ID (used to label the account and to tell several accounts apart).
• The list of your properties (filed under the Google account ID that can see them, with each property’s website address) and each site’s usual traffic pattern are cached in the app’s own folder (Application Support, inside the app’s sandbox), so the app starts quickly and makes fewer requests.
• Each watched site’s icon and its main colour, which Site Pulse uses to tint the site’s tile, are cached in the app’s own folder (Application Support) and refreshed at most once a week.
• Your settings (which sites to watch, short names, colours, order and options) are stored in the app’s preferences.

Widgets

If you add Site Pulse widgets to your desktop or Notification Centre, the app keeps the data they show in a shared folder on your Mac (an App Group container, ~/Library/Group Containers/566SSXX9H8.com.sgumz.sitepulse/). It holds:

• a snapshot of aggregated analytics numbers for your watched sites and for all of them together: users per month and per day (this month and last), the last 24 hours as a curve, the top countries (this month and last) and traffic sources, the current live counts and which sites are spiking, a few highlights computed from these numbers, and your sites’ names, property IDs, colours, monograms and time zones;
• copies of the watched sites’ icons;
• a log of when spikes started on your watched sites over the last 31 days (property ID and start time only).

Only the Site Pulse widgets read this folder. The widget extension has no network access and never reads your Google sign-in tokens, which stay in the Keychain; the numbers are fetched by the app, with the same read-only permission as above. Nothing in this folder leaves your Mac.

While Site Pulse is running, it rewrites the snapshot about every 15 minutes and shortly after you change which sites you watch or remove an account. Each time, a site you no longer watch drops out of the snapshot, its icon copy is deleted, its entries are removed from the spike log, and spikes older than 31 days are removed too. When no Google account is connected, the snapshot holds the simulated demo site instead, and the icon copies and the spike log are deleted. macOS doesn’t delete this folder when you delete the app; to remove everything, delete the folder named above.

The countries, cities, page titles, devices and events shown in a site’s detail are fetched only while that detail is open. They are kept in memory while Site Pulse is running (so reopening a detail shows them straight away), are never written to disk, and are gone when you quit the app.

Website icons

To show each site’s icon, Site Pulse downloads it directly from your website: it requests the website address that Google Analytics lists for the site (following any redirects), reads that home page, and then requests the icon locations the page itself links to, which may be on a content delivery network the site uses. Site Pulse never uses a third-party favicon or icon service, and sends no Analytics data in these requests. They are ordinary web requests, so your website may see them in its own server logs.

Site Pulse writes brief diagnostic messages, such as a failed request and the property ID it was for, to your Mac’s system log. They stay on your Mac and contain no analytics numbers and no tokens.

Site Pulse talks directly to Google’s servers (accounts.google.com, oauth2.googleapis.com, analyticsdata.googleapis.com and analyticsadmin.googleapis.com) over encrypted connections, and to your own websites to fetch their icons (described above). There is no Site Pulse server. I never receive, store, sell or share your Google data, and no person other than you can read it.

Google API Services User Data Policy

Site Pulse’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

In particular, Site Pulse uses data from Google APIs only to show you your own analytics in the app. It doesn’t transfer the data to anyone, doesn’t use it for advertising, doesn’t use it to train AI or machine-learning models, and doesn’t let any person read it.

Tracking and analytics

Site Pulse has no analytics, crash reporting, advertising or tracking SDKs, and doesn’t collect any data about how you use it. If you choose to share crash reports with developers in macOS, Apple may pass them on to me under Apple’s own privacy policy; they don’t contain your Google data.

Removing access and deleting your data

• In Site Pulse: open Settings → Accounts and click Remove next to an account. This deletes its token, email address and account ID from the Keychain, revokes Site Pulse’s access at Google, and forgets the sites only that account could see.
• At Google: go to your Google Account → Security → Your connections to third-party apps & services (myaccount.google.com/connections), choose Site Pulse and remove its access.
• Everything: deleting the app and its container (~/Library/Containers/com.sgumz.sitepulse) removes all cached data and settings; also delete the widget folder ~/Library/Group Containers/566SSXX9H8.com.sgumz.sitepulse; remove the “com.sgumz.sitepulse.google” items in Keychain Access to delete stored tokens.

Children

Site Pulse is a tool for website owners and isn’t directed at children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date.

Contact

Sandro Gumz · email the developer