Privacy Policy

Hark is a native desktop email and calendar client for Google Workspace and Gmail accounts (macOS today; Windows and Linux planned), published by Souplin Labs LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("we", "us"). This policy explains what Hark does — and, more importantly, does not do — with your data.

The short version

Hark has no backend for your mail or calendar. When you connect a Google account, your device talks directlyto Google's servers. Your email, calendar, contacts, and Google access tokens stay on your device. We never receive, proxy, store, or have any access to your Google data. Nothing Hark sends us is taken from your mailbox — the one way anything of yours can reach us is if you attach it to a bug report yourself, which is described below. We cannot read your mail, because Hark never sends it to us.

What data Hark accesses, and where it stays

With your explicit consent on Google's sign-in screen, Hark uses Google APIs on your device to:

• read, organize (label/archive/snooze/trash), search, and compose/send your Gmail;
• read and manage your Google Calendar events and Google Tasks;
• read your contacts, for two things: completing recipients and event guests as you type, and showing a sender’s profile photo on their messages;
• read/update Gmail settings you change in the app (signature, vacation, filters, send-as aliases);
• attach Google Drive files you explicitly pick to a message you are writing. Drive files already attached to a calendar event by someone else are shown, but Hark does not attach new ones to events.

All of this happens in a direct connection between your device and Google (googleapis.com). The data is stored locally on your device:

• Google access/refresh tokens:in your operating system's secure keystore (macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager / Linux Secret Service), encrypted by the OS.
• A local cache of recent messages, calendar events, and downloaded attachments, to make the app fast and available offline. You can clear this at any time, and it is removed when you sign out or delete the app.

We do not transmit any of this to our servers — we have no server that touches it.

What we (the publisher) receive

For the core mail/calendar app: nothing. There is no telemetry that contains your account list, email addresses, subjects, message content, or contacts. Hark never sends us anything out of your mailbox on its own.

Three things do reach us, and only one of them can carry anything of yours — because you put it there:

• Reporting a bug (only when you send one):the “Report a bug” window sends what you typed, which part of the app you picked from a fixed list, and any images you attach yourself, to a report endpoint we run. It also sends your app version and build, macOS version, hardware model, CPU/RAM/disk, locale, timezone, uptime, how many accounts are connected (a count, never the addresses) and a random per-install id. It sends nomessage content, subjects, addresses, tokens, or log files — the log-collecting reporter is a separate build that is not compiled into the public app at all. The images are the part to think about: if you attach a screenshot of your inbox to show us a bug, that screenshot reaches us, because you sent it. Attach nothing, and nothing of your mail leaves your Mac.
• Attaching a Google Drive file:Google’s file picker is a web component, so choosing a file opens a page on harkmail.app in your browser. Loading it reaches our host, which sees your IP address, the time, and a random one-time id — the same things any website sees. It does notsee your email address, your files, or which file you picked, and the page’s Google credential is created in your browser and never sent to us. It can only ever grant access to files you pick yourself: it comes from a separate Google Cloud project that has never been granted access to mail. Nothing happens here unless you use this feature.
• Crash diagnostics (opt-in, off by default):with it switched on, Hark reads the crash files macOS itself writes about Hark and sends a fixed set of fields: an incident id and time, the app version, build and commit, the macOS version and hardware model, the exception type, signal and termination reason, which thread crashed, and the stack frames. No field in that report can carry mail — no message content, no addresses, no account identifiers. With the switch off, Hark does not read the crash-report folder at all, let alone the network.
• Subscription/billing: Hark is free while it is in beta. If you subscribe once it is not, payment is processed by Stripe, and your billing account is separate from your Google account: you create it with an email address of your choosing and sign in either with a one-time link emailed to that address or with Google Sign-In — through a separate sign-in client that has no access to Gmail, never the connection Hark uses for your mail. Each Mac you use Hark on carries a random identifier generated on that Mac (not a serial number or any hardware address), which is what links it to your billing account; you can link up to five, and your account page lists them and can remove the Mac whose Hark opened it. We receive a subscription record: that email, a Google account id if you signed in with Google, subscription status with the date it started and the renewal or retry-until date that goes with it, an opaque Stripe customer reference, those per-Mac identifiers, when each Mac was linked and last checked in, and — once the beta ends and each Mac asks what it is entitled to — when that Mac’s 30-day trial started and ends, whether or not you ever subscribe. Signing in stores a one-way hash of the sign-in link and of your session, with when each was created and last used; the session key itself is held only until the browser that asked for it collects it, and the record is deleted once the link expires. We never link it to, or receive, your Gmail data.

How Google user data is used — and Limited Use

Hark's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically:

• Google user data is used only to provide and improve the user-facing email/calendar features inside Hark, on your device.
• We do not transfer Google user data to third parties except as necessary to provide those features (the direct device↔Google connection), for security, or to comply with law.
• We do not use Google user data for advertising.
• We do not allow humans to read Google user data, except with your explicit consent for a specific support request, where required for security/abuse, or as required by law.
• We do not use Google user data to train generalized/ML models.

How we protect your data

The sensitive data Hark is trusted with — the contents of your Gmail, your calendar, your contacts and your tasks — is protected by keeping it in as few places as possible, and by the operating system's own protections in the one place it does live:

• In transit: every request runs over HTTPS/TLS directly between your device and Google's servers (googleapis.com). Hark opens no cleartext connections, and there is no proxy or intermediary of ours in that path.
• Credentials: your Google access and refresh tokens are held only in your operating system's secure keystore (macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager / Linux Secret Service), which encrypts them and gates access to them. They are never written into Hark's own files.
• At rest: the local cache of messages, events and attachments is a file in Hark's application-support directory, protected by your operating system's file permissions and by your device's full-disk encryption (FileVault on macOS, BitLocker on Windows). To be precise rather than reassuring: Hark does not add a second layer of encryption of its own on top of that cache. If your device is not using full-disk encryption, enabling it is what protects this data at rest.
• Nothing to breach on our side: we operate no server that receives, stores or processes your Google data, so there is no copy of it in our infrastructure to be exposed. See “What we (the publisher) receive” above for the small set of data that does reach us, none of which is Google user data.
• No diagnostic trace in the shipped app: the action/API-call tracing and bug-report upload used for internal testing is compiled out of the public release build entirely — it is not present in the binary you run, so it cannot capture or transmit your mail.
• Least privilege: Hark asks for the narrowest scope that implements each feature. For Google Drive that is drive.file, which grants access only to files you individually pick in Google's own file picker — not to your Drive.
• Access control: we do not access your Google user data, and no employee or contractor reads it, except in the narrow cases set out under Limited Use above (your explicit consent for a specific support request, security/abuse, or where required by law).

Data retention & deletion

Because your Google data lives only on your device, you control it: clearing the cache, signing out, or deleting Hark removes the local copy and the stored tokens. To revoke Hark's access entirely, remove it at Google Account → Security → Third-party access.

Children

Hark is not directed to children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your jurisdiction).

Changes

We may update this policy; the "Last updated" date reflects the latest version. Material changes will be noted in-app or on the website.

Contact

support@souplin.com · Souplin Labs LLC, 28 Geary St STE 650 #493, San Francisco, CA 94108, USA