Legal
Privacy policy
This covers two things that are easy to confuse: the Rutba Office application, which runs on your machine, and office.rutba.io, which is a website. They collect very different amounts of information, and the difference is most of this document.
Last updated 8 September 2026.
Who we are
The data controller
Tech Style Ltd, company number 11101491, registered in England & Wales. UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply to what follows. You can reach us about anything on this page at hello@rutba.io.
The application
Rutba Office collects nothing
Not anonymised, not aggregated, not to improve the product. There is no account, no sign-in, no telemetry and no crash reporting.
- Your documents never leave your machine. The engine works in a local process. Nothing about a file you open is transmitted anywhere by us.
- Mail credentials go to your operating system. Account passwords are handed to the OS keystore — DPAPI, Keychain, libsecret. We never receive them and they are never written where the application can read them back in clear text.
- One network request, and it is not to us. An installed copy asks GitHub whether a newer release exists — twenty-five seconds after launch, then every six hours. It carries no identifier we add. It is a setting you can switch off, after which no request is made at all.
What GitHub sees, which is not nothing. Any request to a server reveals an IP address and a user agent, so GitHub receives those when your copy checks for an update and when you download an installer. We do not receive them and never see them. That is GitHub’s processing under their own policy, and it is the honest limit of what “collects nothing” can mean for software that is able to update itself.
The website
office.rutba.io, where there is something to describe
Analytics you can decline
This site uses Google Analytics to count visits. Nothing loads until you accept the notice at the foot of the page, and if you decline we count nothing at all — there is no server-side fallback that counts you anyway. The lawful basis is your consent, and you can withdraw it by clearing the choice in that same notice.
Two optional forms
Neither is a condition of anything. The download does not depend on either, and the software does not know they exist.
| Form | What it sends | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The download liston /download | Your email address, and — only if you fill them — a name, an organisation, your platform and why you are using it. | So we can tell you when there is a release worth knowing about. |
| Feedbackon /announcement | What you write, plus the version and the kind of report. An email address only if you want a reply — leave it blank and the report is anonymous. | Because the software reports nothing, this is the only way we learn that a version works. |
Where those go, and for how long
Both send an email to one monitored inbox at Rutba and nowhere else. There is no database, no CRM, no marketing platform and no third party we pass them to. We keep them for as long as they are useful and delete them on request, which is a less precise retention period than a larger company would publish and is the truthful description of an inbox.
The lawful basis is consent: you typed it and pressed a button. Nothing you send is sold, shared or used to build a profile, and nobody is added to a marketing sequence. One reply asking to be removed is enough.
Third parties
Everyone else who is involved
- • GitHub — hosts the source, the releases and the issue tracker, and answers the update check. Requests to it are subject to their policy, not ours.
- • Google Analytics — only after you accept the notice, and never before.
- • Our mail provider — carries the two forms above to our inbox.
Anything you post publicly on the issue tracker is public, permanently and to anyone. That is worth remembering before attaching a file — see the community page, which says the same thing where people are most likely to need it.
Your rights
What you can ask us to do
- Access
- Ask what we hold about you. For most people the honest answer is nothing.
- Correction
- Ask us to fix anything wrong.
- Erasure
- Ask us to delete it. We will, and we will confirm.
- Objection
- Tell us to stop. There is nothing here you have to justify objecting to.
- Complaint
- If we handle it badly you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK supervisory authority, without going through us first.
Email hello@rutba.io and say what you want. There is no form and no process, because at this volume a process would be theatre.
Changes
When this document changes
The date at the top is the date it last changed. This site is published from a public repository, so every revision of this page is in its history — you do not have to take our word for what it used to say.
The plain-English version of what the software does not send →