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 23 October 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 telemetry and no crash reporting, and no account, except in Talk, the app for messages and calls, which is described after this list.
- 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.
- An update check, 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.
- An announcement check, and this one is to us. Once a day at most, the launcher asks this site whether there is an announcement worth showing you. It sends the version of Rutba Office and the name of your operating system, in the address, and nothing else: no cookie, no identifier in the request, and none stored in a file to send next time. It is a setting in the launcher, and turning it off stops the request and the announcements together.
What a request reveals, which is not nothing. Any request to a server reveals an IP address and a user agent. GitHub receives those when your copy checks for an update and when you download an installer. That is their processing under their own policy, not ours. The announcement check reveals the same two things to us, because it is our server answering. What it does not carry is any identifier, so what can be counted is that a copy of Rutba Office was opened somewhere on a given day, never that this copy was, and never across two days. That is the honest limit of what “collects nothing” can mean for software that updates itself and has a notice board.
Talk, the one app that signs in
Talk carries messages and calls between people, so it has to know who you are. If you use it, you sign in with a Rutba account (the account itself is covered by rutba.io’s privacy policy), and our servers process what follows to provide the service you signed in for, which is the lawful basis. If you never sign in to Talk, none of it exists.
- Your place in Talk. Your Rutba account id, name and confirmed email address, when you last connected, and your contacts and blocks. No IP address and nothing about your devices. Kept while you use Talk. Talk has no button to delete these yet, so write to us at hello@rutba.io and we remove them.
- Messages waiting for someone offline. Held encrypted until they are delivered, then deleted. One never collected is deleted after 30 days.
- Invitations. Who asked, the address typed or the link’s code, an optional note and the time, deleted when the invitation is accepted or withdrawn and after 30 days at most. An invitation we send from no-reply@rutba.io also leaves a record of who sent it and when, so the sending limits can be kept, deleted after 8 days. An address that asks not to be invited again is kept as a keyed hash rather than the address itself, so that the request is honoured.
- Calls. Encrypted end to end. A call that cannot go straight between the two computers passes through our relay, turn-eu.rutba.io, which logs when it started and ended, the account id, the caller’s IP address and how much it relayed, never what was said. The log has a fixed size, so its oldest lines are overwritten as new ones arrive.
- Backups. Our servers are backed up every night, and a backup can hold what is described here for up to about three months after it was deleted from the server.
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.
The films
Each film on this site, the introduction on the home page and the apps’ own on the apps page, shows as a picture kept on this site, and nothing is loaded from YouTube until you press play. Pressing play is your choice to load that film: it then plays from youtube-nocookie.com, which may keep data in your browser for the player under YouTube’s own privacy policy. If you never press play, YouTube is never contacted.
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. The announcement check is answered by this site instead, so it is not a third party at all. It is us, described above.
- • Google Analytics is used 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 →