Hi there! I’m Ben, the sole developer of Mattebox. I deeply respect your privacy. Other than your preferences, Mattebox stores no data. Mattebox does not track or share any of your personal information.
That’s it! That’s the privacy policy.
Ben
Appendix
Perhaps you’re curious about the permissions Mattebox requests, the way data is stored, or what steps I’ve taken to deliver on this promise to respect your privacy. Let’s break it down.
Photo Permissions
Mattebox is a photo editing app, so at a bare minimum, it needs some way to open a photo, process it, and save it again. As a developer, I have two options as of late 2024:
- Present an Apple photo picker which only allows the developer to see the image selected by the user, and grants no access to their photo library.
- Request access to the user’s photo library. Users can allow full access, or restrict access to manually selected images.
I would prefer to use the first option, but this API does not allow me to save the edited photo back into your photo library. A photo editing app that can’t save is problematic.
The second option is on the other extreme—by granting Full Access, the developer has unrestricted access to read, write or delete anything in your photo library.
If you choose Limited Access, you’re in control of which photos are available to the developer, but now you’ll need to manually approve every photo you want to edit, which is not a smooth user experience.
Knowing all this, I completely sympathize with users who would select Limited Access. I hope that over time, Apple can add functionality to the photo picker—and I’ve filed Feedback to this effect.
In the meantime, all I can do is guarantee that even with Full Access, Mattebox will only ever read or write the photos & videos that you select, will only access assets that you view, and will never store or transmit anything about those assets.
Data Storage
Mattebox stores almost no data of its own. In fact, here’s the complete list:
- A database of Filters (described below), which is stored locally on your device.
- User preferences, which are stored in the system’s standard UserDefaults database. None of these preferences include personally identifiable information, other than whatever name you enter when creating a filter.
- Account details and access tokens for any connected services such as Mastodon. These are encrypted and stored in the Keychain using standard best practices.
Mattebox does not upload any user data to any remote server.
Filters
Mattebox allows you to save an image processing recipe as a “Filter.” When you create a filter, you can give it a name, and enter your own name as the creator. The name you give yourself is stored in UserDefaults so you don’t have to re-enter it the next time.
Both of these name fields are unrestricted. You could title your filter “1989” and enter your name as “Taylor Swift.” Your name is not a username, and it is not reserved, validated or checked against any service.
When you send a filter to someone, they can follow a link to https://mattebox.com/filter/, and see the names entered by the creator. However, it’s important to note that the filter data itself never passes through the mattebox.com server. The filter data is encoded into the URI fragment, which is not sent to the server as part of the request. The filter and its name are decoded using client-side Javascript.
There is no central database of filters. You can think of sharing a filter as equivalent to sharing a screenshot. A recipient may easily re-share the screenshot with no attribution. It’s possible to slightly change the filter and enter a new name.
Mattebox sometimes appears to be a filter sharing platform, but it isn’t; it does not feature any way to share filters within the app. Instead, to publish or send a filter, you must take action outside the app using a communication channel such as email, SMS, Mastodon, etc.
Tracking
Mattebox does not collect tracking information or analytics about your use of the app. The app keeps track of which features you’ve seen in order to help onboard you, but this data is kept local (via UserDefaults). You can see the number of images you’ve saved from Mattebox in the Settings screen, but this is just for your information and never leaves your device. Similarly, Mattebox.com does not use tracking, analytics or cookies. In order to prevent abuse, the Mattebox.com web server keeps standard access logs, including IP addresses. These logs are archived daily and deleted after 7 days.
Changes
I may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If I make any changes, I’ll update the date below.
Contact
If you have questions about this policy, contact me.
Last updated: 2024-10-05