Privacy

Desktop Ducky collects nothing.

Last updated 5 July 2026

No account. No sign-in. No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking, no ads. The app makes no network connections to report on you, and it never sends anything about you anywhere — the one network call it makes at all is license activation, described below. This isn’t a “we respect your privacy” promise wrapped around a data pipeline — there is no pipeline. It’s a duck.

What stays on your computer

Your settings — the look you chose, panel positions, volumes — are saved locally on your own machine, in the usual per-app spot (on macOS, ~/Library/Application Support/DesktopDucky/). They never leave it. Delete the app and they go with it.

The Screen Recording permission

The Screen water mode ripples your actual desktop. To do that, macOS requires the app to hold Screen Recording permission, which the system prompts you to grant on first use. Here’s exactly what happens with it:

The captured image of your screen is used only to draw the water’s refraction, in the moment, on your machine.
It is never saved to disk, transmitted, uploaded, or shared.
The app excludes its own window from the capture — it never records itself, and there is no “recording” in the sense of a saved file.
Don’t want it? Don’t grant the permission, or don’t use the Screen water modes — everything else works without it.

Buying it

Payment is handled entirely by Lemon Squeezy, our payment processor and merchant of record. When you buy Desktop Ducky, your card and billing details go to Lemon Squeezy, not to us — we never see or store your payment information. Lemon Squeezy processes the payment and sales tax under its own privacy policy, then sends us only what we need to deliver your purchase: your email address and an order confirmation, so we can send your download and license key.

We use your email only to deliver the app, your license key, and important notes about your purchase (like a critical update). No marketing lists, no selling your address, ever.

License activation

The one network call the app itself makes is license activation: when you enter your key, the app sends that key to Lemon Squeezy over HTTPS to confirm it and register the activation, and every few days it quietly re-confirms the key is still good. The activation is labelled with your computer’s operating system and a short anonymous code (for example Windows-3F2A) so you can tell your own computers apart if you ever move the license — your machine’s actual name is never sent. That’s the whole exchange: no usage data, no settings, nothing about what’s on your screen.

This website

This site is a handful of static files. It sets no tracking cookies and runs no advertising or cross-site trackers. The live duck in the header runs entirely in your browser.

If this ever changes

If a future version ever adds anything optional — say, crash reports to help fix bugs — it will be strictly opt-in, off by default, clearly explained, and described here before it ships. The default will always be: the duck keeps to itself.

Questions? Email hello@desktopducky.com.