SimpleTextPad
Privacy policy
Last updated: 12 August 2026 · Applies to SimpleTextPad for macOS, version 1.0
SimpleTextPad collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party code in the app. It makes no network requests, and it contains no code capable of making one. Your notes are files on your Mac and nowhere else.
That is the whole policy in a sentence. The rest of this page is the detail behind it, in the order Apple and most people ask for it.
Who this is from
SimpleTextPad is made and published by Cavan Judge, trading as Judge Studios, the sole party responsible for the app and for this policy. Contact: cavan@judgestudios.com.
Information SimpleTextPad collects
None. To be specific about the categories an app usually collects, SimpleTextPad collects no:
| Category | Collected |
|---|---|
| Contact details — name, email address, phone number, postal address | No |
| Identifiers — user ID, device ID, advertising ID | No |
| Usage data — analytics, product interaction, session length | No |
| Diagnostics — crash logs, performance data | No |
| Location, contacts, photos, calendar, microphone, camera | No |
| Purchases and financial information | No |
| Your notes and the text you type | No |
There is no sign-up, no sign-in and no optional account. Nothing is collected on an opt-in basis either, so there is no setting to check and no consent to withdraw.
Your notes
Notes are plain UTF-8 text files stored on your Mac, inside SimpleTextPad’s own folder in your Application Support directory, alongside a small session.json that records your tab order and names. You can open that folder yourself at any time with Reveal Notes in Finder in the ⋯ menu.
If you use Save As, the note is written to the file you chose, at the location you chose, and every later edit is saved there instead.
In both cases the notes stay on your Mac. They are never uploaded, never transmitted, never scanned, never indexed by me and never seen by me or anyone else. I have no server, so there is nowhere for them to go. SimpleTextPad does not sync notes between devices — a note written on one Mac exists only on that Mac.
Sharing and selling
Nothing is shared, sold, rented, disclosed or transferred to anybody, for any purpose, including advertising, marketing and analytics. There is no data to share and no third party to share it with.
Third-party code
SimpleTextPad has no third-party SDKs, frameworks, libraries or dependencies of any kind. It uses only Apple’s own operating-system frameworks, which run on your Mac.
The Mac App Store
Downloading SimpleTextPad is a transaction between you and Apple, and Apple handles it under Apple’s privacy policy. Apple may make aggregate, anonymised information about downloads available to me as the developer. That happens on Apple’s side, not inside the app, it identifies nobody, and SimpleTextPad itself neither sends nor receives anything.
Data retention and deletion
I hold no data about you, so there is nothing for me to retain or delete. Your notes are yours and stay on your Mac for as long as you keep them:
- Deleting a note in SimpleTextPad (closing its tab and confirming) erases that note from disk immediately and permanently.
- Removing the app removes its own storage along with it, in the usual macOS way.
- Any file you created with Save As belongs to you and is left alone — SimpleTextPad never deletes a file outside its own storage.
To keep a note beyond the life of the app, use Save As to write it somewhere of your own first.
Your rights
Privacy laws including the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export, delete and restrict the processing of personal data a company holds about you, and not to have it sold. I hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing to request and nothing to opt out of. Your notes are already fully in your hands: they are ordinary text files on your own Mac that you can read, edit, copy or delete with any tool you like, without asking me.
You are welcome to write to me anyway if you want any of this confirmed in a reply.
Children
SimpleTextPad is rated 4+, is safe for all ages, and collects no data from anyone — children included. It has no advertising, no in-app purchases, no messaging, no user-generated content shared with others and no access to the web.
Security
Because nothing is transmitted or stored off your device, there is no server to breach and no database of users to leak. Your notes are protected by the same things that protect the rest of your Mac: your account password, macOS file permissions, and FileVault if you have it switched on.
Changes to this policy
If this policy ever changes, the new version will appear at this address with a new date at the top. If a future version of SimpleTextPad were ever to collect anything at all, that change would be described here and in the app’s release notes before it took effect.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about privacy in SimpleTextPad generally:
Every message reaches me directly and gets an answer.