Faste Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 28, 2026

Faste is built on a simple principle: your clipboard is yours. This policy explains exactly what Faste stores, where, and what (little) ever leaves your Mac.

What Faste stores, and where

Faste keeps your clipboard history on your Mac, in your user Library folder:

~/Library/Application Support/Faste/
├── metadata/     # one JSON file per history item (text content, type, dates,
│                 #   pin state, source app, and text recognised inside images)
├── images/       # original copied images and screenshots
├── cache/        # generated thumbnails
├── settings.json # your preferences
├── license.key   # your license key, once you activate one
└── trial.json    # the date your trial started

This data never leaves your device. It is not synced, backed up to any Faste server, or shared with anyone. It is protected by the same macOS file permissions as the rest of your user data, and it is included in whatever local backups (e.g. Time Machine) you configure.

Deleting an item in Faste deletes its files. Clearing your history, or uninstalling and removing this folder, removes everything (see Support for full uninstall steps).

What Faste deliberately does NOT record

Concealed and transient clipboard content. Password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, Apple Keychain/Passwords, and others) mark sensitive copies with the standard concealed/transient pasteboard types (org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType, org.nspasteboard.TransientType). Faste honors these markers: such content is never captured and never written to disk.

Excluded apps. You can add any application to a per-app exclusion list in Settings. Anything copied from an excluded app is ignored entirely.

Text recognition in images

To make screenshots findable, Faste reads the text inside images you copy and stores it alongside that item, so your search can match it later.

This happens entirely on your Mac. Recognition uses the text-recognition capability built into macOS (Apple's Vision framework), which runs locally on your device. Specifically:

• No image is ever uploaded. Not to us, not to Apple, not to anyone. The image data stays in ~/Library/Application Support/Faste/images/ where it already was.
• No network request is made for recognition, including the very first one. If your Mac is offline, this feature works exactly the same.
• No recognised text is transmitted. It is written into that item's JSON file in metadata/ and used only for local search and for the preview line shown on the item.
• No third party is involved. There is no OCR service, no API key, and no external model download by Faste.

Because the recognised text is stored with the item, it is covered by everything else in this policy: it is deleted when you delete the item, it is removed when you clear your history, and it never leaves your device.

Turning it off. Settings → Image Search → Read text in images stops all recognition, including the background pass over images already in your history. Text that was already recognised is kept — turning the feature off does not erase it, because that would discard something you may still be relying on to find an item. To remove it, delete the items themselves (or your whole history).

Network access

Faste makes no background network requests. No feature added since this app shipped — including text recognition in images — has changed that. There is exactly one network feature:

• Manual "Check for Updates". When you choose Check for Updates, the app fetches a small, static JSON manifest from our server that describes the latest available version. The request contains no identifiers — no license key, no device ID, no clipboard data, nothing about you or your usage. It is only used to compare version numbers so the app can tell you whether an update exists. If you never click it, the app never connects to anything.

There is no crash reporting, no usage analytics, and no tracking of any kind.

Licensing

Trial and license activation are validated entirely offline on your device. Your license key (FASTE-…) is stored locally in license.key, and your trial start date in trial.json, both inside the folder shown above. Neither is ever transmitted by the app.

Note: your purchase of a license is processed by the store you buy from (our payment provider); their handling of your payment details is governed by their own privacy policies. Faste the app receives none of that information.

Your data, your control

Because everything is local, you don't need to ask us to export or delete your data — you already have full control:

• View / export: the files in ~/Library/Application Support/Faste/ are plain JSON and standard image files. That includes any text recognised inside your images — you can read it in the same JSON file as the item it belongs to.
• Delete: clear the history in-app, or remove that folder to erase everything.

Children

Faste does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes (for example, if a future feature adds an optional network capability), the updated policy will be published at faste.dev/privacy with a new effective date, and the change will be described in the release notes. We will never retroactively change how already-stored data is handled.

Change on July 28, 2026: added the Text recognition in images section covering the new image-search feature, which processes images entirely on-device and adds no network access. Also corrected where the license key is stored — it lives in its own license.key file, not in settings.json as previously stated.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email [email protected].