Privacy Policy

This policy covers three different things, and it is worth keeping them apart: the application that runs on your computer, the purchase if you buy it, and the support inbox if you write to us. They have almost nothing to do with each other.

1. The application

BigCap sends nothing to us.

There is no account to create, no sign-in, no analytics service, and no telemetry. There is no update check and no crash reporter. The application makes exactly one kind of network request to us: licence activation, once, when you enter your serial — and an occasional validation check, roughly monthly, in the background. Both carry the same three things: your serial number, an anonymous machine identifier, and the app version. The machine identifier is a one-way fingerprint derived on your machine; it is not your hardware details, and we cannot turn it back into anything about you or your computer. Your captures, the addresses you type, and the sites you visit inside BigCap are never uploaded — not to us, not to a third party, not anywhere. If BigCap cannot reach the internet, it keeps working.

This is the same claim we make on the BigCap page, in the same words:

BigCap sends us its licence check — a serial and an anonymous machine identifier, at activation and roughly monthly — and nothing else. No telemetry, no analytics. Your captures and the URLs you visit never leave your device.

There is one thing BigCap does over the network, and it is the whole point of the product: it loads the page you asked it to capture. It fetches that page and its resources — HTML, images, fonts, scripts — directly from the site and its servers, exactly as a browser would, from your computer and your IP address. That site sees an ordinary visit and can log it the way it logs any other. We are not in the middle of it, we do not proxy it, and we never learn which page it was.

That said, a tool that drives a real browser has to keep some things on disk in order to be useful a second time. We would rather be straight with you about what that means than hide behind "we collect nothing". The next two sections are the honest version.

2. What BigCap stores on your PC

Your preferences, in one small file.

BigCap writes a settings.json file into its own folder inside your Windows user profile — on Windows, typically %APPDATA%\BigCap. It holds the choices you last made: capture width, scale, format, JPEG quality, Max Length, Break, Delay, the option toggles, the load timeout, and the folder you last saved into.

That is the complete list. It contains no addresses, no page content, and nothing about what you captured. Deleting the file resets BigCap to its defaults on the next launch.

Captures are written only where you put them. When you press Save, BigCap writes the file to the location you chose in the save dialog and nowhere else. It keeps no history, no thumbnails, no cache of past captures, and no hidden second copy. Close BigCap without saving and the capture is gone.

3. Browse & Capture, and the sites you sign in to

This is the part to read carefully. Browse & Capture keeps a real browser profile on your computer, including the cookies that keep you signed in.

Browse & Capture exists so you can capture pages that only exist behind a login. To make that work — and to spare you signing in every single time — the built-in browser uses a persistent session rather than a throwaway one. In practice that means BigCap keeps, in its own folder inside your user profile, the same kinds of things any browser keeps for the sites you visit in it:

• Cookies, including the session cookies that keep you logged in to those sites;
• Local storage and similar site data written by those pages;
• The browser cache for resources those pages loaded.

So yes — if you sign in to your webmail inside BigCap, a credential that can get back into your webmail is sitting in BigCap's folder on your computer, exactly as it would be in Chrome's or Edge's. That is what makes the feature work, and it is why it never leaves the machine.

What BigCap does not do is read any of it. When you type a password into a site inside Browse & Capture, you are typing it into that site, the same as in any browser. BigCap does not intercept it, does not store it separately, and has no code that inspects the contents of that session. And none of it is transmitted to us — we could not receive it if we wanted to.

This data is not encrypted by BigCap. It is protected the same way the rest of your Windows profile is: by your user account. Anyone who can already read your files on that PC can read it. We would rather say that plainly than imply a protection the application does not provide.

Two practical consequences worth stating. If you use BigCap on a shared or work computer, treat a Browse & Capture session the way you would treat staying signed in to that browser. And if you sign in to something once for a single capture, §4 tells you how to clear it afterwards.

4. What you control

Everything in sections 2 and 3 is yours to delete, and none of it needs us.

• Reset your preferences. Delete settings.json from %APPDATA%\BigCap. BigCap recreates it with defaults next time it starts.
• Clear saved logins and session data. Delete BigCap's user-data folder — on Windows, %APPDATA%\BigCap. That clears the persistent Browse & Capture session along with your preferences, and signs you out of everything you had signed in to inside BigCap. BigCap 1.0 does not ship a built-in "clear session data" control; clearing the Browse & Capture session today is a manual folder deletion, as described above.
• Remove everything. Uninstall BigCap and delete that folder. Captures you saved yourself stay where you saved them until you delete them — they are your files, in your locations, and BigCap has no idea where they are.
• Reduce what the captured page can do. Block ad & tracker requests cancels requests to a curated list of advertising, analytics, and consent-management domains before they load, which cuts down the third-party tracking a captured page would otherwise trigger. It is off by default, and it is a domain-list heuristic rather than a guarantee. Hide ads & cookie banners is cosmetic only — it hides things in the capture and does not change what the page requests.

5. System access

BigCap runs as an ordinary desktop application, with your own account's privileges.

It does not request administrator rights, install a service, or leave anything running after you close it. It is not a packaged Store application, so there are no declared capabilities and no Windows privacy setting that governs it — there is nothing of that kind for you to grant or revoke. It reads and writes what your Windows account can: its own folder in your profile, and the location you pick when you save a capture.

6. When you buy

Payments are handled by Paddle. Your card details never reach us.

Paddle.com Market Limited is the merchant of record for BigCap. Paddle runs the checkout, takes the payment, issues your receipt and invoice, and calculates and remits VAT and sales tax. To do that, Paddle receives your name, your email address, your billing country, and your payment details, and processes them under its own privacy policy — you can read it at paddle.com/legal/privacy.

What CTRL Colab LLC receives from Paddle is your email address and your order details: what you bought, when, the order reference, and the country used for tax. We never receive your card number, and we could not charge your card if we wanted to. We use what we do receive to generate your serial, to honour refunds, and to answer questions about your order.

7. When you contact us

We keep your email so we can answer it.

If you write to hello@ctrlcolab.com we receive whatever you send: your address, your message, and anything you attach. We use it to help you and for nothing else. We do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not have one.

One thing worth saying, because of what BigCap does: if you send us a capture to show us a bug, you are sending us a picture of a page — possibly one behind your login, possibly with your name or account details in it. Please look at it first. If it shows something you would rather we did not have, crop it, or describe the problem instead and we will work from that.

8. This website

This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics.

The BigCap pages load one first-party script of our own, which handles the navigation menu and some animation. There is no analytics service, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no embedded third-party content, and no cookie of any kind — which is why you have not been asked to consent to any.

Following the checkout link takes you to Paddle, at which point Paddle's own privacy policy and cookie practices apply to that page.

9. What we keep, and for how long

There is very little to keep, which is the point.

• Nothing about your captures. No addresses, no images, no page content, no counts, no history. We have never had them and there is nothing for us to retain.
• Order records — your email address and the order reference — for as long as you may need support or a copy of your receipt, and for as long as tax and accounting law requires records of the sale. Paddle keeps its own transaction records under its own retention schedule.
• Licensing records — your serial, its status, and each activation's anonymous machine identifier with the time it last checked in. That is the entire server-side record; it exists so a refund can end a serial, and so we can free a seat when you replace a machine. It is kept for the life of the licence.
• Support correspondence — 36 months, then deleted

10. Sharing

We do not sell your information, and we share it with one company.

That company is Paddle.com Market Limited, and only for the purchase itself — see §6. Beyond that, and beyond the ordinary providers who run our email and host this website, nobody receives your information. There are no advertising networks, no data brokers, and no analytics partners with a copy of anything.

The only other circumstance is a legal one: if we were required by law to disclose something, we would comply. What we could disclose is limited to what is described on this page — an email address and an order record. What you captured is not ours to hand over, because we do not have it.

11. Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights under the UK and EU GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or a comparable law: access, correction, deletion, portability, and the right to object to certain processing. Write to hello@ctrlcolab.com and we will act on it. We will not make you prove why.

In practice the answer to an access request is short, and you should know that in advance: an email address, an order reference, and whatever you have written to us. Everything else described on this page is on your own computer, where you can read and delete it yourself without asking anyone.

12. Children

BigCap is a general-purpose tool for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children — and, as this page explains, we do not collect personal information from anyone through use of the application.

13. Changes to this policy

If BigCap gains a network feature — an update check, an optional diagnostics upload, anything at all that leaves your machine — this policy will say so before that version ships, not after. The version and effective date at the top of this page are how you tell. Material changes will be noted with the release they belong to.

14. Who we are, and how to reach us

BigCap is made by CTRL Colab LLC, a New Mexico limited liability company. For anything on this page, including a request under §11:

hello@ctrlcolab.com

For legal service or postal correspondence, please contact us by email at the address above and we will provide a physical address on request. We have not designated a UK/EU data-protection representative under GDPR Article 27 at this time given the limited scope of personal data we hold; if this changes as sales grow, this section will be updated.

© 2026 CTRL Colab LLC. All rights reserved.