Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective August 12, 2026  ·  Applies to Space Cowboy 1.x for Windows and to this website

The honest summary: the app reads a great deal about your disk and tells no one, including us. The most personal data we ever hold about you is the email address you buy with. This page walks through both halves without euphemism.

The application

Space Cowboy is a visual disk-space analyzer. To draw its map it reads the names, sizes, and locations of files on the drives and folders you choose to scan. All of that reading happens on your computer, and all of the results stay there. The app has no account system, no sign-in, no telemetry, no analytics, and no update phone-home. It makes no network connections of its own.

What Space Cowboy stores on your PC

Less than you might expect. The scan itself — the map of your drive — is held in memory only and is gone when you close the app. Nothing about your files is written to an index or database. What the app does write locally:

• Your license file, stored in the app’s data folder so you only activate once. It contains your purchase email address (see below).
• Diagnostic logs, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Space Cowboy\logs — short, technical notes about what the app itself did (scan started, scan finished, an error occurred). They deliberately contain no file names and no paths from your drives.
• Ordinary Windows application state (window size and similar), kept by Windows in the usual per-app locations.

Uninstalling the app removes it; the logs and license file live in your user profile and can be deleted like any other files.

Administrator rights and system access

The app runs unelevated. Scanning a whole NTFS drive uses a small, separate helper program that Windows asks you to approve with a standard UAC prompt — once per drive scan. The helper reads the volume’s file table, streams the picture (and live changes) to the app while your scan is open, and exits when the scan session ends. It is read-only: it performs no deletions and changes nothing on your disk. It never runs at startup and never runs in the background outside a scan you started. Folder scans don’t use it at all.

Sensitive locations

A whole-drive scan necessarily sees everything your drive contains, including folders you may consider sensitive. That visibility exists only inside the app, in memory, on your machine. Space Cowboy also refuses to delete system-critical locations and flags risky ones — a safety feature, not a data-collection one.

Diagnostics and crash reports

Nothing is ever sent automatically. The bug-report button writes a diagnostic report to a local text file and opens a draft email in your email program, addressed to us, with the report in the body for you to read first. It contains the app version, your platform (e.g. “windows x86_64”), and recent app activity — no file names, no paths. It reaches us only if you press Send.

Your email address in your license file

Your license file has your purchase email address embedded in it, and the app shows it as the licensee. That is the honour system working as designed: your copy is yours, visibly. The app never transmits it anywhere.

When you buy

Purchases are processed by Paddle.com Market Limited, our merchant of record. Paddle collects your payment details — we never see your card number — and handles them under Paddle’s privacy policy. What Paddle passes to us is what we need to deliver your purchase: your email address, the name you optionally give, and the transaction id. We use that to generate your license file and email it to you (delivered via Resend, our email provider), and we keep it as our record of your purchase so we can reissue a lost license or process a refund.

When you contact us

If you email us, we have your email. We use it to reply and keep the thread for support history. We don’t add you to marketing lists — there aren’t any.

This website

This site is a static product page. It sets no advertising cookies and runs no third-party analytics. Our hosting provider (Vercel) produces ordinary, short-lived server logs (IP address, requested page) as part of operating the service. The checkout page loads Paddle’s payment component, which operates under Paddle’s own policy.

What we keep, and for how long

• Purchase records (email, name, transaction id): kept for as long as we sell and support Space Cowboy, because they are how a lost license gets reissued years later, and as required for tax and accounting.
• Support email: kept as ordinary correspondence.
• Everything the app sees on your drives: never held by us at all — it never leaves your machine.

Sharing

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with anyone, with three narrow exceptions: Paddle (they process the purchase — in fact the data flows from them to us), Resend (they deliver the license email), and cases where the law compels us. That is the whole list.

Your rights

Depending on where you live (the EU/UK, California, and elsewhere), you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or port the personal data we hold about you. Since what we hold is essentially one purchase record and any email you sent us, exercising them is simple: write to hello@ctrlcolab.com and we will do it. Note that deleting your purchase record means we can no longer reissue your license — we will confirm that with you before acting.

Children

Space Cowboy is a disk utility, not a service directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. There is no account to create.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, the new version is posted here with a new effective date. A change can only describe what the software and site actually do — and if a future version of the app ever transmitted anything (for example, an optional update check), that would appear here first, as an explicit, opt-in feature.

Who we are, and how to reach us