Privacy question

[slamotte]

Hi, now that you are in a public beta, could you please explain what sort of analytics/instrumentation/other data, including crash reporting, is being collected and sent back to your team, if any. Our team is very interested in OrbStack because of our Docker Desktop performance, but security first!

[kdrag0n]

Thanks for bringing this up! It's documented in the privacy policy: https://docs.orbstack.dev/legal/privacy#how-we-use-your-information

You should read the entire policy for details, but here's an excerpt:

api-license.orbstack.dev: Required. Used to verify your license and enable paid features or usage of the App.
api-updates.orbstack.dev: Optional. Used to check for updates to the App.
ingest.sentry.io: Optional. Used to collect anonymous error and crash reports, which help us improve the App and troubleshoot issues.

(Licensing is already active so that we can end the public beta when the time comes.)

The privacy policy also reserves the right for us to add anonymous opt-out telemetry in the future in order to improve the product based on real-world usage and performance, but it's not currently implemented. When added, this will only include anonymized reports of feature usage, internal performance metrics, etc. — for example, which features are used and how much CPU is used in the background. Telemetry will never include any user data.

Let me know if you have any other questions.