John’s Background Switcher Privacy Policy

I, John Conners (the developer of John’s Background Switcher) don’t store any of your personal information, personal data or anything at all. Period. The only two occasions where JBS sends any information to me are:

  • When it checks for an update – in which case it’ll send me your IP address which I don’t store longer than 30 days (or even look at – it’s buried in my server logs). Note that the Mac App Store version of JBS for Mac you can buy from Apple does not check my server for updates.
  • When it crashes – where it will send a crash report containing a call stack and your operating system version but no personally identifiable information and no other data. Even then, that information is never shared with any third party – it’s literally used by me to fix bugs and make the application better.

John’s Background Switcher’s main purpose is to interact with photo services and show those photos on your desktop background. Often this will require you to authorise JBS to access a service on your behalf. When that happens the photo service will present you with a logon page that lets you enter your credentials. Once complete John’s Background Switcher will store an authentication token locally on your computer and use it solely to interact with that service. It will NEVER use that authentication information in any other way and absolutely won’t ever send that to me or any third party.

In general operation John’s Background Switcher will look at your locally stored settings to determine which photo sources you have configured. It will then make an authenticated, secure call to those sources (via the tokens mentioned above) and query the service’s API (Application Programming Interface) for the photos as you’ve chosen (for example one of your photo sets on Flickr or photo albums on SmugMug). It will cache the results of that photo call locally to reduce network bandwidth, then download the photo(s) as required and show them on your desktop. This means the only communications John’s Background Switcher makes is directly with the various photo services and nowhere else. Also note that John’s Background Switcher only caches photo results locally for no longer than 2 days and in many cases much less (each photo service has its own cache requirements so JBS will follow those where appropriate).

Please note that each photo service you interact with via John’s Background Switcher has its own privacy policy so you’d be advised to review each in turn. When JBS makes an authenticated call to one of these photo services I have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.

If you have any question about this privacy policy or would like more information about the locally stored information JBS has on your computer then please contact me here: