The app sends nothing. The website counts visits without cookies, and uses cookies only if you say yes.

The app

• Previews are made on your Mac. The Quick Look extensions that read your files run in Apple's sandbox without network access.
• dotViewer has no analytics, no telemetry and no update checks. It sends nothing about you or your files anywhere.
• Its only network listener is local: it accepts connections from this Mac only (127.0.0.1) and passes what you type after ⌘F to an open preview.
• A Markdown file you preview can point to images on the web. With Show images on, those images load when you view the file, as they would in any Markdown viewer.
• If a later version adds update checks or usage statistics, this page will describe them before that version ships, and usage statistics will be off unless you turn them on.

This website

• Until you choose, the site sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. A banner asks whether it may use cookies for two purposes, described under Cookies; saying no changes nothing else about the site.
• The site is hosted by Vercel, which handles each request, including your IP address, to serve it (Vercel's privacy policy).
• Vercel Web Analytics counts page views without cookies. It tells visitors apart within a single day only, by a hash it then discards (how it works).
• The site also keeps its own log so visits and downloads can be counted. For each page view and download click it stores the time, the page (without anything after “?” in its address), the name of the site that linked here (not the full address), campaign tags in the link, the country (worked out from the IP address), the browser and operating system family — such as “Safari on macOS” — and whether the request looks like a bot. For downloads it adds which link was used and which version. It stores no IP address, no city and no full browser string.
• To count visitors per day, each entry also gets a code made from your IP address and browser together with a random value that changes every day. The random value is deleted when the day is over; after that the code can't be traced back to you or linked to another day.
• That log is kept in a PostgreSQL database on dbHost, another project by the same creator.
• Until 23 September 2026 the site set two cookies for this log without asking — dv_vid, a random visitor ID kept for up to two years, and dv_sid for a single visit — and also stored the city, the full browser string, the full address of the site that linked here and the whole page address. It stopped that day, browsers that still have those cookies are told to delete them, and the IDs, cities, browser strings, linking addresses and the parts of page addresses after “?” already in the log were deleted.

Cookies

• Only with your consent, apart from the one that remembers your choice. Choose in the banner, and change your mind at any time: Cookie settings.

• With Google Analytics allowed, your browser loads Google's script and sends Google the pages you visit here, how you arrived, and your device, browser and approximate location. Google Ireland Limited is responsible for it in Europe; Google may process the data in the United States, where Google LLC is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework (Google's privacy policy). Google's script is not loaded at all without your consent.
• Turning something off deletes its cookies at once. Browsers that send Global Privacy Control are treated as if you said no, and the banner is not shown.
• The legal basis for these cookies is your consent (GDPR Article 6(1)(a) and section 3-15 of the Norwegian Electronic Communications Act). The cookieless log and the daily codes rest on a legitimate interest in knowing how many people visit and download (Article 6(1)(f)).
• Visitor IDs are removed from the log after 13 months. Each choice is recorded — when, what you chose, and the visitor ID if you allowed dotViewer statistics — and kept for 2 years as proof of consent.

Downloads

• The installer is served by GitHub from the project's releases. GitHub counts downloads and handles the request under the GitHub Privacy Statement.
• Installing with Homebrew is covered by Homebrew's own analytics, which you can turn off with brew analytics off. Homebrew publishes install counts per package.

Your rights

• The log exists to learn how many people visit and download dotViewer and how they find it. Without your consent nothing is stored on or read from your device except the cookie that remembers your choice.
• Without dotViewer statistics the log holds nothing that links rows to you. You can withdraw consent at any time under Cookie settings, and ask what is kept, or object, through GitHub issues or the creator's site.
• You can complain to Datatilsynet, the Norwegian data protection authority.