Wire Goose

Privacy

Last updated 31 October 2026.

Written by the people who built Wire Goose, describing what the code actually does. It is not legal advice.

The app

Wire Goose makes no network connections of its own, but one you ask for: in the copy from this site, Help → Check for Updates reads the latest version number from wiregoose.com, and sends nothing else. Every lookup, where a server is and who runs it, happens on your computer against data inside the app. What it records stays on your computer, on a Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/WireGoose, for the 7 or 30 days you choose, and Reset history deletes all of it. The network filter, if you install it for blocking, sees which process opened a connection and never what was sent.

Wire Goose asks macOS for your location once, at the first launch, to know which countries count as home: traffic that stays there shows green. It works out the country on your computer, from the map inside the app, and the location never leaves it and is not stored. If you say no, or macOS has no fix, it uses your computer's time zone instead. You can change your answer in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services.

The App Store version

If you get Wire Goose from the Mac App Store, the same holds, with three differences. It keeps its history in its own sandbox folder, ~/Library/Containers/com.8thbyte.wiregoose. Its network filter is how it sees connections at all, not only how it blocks them. And it asks Apple whether your Apple ID owns Wire Goose Pro. If you buy Pro there, Apple handles the payment under its own privacy policy, and we receive no personal information from it.

This site

We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read. It sets cookies, and Google receives your IP address and details of your browser. It runs unless you turn it off: the site asks on your first visit, and Privacy settings, at the foot of every page, changes your answer at any time. The pages are static files. On the Pro page, Stripe's checkout runs in its own frame, and Stripe's own privacy policy applies inside it. The service behind the Pro page keeps its own logs, of orders and errors and never of visitors, for thirty days.

If you buy

We keep the email you bought with, the key, its serial number, the amount and the date, as one record per purchase, in a private bucket with Amazon Web Services in the United States. We keep it for as long as the key is valid, because it is the record that a key was issued to you. When a new version of Wire Goose is out, we email that address to say so, once per version, with what changed; the link at the end of each one stops them. We never see your card: Stripe handles the payment, and holds what a payment needs under its own policy.

Others we rely on

Getting it removed

Use Contact, giving the email you bought with, and the purchase record is deleted. The key keeps working; we simply no longer hold that it was yours, so a lost key can no longer be sent again.

Contact

Use Contact, at the foot of every page. Your address and message reach us by email through Amazon SES and are kept in our mailbox, nowhere else. The check against spam runs on our own server; no other company sees the form.