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Privacy policy

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The short version: Linger runs on your Mac and has no servers of its own. Your Instagram login, your messages, your photos and videos, your search archive and your backups stay on your computer, and we never receive them. We only handle the small amount of data needed to sell you a license, check that it’s valid, offer updates and answer your emails. This website uses no cookies, no ads and no trackers.

Who we are

Linger is made by We Are Mortensen S.L., a company based in Spain. We’re the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us about anything privacy-related at hello@getlinger.com.

The Linger app

What stays on your Mac

  • Your Instagram login. You log in on your Mac, directly with Instagram. Linger never stores your password. The session that keeps you logged in is stored encrypted (AES-GCM) on your Mac, with the key kept in the macOS keychain.
  • Your messages and media. Messages, photos, videos, voice messages, the local search archive and any backups you export are saved only on your computer. We never receive them.
  • No Linger account. There is no Linger account to create, and the free trial doesn’t ask for an email or a card.

Talking to Instagram

To show your messages, Linger connects from your computer directly to Instagram. That traffic doesn’t pass through us. Instagram (Meta) receives it like it would from its own apps, and Meta’s own privacy policy applies to it.

License validation (LicenseSeat)

To check your license, the app sends your license key and a device identifier to LicenseSeat, the service we use to check that the license is valid and to keep it to one computer per license.

Update check (GitHub)

The app checks for new versions by asking GitHub, where our public releases are hosted. GitHub sees the IP address of that request, as it would for any download. The request doesn’t include your messages or your Instagram account.

Payments (Stripe)

Subscriptions are sold and managed through Stripe, using a Stripe payment page and Stripe’s customer billing portal at https://billing.stripe.com/p/login/fZucN67Y1ePJ7wjdo05AQ00. Stripe processes your payment details. We receive what’s needed to run your subscription and issue invoices, such as your email address, name, country and payment status. We never see your full card number.

This website

  • Hosting. The website is hosted on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes IP addresses in server logs to deliver the site and keep it secure.
  • Analytics. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits. It doesn’t use cookies, doesn’t build personal profiles and only gives us aggregated numbers.
  • Nothing else. No cookies, no advertising, no other trackers.

Support emails

If you write to us, we receive whatever you include in your email. We use it to answer you and keep it for as long as we need to help you.

Why we use your data (legal bases)

  • To perform our contract with you: selling and managing your subscription, validating your license.
  • Our legitimate interest: keeping the website and services secure, and understanding visits through aggregated analytics.
  • Legal obligations: keeping invoices and payment records for as long as tax law requires.

Who else processes your data

We share data only with the providers named above, each for its own purpose: Cloudflare (website hosting and analytics), Stripe (payments), LicenseSeat (license validation) and GitHub (update checks). We don’t sell your data and we don’t share it for advertising.

How long we keep it

We keep subscription and invoice records for as long as the law requires us to. Support emails are kept while we need them to help you. Your messages and media are never with us, so there’s nothing of yours to keep: deleting Linger and its data from your Mac removes them.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to access, correct or erase your personal data, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable format. Write to hello@getlinger.com and we’ll answer as soon as we can, and within the time the law sets.

If you think we’ve handled your data wrongly, you can also complain to the Spanish data protection authority, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, at aepd.es.

Changes to this policy

If we change how Linger handles data, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. If a change is significant, we’ll make it clear on the website.

See also our terms.