Photo Anonymizator

Security Considerations

Photo Anonymizator is a simple utility: it takes one or more input files (image files) – which you provide –, and removes all non-essential metadata from copies of all input files in the output directory you have selected beforehand.

It fully complies with Apple's "sandboxing" requirements for Mac applications – otherwise it wouldn't be in the AppStore anyways.

In particular, Photo Anonymizator does ...

NOT access any files or folders other than the input files/folders you provide and output folder you provide,
NOT modify or alter the original input files you provide (but creates new copies),
NOT modify or alter any content of the photo files you provide, except for removing the selected metadata attributes (which is the actual purpose of this application)
NOT access any other system resources like networking (*exception).
NOT collect or share any usage data.

Instead, you control ...

which files get fed into Photo Anonymizator as input, and
which output folder is used for the anonymized results and hence where all files written end up.

(*) The exception to the above promise: Checking for newer versions of Photo Anonymizator

For the sake of transparency, there has to be noted that Photo Anonymizator will check for newer versions of itself being available at the Apple App Store for download. In order to achieve this, Photo Anonymizator issues two HTTP requests whenever you open the application. The first request goes to the Apple App Store API to retrieve the version number of the latest available Photo Anonymizator version. The second one goes to the Photo Anonymizator support website (the site you are currently browsing) in order to load the release notes for all Photo Anonymizator versions. In combination, the responses to these two requests are used to determine whether you will be presented information about the new version being available and what's to be expected from it, plus a link to the App Store to review and potentially decide to update your Mac with the latest Photo Anonymizator release.

There are no other network requests issued and there is no information transferred from your Mac to either of these sites besides the implicit fact that apparently Photo Anonymizator was started and an HTTP request was sent from some IP address (the external IP address your Internet provider has currently assigned to your access point to their network). There is no (!) personal data transferred.

If you don't like the idea of Photo Anonymizator automatically triggering HTTP requests to the Apple App Store and the Photo Anonymizator support website, you can switch off this version check completely: Either by deselecting the corresponding option in the welcome screen of Photo Anonymizator when started for the first time after installation, or at any later point in time in Photo Anonymizator's Settings (see Settings).

Here's the two static HTTP requests issued by Photo Anonymizator for your reference. Feel free to check those out for yourself – it's two JSON-formatted documents being linked.

Apple App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=1598189356 (don't be surprised: your browser will not open the content in a window, but download the JSON file as a text document into the downloads folder of your browser)
Photo Anonymizator support website: http://goerke.tech/Mac/PhotoAnonymizator/releaseNotes.txt