Privacy Policy: Aikonic

This covers the Aikonic desktop app (every version and both tiers, Clarity, the free app, and Control, its paid tier), paid licences, email you send us, and this website. Control is not on sale yet; the parts about buying describe what happens once it is.

Aikonic reads your hardware's sensors and shows the readings on your machine. There is no account, no analytics and no remote logging. Your readings, and how you use Aikonic, stay on your computer. Three things do leave it:

a few licence calls, described field by field below;
an update check;
if you buy a licence or email us, what that involves.

Aikonic's window is drawn by Microsoft Edge WebView2, a part of Windows. On a PC without it, Aikonic's installer downloads it from Microsoft. From 1.1.34, Aikonic switches off WebView2's own calls to Microsoft. Versions up to 1.1.12 let it make them: when the window opens it asks its settings service (config.edge.skype.com), sending a random ID, the WebView2 and Windows versions, an install date and whether the PC is a virtual machine. Then its component updater (edge.microsoft.com) checks for updates to WebView2's own parts, again every few minutes on a new install. Aikonic's code does not make these calls or add anything to them, and Microsoft's privacy statement covers them.

This page covers what the app does with your data, what we keep when you buy a paid licence, what happens when you email us, who else handles it and for how long, and what the website records. All of it is written to be checked against what the software actually does.

The app

On your machine

Sensor readings. Aikonic reads CPU, GPU, memory, storage, network and process data through Windows and bundled LibreHardwareMonitor components, in a Windows service that answers over a local named pipe. Versions before 1.1 also used a small helper for one-off reads of the system's specs. Neither uses the network.
Frame timing. The sensor service can also read the timing of the frames a game or other program shows on screen, through Windows' own event tracing. It reads timing only, never what is drawn, and like the other readings it stays on your computer; the latest values are saved with the last snapshot.
Last snapshot. While readings come in, the latest are saved to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Aikonic\last-snapshot.json at most once a minute, and again when the window is hidden to the tray and when Aikonic closes, so the dashboard has something to show at the next start before the first live reading. The file holds the readings and the names of the machine's drives, not the computer's name or the programs running.
The app's log. The app's errors and warnings, with notes on what it did, such as activating a licence, go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Aikonic\logs\aikonic.log. The log is rotated and capped. The sensor service writes its own warnings and errors to Windows' Application event log.
Preferences. Theme, card layout, alert rules, polling rate, the names you give fans, your other settings and the last report of System verification are kept in the app's own storage under %LOCALAPPDATA%\com.aikonic.app\. With Control, the same storage also keeps the Reversibility Ledger, your notes on the history, the last build check, and what the insights have noticed, which includes the names of programs that used a large share of the machine in the last 14 days; these stay when the licence leaves. The window's size and position and the tray icon's settings are kept in %APPDATA%\com.aikonic.app\ (.window-state.json and tray.json).
Licence. The licence Aikonic runs on, the free one or a paid key bound to this machine, is kept in %ProgramData%\Aikonic\license.aklc, beside a paid licence's last check-in as the licensing server signed it. The app notes when each licence last checked in, and why a paid licence was withdrawn if one was, under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Aikonic.
Recorded history, Control only. With a valid Control licence, the sensor service keeps a record of this machine's readings (CPU and memory load, GPU load, the CPU and GPU temperatures, package power, the CPU and GPU clocks and the GPU fan's speed) in %ProgramData%\Aikonic\history, so the history views work even while the app is closed. By default it is kept while Control is active on the machine, thinned with age: every reading from the last hour, then fewer, down to one every 15 minutes for anything older than a week. You can limit it to a year or to 30 days, and pause or clear it, in Settings → Recorded history. It is deleted when the Control licence leaves this machine while the sensor service is running: when you deactivate it, or at the machine's next check-in after a refund or revocation, or after its seat has gone to another machine and no other seat on the key is free. If the licence leaves while the service is stopped, the history is deleted when the service next starts. Being offline never deletes it: when the offline allowance runs out (see Licence calls), recording stops and the history is kept. Clarity keeps no history: apart from the last snapshot above and the last check's readings (see Saved machine file), readings are held in memory while the app runs, and the history folder does not exist.
Alerts and fan settings, Control only. With a valid Control licence, the sensor service keeps the alert rules and a log of each alert that fired in %ProgramData%\Aikonic\Alerts. In %ProgramData%\Aikonic\FanControl it keeps your fan curves, each fan's measured lowest speed and what Find my fans learnt, with your answers about pumps and the board, BIOS and fan chips that result belongs to. The alert log is deleted when the recorded history is, as above. The rules and the fan settings are your own work, so they stay when the licence leaves, unused until Control is back. Uninstalling Aikonic deletes all of them.

None of these use the network.

Files you make

Every file below, and every other export (your preferences, a chart's CSV, the build check, the Tools and System verification reports), is saved to your Downloads folder.

Diagnostic file. Export diagnostic JSON in Settings → Data & exports saves a JSON file. It holds which sensors loaded and which fell back, the latest snapshot, recent events Aikonic noticed (such as a thermal throttle), your Aikonic preferences, the computer's name and the version of the app's browser engine. It holds no credentials, documents, browser history or network traffic. It goes nowhere unless you send it, for example with a bug report.

Hardware report. Export hardware report in Settings → Data & exports shows you the file before you save it, as JSON. It holds the versions of Aikonic, its sensor components and Windows; the board, BIOS, CPU and graphics cards by model, with the graphics driver version; whether the machine is virtual and whether Aikonic runs as administrator; the fan chips and their readings; and which readings are unavailable and why. It holds no computer name, user names, serial numbers or network addresses. It goes nowhere unless you send it, for example to [email protected].

Saved machine file. Save this machine (in Tools, or in Settings → Recorded history) saves a JSON file for comparing with a later machine, or with this one later on. It holds:

the parts by model name: CPU, motherboard, graphics card and its driver version, memory, and the Windows version and build;
the results of the check, if you ran one, and what the check could not control (starting temperatures, the power plan, mains or battery);
on Control, the recorded history.

It does not hold your licence, the machine's fingerprint, network addresses, serial numbers, or the machine's name or yours. It is not signed. To tell whether a file it is comparing was saved on this machine, Aikonic keeps a SHA-256 digest of each file it saves, with the last check's readings, beside your preferences. Nothing is added to the file.

Licence calls

Every copy of Aikonic, Clarity included, talks to Aikonic's licensing server. These are all the calls it makes:

First-start check-in. Once, at first start. Without a connection it retries for about twenty minutes, then at each start and about once a day while the app runs, until a licence is issued. Again at once when a Control licence leaves the machine, because you deactivated it or a heartbeat found it withdrawn (after a refund, for example), to get the free licence back. Sends: the install fingerprint, the product identifier, the app's version.
Heartbeat. Paid licences only, about once a day. Sends: the install fingerprint, the licence's identifier, the app's version.
Activation. When you enter a paid key. Sends: the key or keys you entered, the install fingerprint, the app's version.
Activation again. On its own, when a heartbeat finds this machine no longer holds a seat, after a hardware change for example. Sends: the licence key it holds, the install fingerprint, the app's version.
Deactivation. When you deactivate a machine. Sends: the licence key bound to it, the install fingerprint, the app's version.

Clarity makes the first-start check-in and then no further call to the licensing server. The exception is a fault in Clarity 1.1.10 and 1.1.12: after the app has run for about a day, they also send the heartbeat, about once a day, with the three items listed above. Version 1.1.34 fixes it. The heartbeat keeps a paid licence within its seats and brings a refund or revocation to the machine. Each request's User-Agent also carries the app's version. Nothing else is sent: no readings, no snapshots, no usage.

If you block these calls, Clarity works as normal and keeps trying the check-in as above. A paid licence keeps working offline for at least 365 days after its last successful check-in; the app allows two more days, so a clock running a little fast never stops it early. After that, Control's features stop until it can check in again: recording stops and the history is kept, fan control goes back to the motherboard's own settings, and the app works as Clarity.

The install fingerprint. It is worked out on your machine from the Windows machine GUID, the motherboard UUID, the CPU model and the primary network adapter, hashed together so that it cannot be reversed. The identifiers themselves never leave your computer. The server stores the fingerprint only after hashing it again with a secret key of its own, and uses it to keep licences to their machines and to count installs. A Clarity install's fingerprint is linked to nothing else. A paid licence's is linked, through the licence, to its purchase record, which holds the email address used at checkout.

The product identifier is the same for every copy of an edition and says nothing about you or your machine.

Server logs and backups. The licensing server sees the IP address of each request. Its web server's access log records the address, the User-Agent and the address asked for, for 14 days. Its system journal notes the licence calls it answers (which licence, which app version), for 30 days. Backups hold a copy of its database for 30 days, so a record deleted on the server can stay in a backup until then. Logs and backups are used to run and secure the server and for nothing else.

Update checks

Aikonic asks aikonic.app over HTTPS for a small version file: at start, about every six hours while it is open, and when you press Check for updates in Settings. The request carries the app's version in its User-Agent and nothing else. Cloudflare, which serves aikonic.app, sees the request's IP address; the site's own code records nothing about update checks. If a newer version exists, Aikonic shows a banner. It never downloads or installs anything on its own: only when you choose to update does it fetch the signed installer and its release manifest from aikonic.app, check the signature against a key built into the app, and run the install. You can turn the automatic check off in Settings → About & updates; the button keeps working, and with the check off Aikonic makes no update request on its own.

The licence calls and the update check are everything Aikonic's own code sends.

What Aikonic does not send

Telemetry. No readings or usage data, in any form.
Crash reports. The app's log stays on your disk; the diagnostic file is yours to share or not.
Usage analytics. No launch counts, session lengths or feature events.
Identifiers about you. No machine name, login, advertising ID or usage profile. The install fingerprint is the only identifier for the machine. The licence calls also carry a licence's identifier or key, which for a paid licence leads to its purchase record, and the server sees the IP address, as described above.
Third-party SDKs. No crash reporters, analytics or ad networks. The fonts (Montserrat, JetBrains Mono and Source Serif 4) are in the installer, not loaded from the web.

Buying a paid licence

Paid licences are sold by Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd, UK), the merchant of record. Paddle is the seller: it takes your payment, billing address and tax details, charges you and sends the receipt, under its own privacy notice. We never see your card details.

For each purchase, our licensing server stores:

your Paddle customer id, and an internal customer id derived from it that is written into each paid licence;
the email address used at checkout, and your two-letter country code;
the Paddle transaction ids, the price ids of what you bought, and which licences the purchase issued;
a copy of the licence keys, so the thank-you page and the recovery page can show them to you. We do not email keys;
the invoice number from your receipt, a one-way hash of the thank-you page's one-time code (never the code), and a count of failed recovery attempts;
any refund or chargeback, and which licences it revoked;
each Paddle notification about the purchase (its id, type and time), so that it is processed once;
the time of the Paddle notification that last set your email address, your country code, and each refund or chargeback, so that a notification Paddle delivers late, or twice, never undoes a newer one.

It does not store your name, address, card details or the amount paid. Paddle keeps those.

This record is used to give you your keys and give them back if you lose them, to answer support requests, to carry out refunds and chargebacks, and to keep the business records Swiss law requires. The email address is how the recovery page knows the keys are yours. It is never sold, rented or used for marketing.

When you email us

Mail to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] goes to a mailbox we hold at Google (Google Workspace), where it is kept: your address, your message and anything you attach, such as a hardware report or a diagnostic file.

To answer [email protected] sooner, our own software first matches your message, and any Aikonic report attached to it (a hardware report, diagnostic file, Tools report or System verification report), against the help pages. Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, then sorts the message and drafts a reply from those pages. A person reads every draft, changes it where needed and sends it; nothing is sent to you automatically. Claude is given the sender, subject and text of the message and the help pages that matched. It is not given what an attachment contains, only its file name and which kind of Aikonic file it is, and it is never given mail to [email protected] or [email protected], which a person reads. The drafted reply is saved as a draft in our mailbox at Google, where a person reviews it before anything is sent. Our notes on a message (sender, subject and a short summary) stay on our own computer.

Who else handles your data

Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd) sells paid licences and passes us the purchase details above. UK, which the EU and Switzerland recognise as giving adequate protection.
Hetzner Online GmbH hosts the licensing server, as our processor under a data processing agreement. Germany.
Cloudflare serves aikonic.app, including the update check and the thank-you and recovery pages. The transfer is covered by the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the standard contractual clauses in its data processing addendum. United States, with servers worldwide.
Google holds our mailbox (Google Workspace), as our processor under its Cloud Data Processing Addendum. The transfer is covered by the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. United States, with servers worldwide.
Anthropic drafts replies to support mail, as our processor under its Commercial Terms and data processing addendum. It may not train its models on your message. Standard contractual clauses in that addendum cover the transfer. United States.
Microsoft, in versions up to 1.1.12 only, receives WebView2's own calls, described at the top, and the IP address they come from. We have no agreement with Microsoft about them; its privacy statement applies. Microsoft's servers worldwide.

Nobody else.

Automated decisions

Nothing about you is decided by software alone. Claude drafts support replies; a person reads each one and decides what is sent. Seat limits, refunds and chargebacks are applied as the licence terms set out. Nothing profiles or scores you.

Legal basis

For people in the EU/EEA or the UK:

Performing the contract with you (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)): a paid licence's calls, its purchase record, and support about a purchase.
Our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)) in issuing and checking licences, offering updates, running the server securely, keeping the records Swiss law requires, and answering questions about our software: Clarity's first-start check-in, the update check, the server's logs and backups, records kept after a contract is done, and support for anyone else.

Swiss data protection law (revDSG) needs no separate legal basis; this page gives the information it requires.

How long things are kept

Files on your machine: until you delete them. Uninstalling Aikonic removes the recorded history, the alert rules and log and the fan settings. It leaves the licence in %ProgramData%\Aikonic, so a reinstall needs no new activation; its folders under %LOCALAPPDATA% (Aikonic and com.aikonic.app: the app's log, the last snapshot, the licence notes and your preferences) and %APPDATA%\com.aikonic.app (the window's and the tray icon's settings), which you can delete yourself; and the sensor service's entries in Windows' event log, which Windows keeps by its own settings. Recorded history: as set in Settings, and deleted as described under On your machine.
A Clarity licence (its identifier, product and issue date; no fingerprint, nothing about you): kept. Once its seat record is gone, nothing links it to a machine or a person.
Seat records (the hashed fingerprint of each activated machine, and which seat it holds): paid, until 367 days after the server last saw the machine; Clarity, until 180 days after.
A licence's previous fingerprints, kept to answer hardware-change questions: 180 days.
Seat moves (which seat a machine released and when, its hashed fingerprint, so it can take the seat back without that counting as a move, and when another machine took the seat): 30 days; a release goes sooner, once a machine takes that seat.
Server access log: 14 days.
Server system journal: 30 days.
Server backups: 30 days.
Paddle notifications: 90 days.
The times kept beside your email address, country code, refunds and chargebacks: as long as the record they sit beside.
Transaction records (Paddle customer and transaction ids, price ids, invoice numbers, licences issued, refunds and chargebacks): 10 years from the end of the financial year of the purchase, the Swiss retention period for business records (Art. 958f of the Swiss Code of Obligations).
Your email address, country code and licence keys: 10 years from the purchase, the Swiss limitation period for contract claims (Art. 127 of the Swiss Code of Obligations).
The hashed thank-you code: erased the first time the thank-you page shows your keys. If they are never shown, it stays with the purchase record and stops working after 7 days.
The count of failed recovery attempts: reset to zero after a correct attempt or a lock-out.
Email: 2 years after the last message in the conversation; mail about a purchase, 10 years, as the purchase record. Our notes and drafts follow the same periods.

Records kept for these periods are used for nothing else.

Your rights

Hancock Technologies (UID CHE-336.753.966), Häglerstrasse 4C, 4422 Arisdorf, Switzerland, is responsible for this data.

Email [email protected] to see what we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted or its use restricted, or to get a copy in a portable format. We answer within 30 days.

Your right to object. Where we rely on legitimate interest (see Legal basis), you can object at any time by emailing [email protected]. We then stop, unless we have compelling grounds to continue or need the data to establish or defend a legal claim.

If you think we have handled your data wrongly, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live or work in the EU/EEA or the UK, or in Switzerland to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC).

If you are under 18, or under the age of majority where you live, you may use or buy Aikonic only with a parent's or guardian's permission (Licence Agreement, §3.1).

Changes

If a release ever sends anything not described here, this page is updated first, in the same change as the code, and the in-app Privacy card with it.

If you think Aikonic is sending something this page does not describe, email [email protected]. We treat it as a security bug.

Earlier versions of this page are available on request at [email protected].

The website

The site has no sign-up, no account and no cookie of its own. Two pages ask for something, and only when you use them: the key recovery and seat pages ask for your order number and checkout email, and send them to our licensing server to find your purchase, as described under Buying a paid licence. The help pages read a report or a pasted message in your browser and upload nothing. What the site itself records is one row per completed installer download, so that downloads can be counted.

What it stores

The date and time of the download.
The installer filename, which carries the version number.
The country the request came from, as a two-letter code.
Whether the file was served from the edge cache.

No IP address, no browser identifier, no account. A row cannot be traced back to you.

Where it lives

In a Cloudflare D1 database. The site is served through Cloudflare Pages, so Cloudflare processes your IP address to deliver each request, as any host does. We do not store it.

How long it is kept

Twelve months. Rows older than that are deleted by the same code that records a new download. The record is never sold, shared, or handed to a third party.

In your browser

Three pages keep a little in your browser's own storage. It stays on your device and is never sent to us.

The thank-you page keeps the keys it has shown you in this tab's session storage, so a reload shows them again. It is gone when the tab closes.
The key recovery and seat pages remember how long our licensing server asked you to wait before trying again, so a reload keeps the countdown. A wait for one order is filed under a short code worked out from its order number, not the number itself. Every wait is deleted once it has passed.

None of this is a cookie.

The pre-launch waitlist

Before Clarity was released on 18 August 2026 the site offered a waitlist. It closed at release, its one promised email was sent, and its entries have been deleted.

Your rights

The site holds nothing that identifies you, so there is nothing we could look up or erase for you. If you believe otherwise, email [email protected] and we will check. Under the GDPR and UK GDPR you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection, all exercised through that address.

Cookies

The site sets no cookies of its own. Cloudflare may set a short-lived security cookie if it challenges a request; it is not used for tracking.

Who is responsible

Hancock Technologies, Switzerland, is the data controller for this site. See the contact page for details.