Privacy Policy

Citation Harmony ("we", "our", "the app") is a sandboxed macOS application developed by Peiyuan Cai that audits Word documents for dangling citations and orphan references. This Privacy Policy explains, in plain terms, what data leaves your device when you use the app — the short answer is almost nothing.

Citation Harmony collects no personal data. We have no servers, no database, no analytics, and no telemetry. Specifically, the app does not collect or transmit:

• Your account or identity — the app has no sign-in. There is no concept of a user account.
• Your manuscript content — the Word documents you drop in are parsed entirely on your Mac. They are never uploaded, copied off-device, or transmitted to any server we control.
• Usage analytics — we do not record which buttons you press, how long you spend in the app, or whether you open it at all.
• Crash reports or diagnostics — we do not collect any. (macOS itself may offer to send crash reports to Apple; that is between you and Apple.)
• Cookies or device identifiers — the app uses neither.

Some information stays on your Mac so the app can do its job. None of it leaves your device:

• The Word document you drop in — held in memory only while you are working with it. The app never writes a copy to disk.
• Your triage decisions — stored in the app's local storage so they survive a restart. Cleared when you choose "Reset Session" or uninstall the app.
• Your language preference — stored in macOS user defaults so the app remembers which of EN / 中文 / Русский / Français / 日本語 you picked.

The app makes exactly one kind of outbound network call: queries to the public CrossRef REST API at api.crossref.org, and only when you click the Verify all references button.

Each query sends:

• A reference's surname and year — e.g. Smith 2021 — or its DOI when present in your bibliography.
• A short title hint — the first ~12 words of the reference entry, to disambiguate common surnames.
• A polite-pool mailto identifier — a generic citation-harmony@example.org string CrossRef uses for rate-limit grouping. It is not your email.

CrossRef is a non-profit citation registry; their privacy policy applies to the queries above:

https://www.crossref.org/operations-and-sustainability/privacy/

All app state — your triage decisions, language preference, and any in-progress analysis — lives inside macOS's App Sandbox container for Citation Harmony, isolated from other apps and from the rest of your file system. macOS itself encrypts this container with FileVault when enabled.

The app holds three security entitlements and nothing else:

• files.user-selected.read-write — needed to read the .docx you drop in and to save the CSV report you export.
• network.client — needed for CrossRef verification only.
• app-sandbox — the sandbox itself.

The app cannot read files you did not drop in or pick, cannot modify other applications, and cannot send your manuscript content over the network — the architecture forbids it, not just the policy.

Because nothing is stored off-device, there are no servers from which to delete anything. To remove every trace of Citation Harmony from your system:

• Reset Session — in the app, choose File › Reset Session (⌘⇧R) to clear your current triage decisions and language preference.
• Uninstall — drag Citation Harmony.app to the Trash. macOS will also remove the sandbox container at ~/Library/Containers/com.cpymsu.citationharmony/, taking with it every byte the app ever stored.

Citation Harmony is rated 4+ on the App Store. Because the app collects no personal data of any kind, no special handling is required for children's information — there is none to handle.

Under GDPR, CCPA, and similar regimes you have the right to access, correct, port, and delete personal data a service holds about you. We hold none. There is therefore nothing for us to disclose, correct, port, or erase — the data simply does not exist outside your own Mac. The app's source code is published under an MIT license at github.com/CPYMSU/MSU and the entire data flow is auditable there.

If a future version of Citation Harmony ever adds a feature that touches data leaving the device — for example, optional cloud sync of triage decisions — this Privacy Policy will be updated before that version ships, and the change will be summarised in the App Store release notes. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.