Skip to content

Privacy

Written 2026-11-01.

This page is the PRIVACY.md that Focal installs and opens from Settings, published at build time so the two cannot differ.

Focal records your screen on your computer and keeps what it records there. There is no account and no sign-in, and Focal sends nothing about your recordings anywhere. This note says what does leave your computer, where Focal keeps its files, what the keystroke setting stores, and what uninstalling removes.

What leaves your computer

Four things, and nothing else.

  • The license check. During the trial nothing is sent. Once you enter a license key, Focal sends it to Polar (api.polar.sh), the store Focal is sold through, to activate it on this computer; then about once a day to confirm it is still valid, and when you press Deactivate. Each request carries the key, Focal's id at Polar, this computer's name (Windows' computer name, which labels the activation so you can tell your computers apart in Polar's customer portal), a fingerprint of this computer (a one-way hash of the id Windows gives its installation, which ties the activation to this computer and cannot be turned back into that id), and your IP address. Polar's answer includes the email you bought with, which Settings shows. Buying itself happens on Polar's checkout, under Polar's privacy policy.
  • Checking for updates. With "Check for updates automatically" on in Settings (it is on to begin with), Focal fetches https://releases.focalcapture.com/latest.json shortly after it starts and once a day; the "Check for updates" button fetches it too. The request carries what every web request carries (your IP address) and that it comes from Tauri's updater; nothing about you or your recordings. When you accept an update, the new installer is downloaded from github.com, where Focal's releases are published. With the automatic check off, nothing is fetched unless you press the button.
  • The speech model for captions. The first time you make captions, Focal downloads a speech-recognition model (about 190 MB; a second one for languages other than English) from huggingface.co, where the whisper.cpp project publishes them, and keeps it in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Focal\models. The captions themselves are made on your computer: your audio and your screen never leave it.
  • WebView2, during installation. Focal's windows run in Microsoft's WebView2, which Windows 11 includes. Where it is missing, the installer downloads it from Microsoft.

There is no telemetry, no usage statistics and no crash reporting. When Focal runs into a problem it writes to a log on your disk and shows you a message; whether anyone else sees that log is up to you.

Where Focal keeps things

  • Recordings go to Videos\Focal, or the folder you pick in Settings. Each recording is a folder ending in .focal that holds the screen video, the microphone and system audio tracks, the camera video, the cursor and input log, the captions transcript, your edits, and under export the videos you export. Deleting a recording in the Projects window moves it to the Recycle Bin.
  • Settings, styles and export presets are in %APPDATA%\Focal, and so is license.json: when the trial began, the latest time Focal was running and, once a key is activated, the key, this computer's activation, the purchase date, the last check and the email you bought with.
  • When the trial began is also kept in the registry, as TrialStarted under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Focal, so that deleting license.json or reinstalling does not start a new trial. It is a date and nothing else.
  • Logs, thumbnails and speech models are in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Focal, the folder Focal itself installs into. The logs describe what Focal did and any errors, with times, file paths, device names and sizes; they never contain the recording or what you typed. One file a day is written and a week is kept.
  • Window sizes and positions are in %APPDATA%\dev.focal.desktop, and WebView2's own cache for Focal's windows is in %LOCALAPPDATA%\dev.focal.desktop.
  • Start with Windows, when you turn it on in Settings, is an entry in your user's Run key in the registry, and nothing else changes in Windows. Focal needs no administrator rights.

A .focalproj file made with Export in the Projects window is the recording's folder packed into one file, without the exports: everything listed above for a recording, including your voice, your camera and the input log, so share it as you would share the recording itself.

Keystrokes

Focal records when keys are pressed so it can time zooms and line up the microphone; what it keeps about which keys depends on the Keystrokes setting:

  • Off: only the timing of key presses. Nothing you type is recorded.
  • Shortcuts: key combinations such as Ctrl+C and the function keys, for the keystroke overlay. Plain typing is timing only.
  • Everything: every key and all the text you type, passwords included, for the keystroke overlay. It is kept in the recording's input log whether or not the overlay shows it, and so it travels with the recording: a .focalproj file you export and share carries it, and Focal warns before exporting such a project. An exported video shows only what the overlay showed. Pick Shortcuts or Off before recording anything you would not want in the file.

Uninstalling

Uninstall from Settings > Apps, or with uninstall.exe next to Focal.exe. The uninstaller removes the program, its Start Menu entry and its registry entries. With "Delete app data" checked it also removes your settings, styles, export presets, the license file, logs, thumbnails, downloaded speech models and window positions: the Focal and dev.focal.desktop folders under %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA%. Your recordings in Videos\Focal (or the folder you chose) are never touched by the uninstaller; delete them yourself if you want them gone. Neither is the trial's start date in the registry (above), which stays so that reinstalling does not start the trial again.

Written 2026-11-01 for Focal 0.1.0; the license check added 2026-11-02, and the computer fingerprint and the trial's date in the registry later the same day.