Crest has no account, no sign-in, no sync service, no telemetry and no analytics. It does not profile you, does not show you advertising, and has nothing about you to sell or share, because it never collects anything in the first place.

Everything Crest makes — your notes, your reminders, your shelved files, your preferences — is written to a folder on your own machine and stays there. Two things leave it, both described below and neither one carrying anything about you: a check for a new version, and the forecast for a place you typed in yourself.

These are written as ordinary files in Crest’s own app-data folder, which on a standard install is %APPDATA%\com.lenny.crest. They are plain text you can open, copy or delete yourself.

• Quick notesThe notes you write in the notch, and their titles.
• Calendar remindersWhat you asked to be reminded about, and when.
• TimerThe end time of a running countdown, so an update installing in the background does not lose it.
• File shelfThe paths of the files you dragged in — not the files. A shelved item is a pointer to a file that is already yours, sitting where you already keep it. Nothing is copied or duplicated.
• PreferencesYour theme, accent, position, display choice, shortcut, and the rest of what is in Settings.
• Banner memoIf you switch on “silence Windows’ own banners”, Crest records which apps it changed, purely so it can hand every one of them back when you switch it off or quit.

Most of what the notch shows you is read live, drawn, and then forgotten. None of it is written to disk and none of it is sent anywhere.

• Clipboard historyHeld in memory only, capped at a small number of recent entries, and gone the moment Crest closes. It is never written to disk. On top of that, capture is skipped entirely while a known password manager is the focused window, so a password you copy out of one is not picked up at all.
• ScreenshotsCrest does not take screenshots. It reads the folders Windows already saves them to — your Screenshots and Captures folders — and shows you the most recent ones. Nothing is captured, copied, moved or deleted; the card is a window onto files that are already yours.
• NotificationsRead from the Windows notification centre so the notch can show them. Crest keeps no copy of its own once one leaves the centre, and it cannot see notifications that never arrived there.
• What is playingTitle, artist and artwork from the same Windows media session your volume flyout reads. Displayed, not recorded.
• System readingsCPU, memory, GPU, disk, temperature, battery, network and Bluetooth status, read from Windows for the meters and the pill. No history is kept.
• Installed apps and audio devicesThe launcher lists what is installed on your machine and Quick Access lists your sound devices, both read from Windows when the card is open.

This is the whole of Crest’s outbound network traffic. There is no third service, and both of these are listed in the source.

• Open-MeteoThe weather card talks to Open-Meteo, and nothing happens there until you go looking for a place. Searching for one in Settings sends the text you typed, so it can be turned into coordinates. Once you have picked one, the card sends those coordinates and the time zone they resolved to, and gets a forecast back. Neither request carries an account, an API key or any identifier — they name Crest and its version, the way every browser sends a user agent, and nothing about you or your machine. There is deliberately no automatic location and no IP lookup: Crest does not know where you are unless you tell it, and until you do, nothing is fetched at all. Clearing the location in Settings stops it.
• GitHubCrest checks GitHub shortly after starting and periodically after that to see whether a newer version has been published, and downloads the installer if one has. It is an ordinary web request for a public file, with nothing attached identifying you or your machine.

Neither request carries a user id, a device id, a licence key, or anything about how you use the app. Nothing you write, copy, shelve or open is ever transmitted.

• No telemetryThere is no analytics, usage-tracking or crash-reporting library in the app. Nothing reports back on what you opened or how often.
• No accountsThere is nothing to sign up for, so there is no email, password or profile to hold.
• No advertisingNo ads, no ad identifiers, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts.
• No sale or sharingNothing is sold, rented, shared or handed to advertisers, data brokers or anyone else — there is no collected data for any of that to apply to.
• No hidden copiesCrest does not upload, back up or sync your notes, files, clipboard or screenshots anywhere.

A few features need permission from Windows itself. Each one is used for exactly the feature it belongs to, and nothing more.

• Notification accessNeeded to show your notifications in the notch. Windows asks you to allow this the first time, and you can revoke it at any point in Windows Settings; Crest simply stops showing them.
• Start with WindowsOnly if you switch it on. Crest registers a scheduled task that runs at logon, without elevation, and removes it when you switch the setting off or uninstall the app.
• Silencing Windows bannersOnly if you switch it on. Crest turns off the per-app notification banner for apps that raise one, so a notification appears in the notch rather than twice. Delivery is never blocked — everything still lands in the notification centre as usual — and every banner is handed straight back when you switch it off, or when you quit Crest.

Crest keeps what you make until you remove it. There is no retention schedule to describe, because nothing is held anywhere you cannot reach.

Notes, reminders and shelved items can be deleted from inside the app. Clipboard history clears itself every time Crest closes. Everything else lives in the app-data folder named above, which you can open and delete by hand. Uninstalling Crest from Windows Settings removes the app and that folder together, along with the startup task if you had it on.

Crest is a general-purpose desktop utility. It is not directed at children, and it does not knowingly collect information from anyone — children under 13 included — because it does not collect personal information at all.

If this policy changes, the new version is posted on this page with a revised effective date at the top. Continuing to use Crest after a change means you accept the revised policy. Because Crest is open source, you can also read the exact change in the repository history.

Questions about this policy, or about how Crest handles anything on your machine, go to lennydany3@gmail.com. Every other way to reach us is on the contact page.