Who we are
Markdown Studio (“we”, “us”) makes Markdown Studio for Mac and runs Markdown Studio Cloud and this website. We’re the controller of the personal data this policy describes, under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can reach us at vlada@queazy.app.
Without an account
Writing, Publish previews and copies, Checks, Assist, projects and History, export and Markdown Studio Pro all work without an account, and none of them sends anything to us. Markdown Studio contains no analytics, advertising or tracking code. Without an account, we don’t collect, store, sell or share personal data, usage data, device identifiers or the contents of your documents.
Your documents
Your articles are ordinary Markdown files, saved wherever you choose: on your Mac, or in iCloud Drive if you use it (iCloud is Apple’s service, covered by Apple’s terms and privacy policy). Markdown Studio runs in the macOS App Sandbox, so it can open only the documents and folders you choose, and the folders you allow it to use for images. It remembers those folder permissions on your Mac so it doesn’t have to ask again.
When you open a folder as a project, History keeps earlier versions of its files on your Mac, inside Markdown Studio’s own folder, for up to 90 days. They never leave your Mac unless you upload the project to Markdown Studio Cloud.
When something leaves your Mac
Markdown Studio connects to the internet only when you ask it to, or, while you’re signed in to Markdown Studio Cloud, to keep your cloud projects in sync:
| When you | What’s sent, and where |
|---|---|
| Publish a draft directly, or use Update Everywhere | The article, its images and front matter details such as the title and tags go to the service you chose (DEV, your Ghost or WordPress site, or your GitHub repository), using the key you saved for that account. From then on, that service’s own privacy policy covers what you sent. |
| Click Verify & Save in Settings › Accounts | Markdown Studio contacts the service with your key to check that it works. |
| Click Check Links | Markdown Studio visits each web address in your article, as a browser would, so those websites see an ordinary request from your Mac, including its IP address. None of your text is sent. |
| Preview an article with images from the web | The preview loads each image from its website, as a browser would. |
| Copy an article for a platform | Nothing is sent. The copy goes to your clipboard, and you decide where to paste it. |
| Use Assist | Nothing is sent. Apple Intelligence runs on your Mac. |
| Open an exported HTML page in a browser | The browser loads the fonts for equations from a public content delivery network (jsDelivr). |
| Sign in to Markdown Studio Cloud | With Sign in with Apple, Apple confirms who you are and, if you agree, shares your name and email address with us. With an email link, your email address goes to Google’s Identity Platform, which emails you the link. See Markdown Studio Cloud and Team. |
| Upload a project, or work in a cloud project | The project’s Markdown files, images and PDFs, and every change to them, go to Markdown Studio Cloud. Other files in the folder stay on your Mac. |
| Buy, restore or renew a subscription while signed in | Apple’s signed record of the purchase goes to Markdown Studio Cloud, so it knows your plan. No payment details are included. |
Accounts, keys and passwords
API keys, application passwords and access tokens are stored in your macOS Keychain, on your Mac. They aren’t synced to your other devices and are never sent to us. Each one is sent only to the service it belongs to, over an encrypted connection, unless you entered an http:// address for a site on your own network. Removing an account in Settings › Accounts deletes its key from your Keychain. Your Markdown Studio Cloud sign-in is kept in the Keychain too.
After you publish directly, Markdown Studio writes the post’s ID or file path into the document’s front matter (for example ghost_id) so it can update the same post later. These lines aren’t secret, but they do show where you published if you share the file.
Assist and Apple Intelligence
Assist uses the on-device model of Apple Intelligence. Your text is processed on your Mac and isn’t sent to us or to anyone else.
Purchases
Markdown Studio is free to download. Markdown Studio Pro is a one-time In-App Purchase, and Markdown Studio Cloud and Markdown Studio Team are auto-renewable subscriptions. Apple handles every payment, renewal and refund through the App Store, and we never see your payment details. Apple’s handling of your purchases is covered by the Apple Privacy Policy. When you’re signed in to Markdown Studio Cloud, the app sends Apple’s signed records of your purchases to our server, which uses them to work out your plan.
Markdown Studio Cloud and Team
The rest of this policy, up to Crash reports, applies only if you create a Markdown Studio Cloud account, which you need for Cloud and Team. You can use everything else in Markdown Studio without one.
What we store with an account
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Your account | Your email address and name, an account ID, when you joined, how much storage you use and which plan you have. Your name is the one Apple shares the first time you sign in with Apple or, if there isn’t one, the first part of your email address; you can change it in Settings › Cloud. With Sign in with Apple, the email address may be a private relay address (see Sign in with Apple). |
| Sign-in details | Google’s Identity Platform keeps your account ID, your email address if you sign in with an email link, and when you signed in. To protect accounts from abuse, it also records the IP address and app details of each sign-in. |
| Projects you upload | Their names, the names and folders of their files, the Markdown files with every change made to them, who made each change and when, and the images and PDFs uploaded with them. |
| Comments and reviews | Comments and replies, the passage they’re about, who wrote them and when; review requests, reviewers, decisions and notes. |
| Teams and invites | Each team’s name and its members, with their names, email addresses, roles and the date they joined. For each invite: the role it offers, who created it, when it expires, who accepted it and, if the inviter entered one, the email address it’s meant for. |
| Activity | Who created, edited, renamed, deleted, commented on or reviewed what in a cloud project, and when. |
| Purchases | From Apple’s signed transaction records: the product, its transaction IDs, when it was bought and when it renews or expires, whether it will renew, any billing grace period, refund or revocation, and whether it was a real or a test (sandbox) purchase. A random account token, set on each purchase, links it to your account. We never receive your payment details. |
| Presence | While you have a cloud document open, the people in it see your name, where your cursor is and whether you’re typing. This is passed on live and never stored. |
On your Mac, Markdown Studio keeps your sign-in in the Keychain and copies of your cloud projects inside its own folder, so they work offline. Signing out keeps those copies; deleting your account removes them.
We don’t sell your data, use it for advertising or tracking, or use it to profile you.
Why we use it
| Purpose | Legal basis under the GDPR |
|---|---|
| To provide Markdown Studio Cloud and Team: your account, syncing and history, sharing and co-editing, comments and reviews, and the plan you pay for | Performing our contract with you (Article 6(1)(b)) |
| To keep the service secure, prevent abuse and fix problems, using the server logs and sign-in records described here | Our legitimate interest in a secure service that works (Article 6(1)(f)) |
| To let a team invite someone by email address | The team’s and our legitimate interest in letting teams invite the people they work with (Article 6(1)(f)) |
| To answer you when you email us | Our contract with you when it’s about your account, otherwise our legitimate interest in answering you (Article 6(1)(b) or (f)) |
You don’t have to give us any personal data to use Markdown Studio. To create an account we need an email address or your Sign in with Apple identity; without one, we can’t provide Cloud and Team.
Who can see it
- Only you, for your account and your personal projects.
- Your team. Everyone in a team you belong to can see its members’ names, email addresses and roles, the team’s projects with their history and who made each change, comments, reviews and activity, and who’s in a document right now. If you leave a team or delete your account, your edits, comments and review decisions stay in the team’s projects under your name, because they’re part of the team’s documents.
- People you invite. When someone opens a team invite in Markdown Studio, they see the team’s name, the inviter’s name and the role offered.
- Our service providers, listed below, only to run the service for us.
We don’t share your data with anyone else, unless the law requires us to.
Where it’s stored, and who processes it
Markdown Studio Cloud runs on Google Cloud, in Google’s europe-west1 region in Belgium: the server (Cloud Run), the database (Firestore) and the files (Cloud Storage). Your account, projects and their history, comments, reviews, teams, activity and purchase records are stored there. Two parts work differently, as the table shows: sign-in, which Google runs from data centers in the United States, and server logs.
| Provider | What it does for us, and where |
|---|---|
| Google Cloud: Cloud Run, Firestore, Cloud Storage | Runs Markdown Studio Cloud and stores your data, in Belgium (europe-west1). |
| Google Identity Platform | Signs you in and sends the sign-in emails. It runs in the United States. |
| Google Cloud Logging | Keeps the server logs, which it may store in any of Google’s data centers. |
| Apple | Provides Sign in with Apple, sells and renews your purchases, and tells our server about renewals, refunds and other changes to your subscriptions. Apple handles your data under the Apple Privacy Policy. |
Google processes this data only on our instructions, under Google Cloud’s data processing terms. Transfers outside the European Economic Area rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses in those terms, and on Google’s certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
Server logs
When the app talks to Markdown Studio Cloud, Google Cloud Run logs each request: your IP address, the address requested, the time, the response and how long it took, and the app’s user agent, which names the app’s version and your macOS version. Our server adds a line for each request with your account ID, the kind of request and the result, and notes events such as a sign-in, a new team or a deleted account. Our server’s own lines never include your email address or the content of your documents.
We use the logs to keep the service secure and to find and fix problems. They’re kept for 30 days, then deleted. To stop floods and guessing, the server also counts recent requests per IP address and per account, in memory, for up to an hour; these counts aren’t stored.
How long we keep it
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account | Until you delete it. |
| Personal projects and their history | Until you delete them or your account. A project or file you move to the Trash is kept for 30 days, then deleted for good. Deleting your account deletes your personal projects at once. |
| Team projects | As long as the team keeps them. When a team is deleted, its projects go to the Trash for 30 days. |
| Comments | As long as their document. A deleted comment disappears at once and is erased after 30 days. |
| Activity | One year. |
| Invites | Until 30 days after they expire. An invite expires 7 days after it’s created. |
| Purchase records | While your account exists. When you delete it, we remove the link to you and keep the record itself (the product, dates and transaction IDs), so that a subscription you haven’t cancelled can be attached to a new account. |
| Server logs | 30 days. |
| IP addresses of sign-ins | A few weeks, in Identity Platform. |
| A deleted account’s ID | One day, so that a sign-in from before the deletion can’t bring the account back. |
Deleted data can stay a little longer in backups: the database keeps earlier versions for 7 days (point-in-time recovery), and deleted files can be recovered from Cloud Storage for 7 days. Google says it removes deleted accounts from Identity Platform’s backups within 180 days.
Your rights
Under the GDPR, you can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to get a copy in a portable format, and to restrict or object to how we use it. You can also complain to a data protection authority.
- See and correct it. Settings › Cloud shows your name, email address, plan and teams, and you can change your name there. For a copy of everything we hold about you, or to correct anything else, email us.
- Take it with you. Your cloud projects are on your Mac as ordinary Markdown files: click Show in Finder in the Cloud panel, or export a document as PDF, Word or HTML. They stay readable and exportable even after a subscription ends.
- Delete it. In Markdown Studio, choose Settings › Cloud › Delete Account…. Your account, your personal projects and their history, and your team memberships are deleted at once, and the copies on your Mac are removed. If you own a team, hand it over to another member or delete it first. Deleting your account doesn’t cancel a subscription; cancel it in the App Store. You can also email us, and we’ll delete your account for you.
- Object or restrict. Email us to object to what we do for our legitimate interests, or to ask us to restrict it.
Email vlada@queazy.app and we’ll answer within one month. To protect your account, we may ask you to confirm that it’s yours. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live or work; in Romania, that’s ANSPDCP (dataprotection.ro).
Sign in with Apple
When you sign in with Apple, Apple gives us a stable identifier for you, which we store only as a one-way hash in your account ID, your email address if you share it and, the first time, your name if you share it.
If you choose Hide My Email, we get a private relay address from Apple that forwards to your inbox, and we never see your real address. The relay address is the one we store and the one your teammates see, and an invite meant for a particular email address works only with the address on your account. You can stop using Sign in with Apple with Markdown Studio in your Apple Account settings at any time. That doesn’t delete your Markdown Studio Cloud account, so delete it in the app first if you want it gone.
Crash reports
If you’ve chosen to share analytics with app developers in your Mac’s privacy settings, Apple may share crash reports for Markdown Studio with us. They don’t identify you, and we use them only to fix bugs. You can turn this off at any time in System Settings.
If you email us, we receive your email address and your message, which may include details such as your app and macOS versions. We use them only to answer you, and we never add you to a mailing list.
This website
markdownstudio.queazy.app sets no cookies, runs no analytics or tracking, and loads nothing from other websites. It’s hosted on Google Cloud, which processes standard technical information, such as IP addresses, to deliver pages and keep the service secure.
Children
Markdown Studio isn’t directed at children. Without an account, it collects no data from anyone, including children. You need to be at least 16 to create a Markdown Studio Cloud account. If you believe a child under 16 has given us personal data, email us and we’ll delete it.
Changes
If this policy changes, we’ll post the new version on this page with a new date at the top. If a change affects data you’ve already given us, we’ll tell you before it applies.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or a request about your data? Email vlada@queazy.app.