SideSpace Privacy Policy

Last updated:

This policy covers SideSpace: Multiple Accounts for iOS, published by Sang Cao.

The short version

There is no account to create, no advertising and no third-party analytics. Your web sessions, notes, photos and files stay on your iPhone. From version 1.5 the app sends us one small usage summary a day — counts, never content — described below.

What stays on your device

  • Web sessions. Each Space keeps its own cookies and sign-ins in an isolated store provided by iOS. They stay on the device and are never transmitted to us.
  • Notes, photos, videos and files. Stored inside the app’s own storage. Photos and video taken with the in-app camera are saved into the Space you were in, not into your Photos library. Files you add from the Files app are copied into the Space and stay there.
  • Your Spaces — their names, icons and settings.
  • Your Space passcode, if you set one, stored as a salted hash in the iOS Keychain. It is never stored in a form that can be read back, and it never leaves the device.

The daily usage summary

From version 1.5, once a day and whenever the app is opened after an hour or more, SideSpace sends a short summary to hooks.sangcaolabs.com, a server we run ourselves. No third party receives it. It holds:

  • Counts: how many Spaces, private Spaces, web apps, notes, photos and files you have, the most accounts you keep for one service, and how many times the app was opened that day.
  • Which services you have added and opened that day, named only if the service is in the app’s own catalogue or in a list of widely used sites built into the app — for example “gmail” or “shopee.vn”. That list leaves out adult, dating, health, gambling, religious and political sites. A web app at any other address is counted only as “custom”; the address never leaves your device.
  • Whether those services work, per service: how many pages finished loading, how many failed, and how often a page asked for a passkey, opened a sign-in window or tried to send you to the App Store. Counted only for web apps you added, never for pages you open in the Browser.
  • Your plan: free, the free 24 hours of Premium, or a subscription — and, for a subscription, the purchase’s transaction number, so we can match a day of use to the purchase Apple tells us about.
  • The app version, your App Store country and the device language, and a random identifier the app makes for this device. It is not your Apple Account, your name, your e-mail or an advertising identifier.

It never contains names of Spaces, notes, photos, files, page addresses, anything you type, or anything from inside a web session. We use it only to see whether the app works for the people who use it — which features are used, and whether the free 24 hours lead anywhere — and we do not sell or share it, or use it to track you across other apps or websites.

What else leaves your device

Three more things, and none of them involves us.

The websites you visit inside a Space. Traffic goes straight from your iPhone to those sites. They see what they would see if you used Safari, and their own privacy policies apply. We are not a party to it.

App icons. When you add a web app, your device fetches that service’s icon from that service’s own website, the way Safari fetches a favicon. It is then cached on your device and not fetched again.

The Test Proxy button, only when you tap it. If you have set up a proxy for a Space, that button asks api.ipify.org what IP address it sees, so you can confirm the proxy is working. It runs on that tap and nowhere else, and never at all if you have not configured a proxy.

Proxies

A Space can be given a proxy so its web traffic leaves your phone by a different route. You supply it. We run no proxy servers, sell no bandwidth, and route none of your traffic through anything of ours.

The address and any username and password you enter are stored in your device’s Keychain, are never sent to us, and are deleted with the Space. They are deliberately not included in an exported backup, so restoring onto a new device means entering them again.

Permissions, and when they are asked for

  • Camera and microphone — only when you use the in-app camera. What you capture goes into the Space you were in, never into your Photos library.
  • Photo library — only when you tap Add Recent Photos. If you never use that feature you are never asked. It is used to list recent photos so you can import one, and to delete an imported photo from the library if you choose that; iOS asks you to confirm any deletion itself.
  • Face ID — only to unlock private Spaces. Face ID data never leaves Apple’s Secure Enclave and is not available to the app.

Declining any of these leaves the rest of the app working.

Private Spaces

A Space marked Private is not listed in the switcher until you unlock it, so its name is hidden and not only its contents. Unlock it with Face ID, or with a passcode separate from your iPhone’s own.

There is no recovery for a forgotten Space passcode, and that is deliberate — a reset that could be done quietly would defeat the lock. See Support for what a reset does.

Backups

Exporting a backup writes a file to wherever you send it. That file is not encrypted, so treat it like any other file holding your notes and photos.

It does not contain your web sign-ins: iOS gives an app no way to read those out. A restored Space arrives signed out of everything, with its notes, photos, web apps and settings intact.

What this app is not

SideSpace runs services in isolated web sessions. It does not clone or modify any app, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any service you add to a Space.

Children

SideSpace is not directed at children. The daily usage summary above is the only thing it collects, from anyone.

Changes

If the app’s behaviour changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.

Contact

Questions about this policy: sangcaolabs@gmail.com. We usually reply within one to two business days.