BackLinx Privacy Policy
Effective Date: September 1, 2026 Hybridizing Dragon Fruit LLC
This policy covers BackLinx, our software for macOS. It is separate from the privacy policy for our plant nursery and online store, which continues to govern purchases from this website.
1. The short version
BackLinx runs entirely on your own Mac. We operate no servers for it, you do not create a BackLinx account, and none of the data BackLinx works with is ever sent to us. When BackLinx uses your Google data, it connects from your computer directly to Google. We are not in the middle, and we never receive a copy.
2. Information we collect
We collect nothing. BackLinx contains no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, and no usage tracking of any kind. We do not know that you installed it, we do not know when you run it, and we do not know what you do with it.
If you email us for support, we have whatever you chose to put in that email. That is the only information about you we ever hold.
3. Google user data BackLinx accesses
When you choose to connect a Google account, BackLinx asks Google for your permission to access the following. You can decline any of it, and you can withdraw permission at any time.
| What BackLinx asks for | What it reads | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
Google Search Console, read-only (webmasters.readonly) | The list of websites verified to your account, and their search performance: search queries, page URLs, clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position | To show you which searches bring people to your website, which pages rank for them, and which questions people are asking that your site does not yet answer |
YouTube, read-only (youtube.readonly) | Your own channel's videos and their titles, descriptions and view counts, and the comment threads on those videos | To find questions your viewers have asked, and to build a local knowledge base from your own published work |
YouTube (youtube.force-ssl) | The text of the captions and transcripts on your own videos | To read your own transcripts into your local knowledge base, so BackLinx can draft answers in your words. This permission is required because the read-only permission above returns only the list of caption tracks, not their contents |
Your name and email address (openid, email) | The email address of the Google account you connected | To display which account is connected, in the app's Settings screen |
BackLinx never writes anything to your Google account. It does not post, reply, edit, delete, upload, or change any setting on YouTube or in Search Console. The youtube.force-ssl permission is capable of more than reading, but BackLinx uses it only to download the captions on your own videos.
4. How BackLinx uses that data
Google data is used for exactly one purpose: producing the features you see in the app on your own screen — search performance charts, content gap analysis, lead cards, and draft replies grounded in your own knowledge base. It is not used for anything else.
Every reply BackLinx drafts is sent by you, by hand. BackLinx does not post anything anywhere on your behalf, automatically or otherwise.
5. Where that data is stored
- Access tokens are stored in the macOS Keychain on your Mac, protected by the operating system and your login password.
- Everything else is stored in ordinary files inside BackLinx's macOS sandbox container on your Mac, at
~/Library/Containers/com.hybridizingdragonfruit.backlinx/Data/Library/Application Support/BackLinx. macOS keeps every App Store app's data inside a container like this one. - Nothing is stored anywhere else. There is no BackLinx cloud, database, or backup.
Some of what BackLinx saves is about other people: a lead card can hold the name, public contact details, and profile address of someone whose public post BackLinx found. That information stays on your Mac, encrypted, in the same place as everything else, and we never receive it. Handling it responsibly is yours to do, as it would be with any customer record.
If you back up your Mac — with Time Machine, iCloud, or anything else — that backup is yours and is governed by whatever service you use for it. We have no part in it.
6. Who we share it with
No one. We do not sell, rent, trade, transfer, or disclose your Google user data to anybody, because we never have it in the first place. There are no third-party processors, no subprocessors, no advertising partners, and no data brokers involved in BackLinx.
7. Artificial intelligence, in plain terms
BackLinx drafts replies using an open-weight language model that is bundled inside the application and runs entirely on your own Mac, using Apple Silicon. Nothing is sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any other AI service. There is no AI request that leaves your computer.
The model's weights are fixed at the version we ship. Your data never trains, retrains, fine-tunes, or otherwise modifies any model. When BackLinx says it "learns" from a correction you make, it is saving a note in your own local knowledge base on your own disk, and nothing more.
8. Limited Use
BackLinx's use, and its transfer to any other app, of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically, and without qualification:
- We do not use Google user data for serving advertisements of any kind, including retargeted, personalized, or interest-based advertising.
- We do not sell, license, or transfer Google user data to data brokers, information resellers, or any other party.
- We do not use Google user data to develop, improve, or train generalized or non-personalized artificial intelligence or machine learning models. The model shipped with BackLinx is never updated from user data.
- We do not use Google user data to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes.
- We do not allow humans to read your Google user data. No employee, contractor, or representative of Hybridizing Dragon Fruit LLC can access it, because it never leaves your Mac.
9. Other services BackLinx can connect to
BackLinx works without any of these. Each is contacted from your Mac rather than from any server of ours. The keyed services below are off until you add a key; the public services are queried only once you create a search topic or track a page, and only in the ways described here.
Services you give your own API key to. You obtain the key yourself; it is stored on your Mac and is never sent to us.
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Chrome UX Report
Google PageSpeed Insights is also used, and works without any key at all; you may supply one if you want higher rate limits.
- Open PageRank, operated by Keywords Everywhere
Public services BackLinx queries with no account and no credentials at all. These receive the search terms you have configured. Two narrower uses send a URL instead of a search term: the Wayback Machine receives the addresses of pages you have chosen to track, to read their public change history, and the forum you replied on may be re-visited at the address of your own reply, to check whether it is still up.
- Stack Exchange
- Bluesky
- Hacker News — searched through Algolia, which operates Hacker News' public search index, so the search term reaches Algolia rather than Hacker News directly
- The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine
- Lemmy instances and Discourse forums that you choose
Encrypted DNS. To look up the internet addresses of the services above, BackLinx sends its own DNS queries over encrypted HTTPS to Quad9 (dns.quad9.net), falling back to Google Public DNS and then to your Mac's normal resolver only if Quad9 is unreachable. A DNS query contains only the hostname being looked up — never your Google data, your configured search terms, or any account identifier. This covers BackLinx's own direct connections only — not pages BackLinx loads in a built-in web view (used for some page fetches and for the in-app reply window, which use your Mac's normal DNS), and not your Mac's other traffic.
Your own website and feeds. BackLinx fetches pages and RSS feeds from the sites you nominate — your own site, your feeds, and any competitor pages you choose to track — to build your local knowledge base.
Pages a potential customer links to. When someone whose public post BackLinx found names their own business website in that post, BackLinx may fetch that site's contact page — from your Mac, honouring the site's robots.txt — so the lead card can show how to reach them. Nothing about you or your Google account is sent with that request.
Sites BackLinx does not contact at all. Some sources — Quora, Reddit, and a general Google web search — are offered only as buttons that open the site in your own web browser. BackLinx sends nothing to them; your browser makes that visit, governed by your browser's own settings.
Not in this application. The former Reddit integration was removed from the app entirely, and BackLinx itself makes no Reddit request of any kind. Facebook group search is not included in the App Store build.
No Google user data, account identifier, or access token is ever sent to any service named in this section. When BackLinx searches a public source, it sends the search terms you have configured and nothing else. If you chose one of those search terms after seeing it in your Search Console data, then that word travels with the search — but no Search Console data, and no connection to your Google account, goes with it.
10. Retention, and how to delete everything
There is nothing for us to retain, so there is nothing for us to delete. On your own Mac:
- Disconnect Google. Open BackLinx ▸ Settings ▸ Google Connection ▸ Disconnect. BackLinx asks Google to revoke the access token and erases it from your Keychain immediately.
- Revoke from Google's side at any time, independently of us, at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
- Remove everything. Delete the BackLinx application, then delete its container folder: in Finder choose Go ▸ Go to Folder…, enter
~/Library/Containers/com.hybridizingdragonfruit.backlinx, and move that folder to the Trash. Every trace of your data is then gone. Deleting the app alone does not remove this folder — macOS leaves app containers behind.
11. Security
Access tokens are held in the macOS Keychain rather than in a file. The folder BackLinx stores your data in is created readable only by your own user account, and the files inside it are written the same way. All connections BackLinx makes are encrypted with HTTPS. Because your data never travels to us and is never stored on any server we control, the largest category of risk in most software — a breach of the vendor — does not exist here.
12. Children
BackLinx is business software and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and as described above, we do not collect information from anyone at all.
13. Your rights
Residents of Florida and of other jurisdictions with data protection laws have rights to know, correct, and delete personal information held about them. We hold none, so there is nothing to disclose, correct, or erase — but you are welcome to write to us and we will confirm that in writing.
14. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the effective date above and post the revised version at this same address. If a change ever expands what BackLinx does with Google user data, we will ask for your consent again inside the app before that change takes effect.
15. Contact us
Hybridizing Dragon Fruit LLC 2219 SE 15th Ave, Cape Coral, FL 33990 Email: [email protected]