Privacy policy
24 October 2026
SideMount is a tool that moves files between a phone and a Mac you own, over a cable or your own Wi-Fi network. It is built so that there is almost nothing to say here, and this page says exactly what there is.
Your files
They never touch us. A file copied through SideMount goes from the phone, along the USB cable or across your own Wi-Fi network, to your Mac, and stops there. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is scanned, and no list of what you copied is kept or sent anywhere.
To make reading fast, SideMount keeps a local copy of a file it has pulled, in ~/Library/Caches/SideMount. It is on your Mac only, it is dropped when you eject, and you can delete that folder whenever you like.
What leaves your Mac
Your licence
When you activate a key, and about once a day afterwards, SideMount asks sidemount.app whether the licence is still good. That request carries your licence key, an identifier for the activation, and a one-way hash of your Mac's hardware id, which cannot be turned back into anything about your Mac. Your Mac's name is not sent. On our side we keep the email you bought with, your key, and those identifiers, for as long as the licence exists.
The sale itself is made by Stripe, as merchant of record, which holds your payment details and billing address; we never see a card number. Their privacy policy covers that part. SideMount is made by Tarik Caramanico, in Italy.
Update checks
Once a day SideMount fetches sidemount.app/appcast.xml to see whether there is a newer version. That is an ordinary web request. It carries no identifier and no profile of your Mac; the option Sparkle offers for sending one is off.
Anonymous usage data, which you can turn off
So we can see which parts of SideMount work and where it fails, the app sends coarse usage events to PostHog, our analytics provider: for example that a phone was mounted over USB or Wi-Fi, that a mount failed and with which error code, that the trial started or a licence was activated. Each event carries the app's version, the macOS version, your Mac's model identifier and language, the phone's maker and Android version, and a random identifier made on your Mac that is not tied to you, your licence or your email.
It never carries a file name, a folder, a path, anything you copied, a phone's serial number or the name you gave it, your licence key, your email, or your Mac's name. There is no screen recording in the app.
This is on by default. Turn it off at any time in SideMount's settings, under Share anonymous usage data; no more usage events are sent from then on. Licence and update checks are separate, and described above.
Crash diagnostics, which you can turn off
SideMount also uses Sentry for limited crash diagnostics. Reports contain an event identifier and time, severity, app version and build, environment, a limited error category, thread indices and flags, stack addresses, and binary identifiers and sizes. The app filters reports before sending them. They exclude file contents, paths and names, device names and serial numbers, credentials, user details, requests, logs and breadcrumbs. Performance tracing, profiling and screen recording are off.
Crash diagnostics are on by default. Turn them off under Settings > Privacy > Share crash diagnostics. The choice is saved, stops new collection and cancels pending diagnostic requests immediately. Reports already transmitted cannot be recalled. An existing opt-out from anonymous usage data keeps crash diagnostics off on upgrade, unless you enable them separately. This control is separate from usage analytics, licence checks and updates. As with any network service, Sentry can see the connection's IP address.
This website
sidemount.app uses PostHog too, set up to be cookieless: it stores nothing in your browser, does not follow you across other sites, and never collects your name or email. It records page views, clicks on the download and buy buttons, and session replays.
A replay is an anonymous reconstruction of how a page was used, so we can see where the site confuses people. Replays never include anything you type: every input is masked inside your browser, so the text never reaches us. The page that shows your licence key after a purchase loads no analytics at all, so your key is never captured. Replays are deleted after 30 days.
PostHog, like any web server, sees the address your request comes from and uses it to estimate the country. The site itself is served by Cloudflare.
What we do not do
- No account. There is nothing to sign up for.
- No advertising. We do not sell your data. The service providers described above process the requests sent to them.
- No cookies on this site, and no tracking across other sites.
- Nothing about your files, ever, in any of the above.
Logs
SideMount writes to the macOS unified log, like every other app on your Mac. Those lines stay on your Mac and are useful if you ever send us a problem report. Device serial numbers appear there; they do not leave your machine unless you choose to send them to us.
If you email us
We keep the email so we can answer it. We do not add you to anything.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and the release notes say so.