Security and data

What leaves your machine

Nothing.

Printy has no account, no sync and no telemetry. It does not phone home, does not check for updates on its own, and does not transmit file names, folder paths or printer names anywhere.

The only network traffic it ever causes is you clicking a link in Über, which opens your browser.

What it stores, and where

Everything is in a single SQLite database beside the application’s data directory. Einstellungen → Erweitert → Datenbank shows the exact path and reveals it in the file manager.

It contains:

• your watched folders and their settings,
• the application settings,
• the job history: file name and path, size, a content hash, the printer, the settings used, timestamps, and any error message.

File contents are not stored. A document is read to print it and not kept. What remains in the history is a SHA-256 hash of the content, used to recognise a file that has already been printed.

The database is not encrypted. It is protected by the permissions of the account it belongs to, like the documents in the folders it watches. Anyone who can read your user profile can read it — the same people who could read the printed documents themselves.

What Printy does to your files

Within a watched folder, and only there:

Action	When
Read	To print.
Move	Into printed or failed, if the folder’s rule says so.
Delete	Only in a folder explicitly set to Löschen, and only after a successful print.

Two limits are absolute:

• Subfolders are never touched. Only the watched folder itself is read.
• A file that failed is never deleted, even in a folder set to delete after printing. The one document you certainly still need is the one that would not print.

Moving never overwrites: a name collision gets a timestamp appended rather than replacing the existing file.

Permissions it asks for

Notifications, on first launch — optional. Deny it and Printy prints exactly the same, you simply are not told about failures.

Autostart, when you turn it on — a login item, registered through the operating system’s own mechanism.

Printy asks for no elevated or administrative rights, and runs as the ordinary user account that starts it.

The exported configuration

An exported file is plain, readable JSON. It contains no secrets, but it does list your folder paths and printer names — which may itself say something about the organisation it came from. Treat it as you would a document.

It deliberately excludes the job history, the record of files already printed, and local library paths. See Backup and transfer.

Third-party components

Printy ships open-source components, each under its own licence. The complete list, with versions and licences, is in the app under Über → Lizenzen.

Printy itself is MIT-licensed and its source is at github.com/NoiXdev/printy.

Removing Printy completely

1. Uninstall the application — Windows: Apps & features; macOS: brew uninstall --cask printy, or drag it to the Bin.
2. Delete the database file shown under Einstellungen → Erweitert → Datenbank (note the path before uninstalling).
3. Your documents, and anything in printed or failed, stay exactly where they are. Printy never removes them.