Privacy Policy

I, Michael West, the creator of this application/service, regard privacy very highly. (When I use first person, I mean myself, and when I use second person, I mean both me and this application) The existence of this service actually sprouted from that, in that I didn't wish to share my Google username and password with any site or even have to store it in plaintext on my computer. Because of that, I will always take the approach of putting privacy first.

Using the site
Like many other sites, we use Google Analytics to better track the amount of users to this site and various statistics about them. Read the Google privacy policy for more info.

Logging In
When you log in to this site, you are using Google's OAuth function to log in. This is necessary to validate GMail addresses, as otherwise any user could potentially hijack an account. When you enter your username and password, they are sent to Google and not us. If Google accepts them, Google gives us a token that uniquely identifies you, and your email address. The token allows us to remember your login across multiple sessions, even if your GMail account changes, and your email address is necessary as stated above.

Stored Information
In order to effectively utilize this service, it must store a few user details.

First, any information you enter on the settings page will be stored, un-encrypted. It is stored un-encrypted due to the fact that it needs to be un-encrypted to be used, and that the information is relatively un-confidential originally. You're giving away your Growl password to us, which by definition is compromising it, so it only makes sense that it should be a unique password, not shared with any other service. Even if someone got your password, they would only be able to send your Growl notifications. Only a minor annoyance, really. Growl's password management service makes managing multiple passwords easy. The Prowl API is similar, in that if someone were to use it, they could only slightly annoy you by making your iPhone/iPod Touch buzz. Growl passwords are transmitted over the network as an MD5 hash, however the library we're using doesn't allow MD5 hashes to be specified, and I have an irrational fear of modifying libraries.

Second, your email address and login token are stored, so they can be compared to in the future. The token contains no personally identifiable information. Your email is stored as plaintext rather than a hash to make troubleshooting and sending service notification emails easier.

Third, the date and time of the last message you received and how many messages you've received is stored. These are purely for statistical and troubleshooting purposes, and they couldn't be used for very much anyways.

Receiving Emails/Messages
When we receive a message forwarded from Google Voice, only the information above is stored. Because we want to make this very clear, the source code to the script that receives email is available here. That's a live view of the source code. Our MySQL information and Prowl API provider key are in separate includes for security. Please note that this does not give you permission to use this code, only to view it. All rights are reserved to me unless you receive permission otherwise.

Third Party Privacy
We use smtp2web.com, a service that allows web applications to receive email. We take no responsibility for the privacy of their service, as we can't control it. It logs the time and date of a message received, as well as your GMail address, the size in kb, and whether it succeeded or not. No other information is apparently recorded, however we can't guarantee that that is true. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, you are encouraged to contact its owner or look at its source code.

You also have the option of creating an account at smtp2web.com and setting up an email forwarder to 'http://googlevoice.ub3rk1tten.com/voicegrowl/email.php' if you'd like to prevent me from viewing those logs. It won't change much, but at least you 'own' part of the process.