Privacy Policy — Gutterpress

Effective date: 2026-09-01

Gutterpress is a desktop application and command-line tool that turns Markdown into print-ready PDFs. This policy covers the one feature that involves a third-party account: publishing to Google Drive. Every other part of Gutterpress works entirely on your own computer, on your own files, and sends nothing anywhere.

There is no Gutterpress server

Gutterpress — the desktop app and the CLI alike — has no backend server of any kind. There is no service operated by this project, or by Dimm City, that your files, your Google account, or your OAuth tokens ever pass through. When you connect Google Drive, your browser talks directly to Google's own sign-in pages, and Gutterpress running on your machine talks directly to Google's own API endpoints (accounts.google.com, oauth2.googleapis.com, www.googleapis.com). Nothing is relayed, logged, or stored anywhere except your own computer and your own Google Drive.

What Gutterpress can see and do in your Google Drive

Google Drive publishing requests exactly one OAuth scope, drive.file. This is Google's deliberately narrow, non-sensitive access tier:

• drive.file grants access only to files and folders that Gutterpress itself creates — typically a single folder (named "Gutterpress" by default, or a name you choose) that Gutterpress creates the first time you publish. Gutterpress cannot see, list, read, or modify anything else in your Drive: not your other documents, not your other folders, not anything a collaborator shared with you. This was verified against a real, populated Google account: a folder listing returned exactly the one folder Gutterpress had created, nothing else.
• Your account's email address is read once, from Drive's own account information, only to label the connected account — so Gutterpress can show you "Google Drive — you@example.com" when you have more than one account connected. No separate sign-in scope is requested for it. It is stored alongside your credential (see below) and never transmitted anywhere else.
• What gets uploaded is exactly what you publish: the finished PDF, or a single zip of the HTML export, written to the folder described above. Gutterpress does not scan, index, or transmit any other content from your project.

Where your Google credentials are stored

Connecting Google Drive stores one thing locally: a refresh token, used to mint short-lived access tokens on demand. It is never written to your project folder, never committed to Git, and never leaves your machine except in requests sent directly to Google's own token endpoint.

• Desktop app — encrypted at rest using Electron's safeStorage, which defers to your operating system's own credential vault (Keychain on macOS, DPAPI on Windows, libsecret/kwallet on Linux where available).
• Command-line tool — stored in a private file with 0600 permissions (readable only by you) inside your user configuration directory, the same store used for every other publish provider's credentials.

Access tokens minted from the refresh token live only in memory for the duration of a single publish, and are never written to disk, logged, or included in any error message.

Sharing and visibility

Gutterpress never changes who can see a file it uploads. A file Gutterpress publishes is visible only to you, exactly like anything else you add to Drive by hand, unless and until you share it yourself using Drive's own Share button. Gutterpress has no mechanism to grant, change, or remove sharing permissions on your behalf.

Revoking access

You can disconnect Google Drive at any time:

• From inside Gutterpress (Settings → Accounts, or gutterpress publish --provider gdrive --disconnect), which deletes the locally stored refresh token and makes a best-effort request to revoke it with Google.
• Directly from your Google Account's Third-party apps & services page, which revokes Gutterpress's access immediately regardless of what Gutterpress itself does.

Either way, once revoked, any locally stored token stops working and Gutterpress can no longer access your Drive until you connect again.

Other data

Gutterpress does not collect analytics, telemetry, or usage data about your Google Drive connection, your books, or your project files. There being no Gutterpress server, there is nowhere for that data to be sent even if it were collected.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the update will be published at this same URL with a new effective date. Material changes affecting how Google account data is handled will be called out in the project's changelog.

Contact

Gutterpress is open source. Questions, concerns, or reports about this policy are welcome as an issue at https://github.com/dimm-city/gutterpress/issues.