Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 6, 2026

Who we are

Panda Contacts is a contacts application for macOS and iOS developed by Yan-David Erlich (“we,” “us”). This policy describes how the Panda Contacts app and the pandacontacts.com website handle your information. You can reach us at support@pandacontacts.com.

What Panda Contacts does

Panda Contacts is a client for Google Contacts. After you sign in with your Google Account, the app displays and manages the contacts stored in that account. Optional features add relationship context from your Google Calendar and Gmail. All of this happens on your device.

Google user data the app accesses

Panda Contacts uses Google's official APIs, with your explicit consent through Google's sign-in screen. The app requests the minimum scopes needed for the features you enable:

• Google Contacts (read and write). Names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, organizations, birthdays, events, URLs, notes, photos, and labels. This is the core of the app: it is how your contacts are displayed, edited, and kept in sync with your Google account.
• Google Calendar (read-only, optional). If you enable calendar context, the app reads your calendar list (so you can choose which calendars to include) and events from the calendars you select, to show upcoming and recent meetings alongside the matching contact.
• Gmail message metadata (optional). If you enable the email timeline, the app reads message headers — sender, recipients, subject, and date — to show your recent correspondence with a contact. Message bodies and attachments are never read, stored, or displayed. If you grant the broader read-only Gmail permission (used so the app can search for mail exchanged with a specific contact), the app still processes headers only.

Each optional permission is requested only when you turn the corresponding feature on, and you can revoke any of them at any time (see “Your choices and controls” below).

How your data is used

• To display and edit your contacts, and to sync your changes back to your Google account.
• To show relationship context — upcoming meetings, recent emails, birthdays — next to the right contact.
• To detect likely duplicate contacts and, at your request, merge them.
• To deliver on-device notifications for birthdays and anniversaries you have chosen to be reminded about.

All processing — search indexing, duplicate detection, contact–event matching, reminders — runs locally on your Mac or iPhone.

Where your data lives

• On your device. The app keeps a local cache of your contacts, calendar events, and email headers so it stays fast and works offline. This cache lives in the app's sandboxed storage on your device and is deleted when you delete the app.
• In your Google account. Your contacts remain in Google Contacts, which stays the source of truth.
• In your personal iCloud (settings only). App preferences — such as selected calendars and label colors — sync between your devices through Apple's iCloud Key-Value Store, tied to your Apple Account. Your contacts, calendar events, and email data are not stored in iCloud by the app.
• In the system keychain. Your Google sign-in tokens are stored in the Apple Keychain on your device, protected by the operating system.
• Nowhere else. Panda Contacts operates no servers and has no backend. Your Google user data is never transmitted to us or to any third party by the app.

Limited Use disclosure

Specifically, Google user data is used only to provide the user-facing features described above. It is never:

• sold, or transferred to advertisers, data brokers, or any other third party;
• used for advertising, market research, or credit assessment;
• read by humans, except with your explicit permission for support, or where required for security or legal compliance;
• used to train machine-learning or AI models, whether generalized or personalized.

Third-party services the app talks to

Besides Google's contact, calendar, and mail APIs, the app contacts the following services, each governed by its own privacy policy:

• Google Places API. If you use address autocomplete while editing a contact, the text you type into the address field is sent to Google to fetch suggestions.
• Apple Maps (MapKit). To show contacts on a map, contact addresses are geocoded using Apple's MapKit service on your device.
• Apple App Store. Subscriptions are processed entirely by Apple. We never receive your payment details. See Apple's privacy policy for how Apple handles purchase data.

Analytics and tracking

The app contains no analytics, no advertising SDKs, and no trackers. We do not profile you, and there is no data to sell. The pandacontacts.com website sets no cookies and uses no third-party analytics.

Your choices and controls

• Revoke Google access at any time from myaccount.google.com/permissions. The app immediately loses access to your Google data.
• Disable optional features (calendar context, email timeline) in the app's settings; the corresponding permissions are no longer used.
• Delete your local data by deleting the app from your device, which removes the cache, tokens, and preferences stored there.
• Your contacts remain yours — they live in your Google account and are unaffected by removing the app.

Data retention

Because we operate no servers, we retain nothing. The only copies of your data associated with Panda Contacts are the ones on your own devices and in your own Google and Apple accounts, all of which are under your control.

Security

The app runs inside Apple's application sandbox, stores credentials in the system keychain, and communicates with Google and Apple exclusively over encrypted (TLS) connections. Since no Panda Contacts servers exist, there is no central store of user data to attack.

Children

Panda Contacts is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live (for example, under the GDPR in Europe or the CCPA in California), you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or port your personal information. Because Panda Contacts stores your data only on your devices and in your own Google account, you can exercise these rights directly: view and edit everything in the app, and delete data as described above. If you have any questions or believe we hold information about you, contact us at support@pandacontacts.com and we will respond within 30 days.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version at pandacontacts.com/privacy.html and update the effective date above. Material changes will be highlighted in the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: support@pandacontacts.com