Privacy Policy

Short version

• The website uses a cookieless, privacy-friendly analytics counter (GoatCounter) — no accounts, no cookies, no personal identifiers collected by us.
• The bb software is local-first: indexing, storage, and analysis happen on your machine. There is no Backbencher cloud.
• The only optional network calls are embedding-provider requests you configure yourself with your own API key.
• Your embedding keys are stored in your config with owner-only permissions and are displayed as fingerprints only.

Who is behind this

Backbencher (also called bb) and backbencher.cc are developed by Muhammad Ishaq Khan (ishaq2321). Questions about this policy go to info@backbencher.cc.

The website (backbencher.cc)

The site runs GoatCounter (account bbstats) for page-view counts. GoatCounter is cookieless: it does not set tracking cookies and we collect no names, email addresses, or account data on the site. The counter receives standard request information (page path and title, referrer, browser/user-agent, approximate country) so we can see which pages people actually read.

You can opt out at any time at goatcounter.com/optout, or block the counter script — the site works fully without it.

The bb software — what stays on your machine

When you index a project, the parsed symbols, relationships, and derived data are written to a local, per-project database on your machine. The CLI configuration lives in ~/.bb/config.json with owner-only permissions (0600). Embedding provider keys are stored there and are shown as fingerprints, not plaintext, by inspection commands like bb setup show.

We do not operate any service that receives your index, your config, or your keys.

What leaves your machine

Exactly two kinds of network activity exist, both under your control:

• Installer downloads — when you install or rerun the installer, it downloads the release binary from backbencher.cc (or the URL you point it at).
• Embedding provider requests — only if you enable high-quality semantic search by configuring a provider key with bb setup. The content being embedded is sent to that provider in small vector requests under that provider’s own terms, not to us. If you do not configure a key, semantic search falls back to weaker local vectors and nothing is sent.

Email

Messages you send to support@backbencher.cc or info@backbencher.cc are used only to respond to you and to improve the product. We do not sell or share them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the effective date above is updated in the same change. Significant changes are called out here rather than buried.