Privacy notice

English first; the Italian version follows. In case of doubt the Italian version prevails. Prima l'inglese; segue la versione italiana. In caso di dubbio prevale la versione italiana.

In short

• FoldEngine has no ads, no tracking, no analytics and no account. You do not sign in.
• Most of what you do stays on your device, in folders you choose.
• Data leaves your device only for features you switch on, and each one says where it goes:

Every service also sees your IP address and the time of the request; the coordinator's hosting provider also derives an approximate location (country, city, coordinates) from the IP address and keeps it in its logs for one day. You can withdraw any permission, and delete your data, in Settings › Privacy & licences.

1. Who is responsible

The controller is Alessandro Pedretti, individual developer, Via Giuseppe Verdi 67, 25034 Orzinuovi (BS), Italy; telephone +39 328 572 6032. Contact for privacy: privacy@foldengine.science. There is no data protection officer (not required for this processing, GDPR Art. 37) and no EU representative (the controller is in the EU, Art. 27).

2. What we process, why, and on which legal basis

2.1 Contribute (the Hive), Mac only. When you switch on «Donate computing power», your Mac registers with FoldEngine's coordinator and, when it is idle, plugged in and cool, takes research tasks, runs them and returns the results. The coordinator receives: a public key generated on your Mac (its private half is never sent: it stays on the Mac, in the Keychain or, if the Keychain refuses it, in a file readable only by your user in the app's Application Support folder), the Mac model identifier (e.g. Mac16,11), the macOS version, the time and a random number of each request, the machine number it assigns, and for each task the outcome, digests of the results, the run time and, where macOS allows reading it, the GPU energy. It does not receive your name, e-mail, files or projects. The hosting provider also logs your IP address and an approximate location derived from it. Purposes: handing out and verifying tasks, counting each machine's credits, preventing replayed requests. Legal basis: the service you ask for (Art. 6(1)(b)); security and replay protection, and showing signed results to other volunteers so that anyone can re-verify them, on legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)); you can object to it at any time (Art. 21, see section 6). When a task is closed, other registered machines can see each result's public key, declared Mac model, outcome, times, energy and signature: this is how the network checks itself. Credits, points and achievements have no monetary value (see the Terms).

2.2 Your private iCloud (CloudKit). Three things can go into the private database of your iCloud account. The live view starts only when you switch it on, after the app has listed what it sends: every few seconds your Mac writes its name (as set in System Settings), its chip model, its activity (free, running, screen off), its thermal state and the time of the last contact; for each study with a run in progress, the study's folder name, title and description, the step reached and the total, temperature, energy when measured, outcome and reason, and the time of the update; and the public records of the Hive tasks your Mac has read. Your iPhone and iPad read it. You can switch it off at any time; switching it off stops new writes, and deleting removes what is there. Contribution progress (chosen cause, talents, achievements, the credits each of your Macs last read) is kept there while iCloud is on for FoldEngine. Pairing for signing acts: each iPhone or iPad (and the Mac) writes there a record with its public signing key, an installation identifier, the device name and model, the creation time and the pairing state, authenticated with a secret that the Mac keeps in your iCloud Keychain; your Mac reads it to delegate the device. Deleting FoldEngine's iCloud data removes these records and that secret. The publisher cannot see that database; Apple stores it as the publisher's processor and counts it against your iCloud storage. Legal basis: the service you use (Art. 6(1)(b)).

2.3 Scientific services (Mac). When you use them, your device contacts these services directly; they are independent controllers of what they receive, under their own privacy notices: ESM Metagenomic Atlas (Meta), AlphaFold DB, InterPro and Europe PMC (EMBL-EBI), UniProt (EMBL-EBI, SIB, PIR), RCSB PDB (Rutgers University, USA), Zenodo (CERN), the npm registry and Apple's store catalogue. Cloud prediction, structure look-up and periodic refresh run only after you give consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), separately for each, and you can withdraw it at any time. Do not send sequences derived from an identifiable person's genome.

2.4 Data that stays on your device. Preferences, your consent records, folder bookmarks, the machine key (in the Keychain, or in the file described in 2.1) and your Zenodo token (in the Keychain), local resource measurements and the projects you open stay on your device and are not sent to the publisher.

2.5 Distribution. If you test FoldEngine through TestFlight, Apple gives the publisher your name and e-mail as a tester, the feedback you send and the crash reports you choose to share. If you install it from the App Store, Apple may share aggregated statistics and the crash reports you agree to share. Legal basis: legitimate interest in fixing the app (Art. 6(1)(f)).

2.6 When you write to us. We use your message and address only to answer, and keep them for 24 months after our last reply (see section 5).

2.7 In-app purchases. If you leave a tip or subscribe as a Supporter, Apple processes the payment as an independent controller under its own privacy policy. The publisher receives neither your payment details nor your identity: the app reads Apple-signed transactions on the device only to know whether the subscription is active and to show a thank-you, and sends them to no one. Apple provides the publisher with aggregated sales reports (for example country and amounts) without data that identifies you. Neither tips nor the subscription unlock any feature.

3. Who receives data

• Supabase (Supabase Pte. Ltd., Singapore) hosts the coordinator as our processor, in Frankfurt (EU), under a data processing agreement with the EU Standard Contractual Clauses; its sub-processors include Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare. The app asks Supabase to run the coordinator code in Frankfurt too (without that request Supabase would run it in the region nearest to you).
• Apple stores the private iCloud data as our processor; for your Apple Account, notifications, TestFlight and the App Store it is an independent controller.
• Other volunteers see the pseudonymous signed results described in 2.1.
• The scientific services in 2.3, as independent controllers.

Our processors (Supabase and Apple) are bound by contract to protect your data at least as this notice describes; the independent services in 2.3 apply their own notices, listed in section 11.

4. Transfers outside the EU

Supabase's group and sub-processors may access data from outside the EU (for example the USA and Singapore) under the Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c)). Some scientific services are outside the EU (UK, Switzerland, USA) or are international organisations (CERN); your device contacts them directly, only when you use them and after your consent. The basis of each flow:

• EMBL-EBI (AlphaFold DB, InterPro, Europe PMC, and UniProt, which the app reaches on EMBL-EBI's servers): part of EMBL, an international organisation, with servers in the United Kingdom; EMBL applies its own data protection policy (EMBL Internal Policy No. 68). The UK adequacy decision (Art. 45) concerns recipients subject to UK law; for EMBL the flow rests on your request (Art. 49(1)(b)).
• Zenodo (CERN, international organisation, Geneva): Art. 49(1)(b); CERN applies its Operational Circular No. 11 (Rev. 1).
• ESM Metagenomic Atlas (Meta, servers in the USA): Meta Platforms, Inc. is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45, Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2023/1795); for anything the certification does not cover, Art. 49(1)(b).
• RCSB PDB (Rutgers and UC San Diego, USA) and the npm registry (npm, Inc., USA): Art. 49(1)(b).
• Apple's store catalogue: in the EEA Apple's controller is Apple Distribution International Ltd (Ireland), so the app makes no transfer outside the EU.

Art. 49(1)(b) covers occasional transfers made at your request and on your initiative: you avoid them by not using those features. You can ask for a copy of the safeguards at the contact above.

5. How long

6. Your rights

You can ask for access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and object to processing based on legitimate interest (Arts. 15–22), and withdraw consent at any time without affecting earlier processing (Art. 7(3)). We answer within one month (Art. 12(3)). In the app: Settings › Privacy & licences lets you withdraw each consent, delete FoldEngine's data from your iCloud, ask the coordinator to delete your machine's data, and delete the machine key. If the app cannot reach the coordinator or you no longer have the machine key, write to privacy@foldengine.science (or by post to the address in section 1; telephone +39 328 572 6032); since the public key is visible to other volunteers, it identifies the machine but does not prove it is yours, so we will ask for proportionate further elements (never identity documents) and delete within one month. Deletion removes your machine, credits, signed messages and every delivery of yours, also from verified tasks: of those only an aggregate count per task remains, with no identifier, while the task's class-level verification stays. Copies of task records that other volunteers have already downloaded cannot be recalled. You can complain to the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (www.garanteprivacy.it) or to the authority where you live or work (Art. 77).

7. Children

FoldEngine is not directed at children. In Italy, consent for online services can be given from age 14 (Codice privacy art. 2-quinquies); younger users need a parent's consent to switch on the consent-based features.

8. No automated decisions

There is no profiling and no decision with legal or similar effects about you (Art. 22). Credits are computed by fixed public rules on verified results.

9. Security

Requests are signed (Ed25519) and sent over HTTPS; secrets stay in the Keychain; the coordinator's tables are reachable only through its signed interface. No system is perfectly secure; we will notify the authority and you if the law requires it (Arts. 33–34).

10. Changes

We will publish changes here with a new date. Each consent is tied to the exact text of the technical notice bundled in the app (PRIVACY_POLICY.md, the full description of every network flow): if that text changes, the app asks for the consent again.

11. Privacy notices of the services

Supabase: https://supabase.com/privacy and https://supabase.com/legal/dpa · Apple: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/ · Meta Open Source (ESM Atlas): https://opensource.fb.com/legal/privacy/ · EMBL-EBI: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/data-protection/privacy-notice/embl-ebi-public-website · AlphaFold DB: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/assets/alphafold-privacy-notice.pdf · UniProt: https://www.uniprot.org/help/privacy · RCSB PDB: https://www.rcsb.org/pages/privacy-policy · Zenodo: https://about.zenodo.org/privacy-policy/ (read on 19 October 2026).