Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 4, 2026

bHive Software makes two Mac apps, bHive and bLine. This policy covers both, and the website. The short version: the apps run on your Mac, there is no account, and we collect nothing about you or your content.

There is no server of ours that receives your data. Not your files, not your clipboard, not your searches. That is not a promise about how carefully we handle what we collect. It is that there is nothing to handle.

Both apps

No account. You never sign in or give us personal information to use either app.
No analytics or telemetry. Neither app tracks how you use it. Neither sends usage data to us or to anyone else.
No ads, and nothing sold. We do not sell, rent, or share personal information, because we do not have any.

bHive Your files

Everything happens on your Mac. bHive indexes and searches your files locally. Your files, their contents, and the search index never leave your device.
Your files stay in place. bHive reads your originals where they already live. It does not upload or copy them to any server.

What the local index contains, and how to think about backing it up, is covered in detail on Your Data.

bLine Your clipboard

bLine's job is to move what you copy between your own Macs, so unlike bHive, content does travel across a network. What matters is that it is unreadable to everyone but your Macs, and that it never rests anywhere we control.

End-to-end encrypted. Every clip is sealed on the Mac that copied it with a key derived from a secret your Macs generated between themselves, and opened only on the Macs you have added. That shared secret is kept in your macOS Keychain rather than in a file. We never hold it and could not read a clip if we did.
Nothing is stored in any cloud. Your clipboard history lives encrypted on each of your own Macs. There is no server of ours holding a copy, and no backup of it anywhere we can reach.
No relay ships with the app. On one network your Macs talk directly to each other and nothing leaves them. If you want your Macs to sync across different networks, you deploy a relay yourself, on your own free Cloudflare account. It forwards sealed bytes it has no key for and stores nothing. We do not run one for you and we are not in that path.
Passwords are skipped. Password managers mark what they copy as confidential, and bLine neither records nor sends it. Clips that look like one-time codes stay on the Mac that copied them and are forgotten after five minutes.
Text read from images stays local. bLine reads the words inside screenshots so you can search for them. That reading happens on your Mac, is stored encrypted beside your history, and is never sent anywhere — not even to your other Macs, which read their own copies.
Dictation is on-device. A dictated note is transcribed on your Mac. A Mac that cannot do it on-device is refused rather than quietly sending your voice to a server, and the audio is never written down.

Two things bLine can do that reach outward, both off until you turn them on

Website snapshots. With this on, the Mac that copies a link loads that page once, in a blank browser with no cookies and no sign-in, and keeps a small picture of it. Your other Macs never load it. Links that look single-use — password resets, sign-in links, anything carrying a token — are skipped rather than opened, because loading one can spend it. This is the only request bLine ever makes to a site that is not ours.
Remembering where a clip came from. With this on, bLine notes the page or document you copied from and shows it in the preview as a link. It reads that from the app you copied in, through macOS's Accessibility, rather than asking the app for it. The same single-use links are never stored. Nothing about it is sent to us.

Software updates

Both apps can check for updates automatically using Sparkle, a widely used open-source update framework. To do that, the app fetches a small public file listing available versions from Amazon S3.
If you accept an update, the download itself comes through bhive.software, which counts it and then redirects to the file on S3. So a firewall will show a connection to our website at that moment, and only at that moment. We count how many updates happen, per version. Nothing identifies you or your Mac.
As with any request to a website, that contact includes your device's IP address, which our hosting providers handle as a normal part of running a network. We do not use it to identify you, build a profile, or track you between sessions.
You can turn automatic update checks off in either app's settings and check by hand instead.

This website

No cookies, no third-party trackers. We do not run Google Analytics or any advertising or tracking scripts.
Anonymous download counts. When you download an app from this site, we add one to a counter, along with which app it was and the host that referred you, if your browser sent one. Never the full referring URL, which can carry personal information in its path or query. We do not store your IP address, your name, or anything that identifies you.
Server logs. Our web host may keep standard server logs, a normal part of running any website, for security and reliability. We do not sell or share them.

What we never do

We never sell, rent, or share your personal information.
We do not show ads.
We do not require an account or collect personal data to use either app.

Who we are

bHive and bLine are made by Brandon Edling, an independent developer in New Jersey, under the name bHive Software. There is no company behind it beyond that, and no investors, which is part of why it can promise what it promises: nothing about you or your content is collected, so there is nothing to sell. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Open-source software inside the apps

bHive includes a small media helper built from FFmpeg (version 8.0, licensed under the LGPL v2.1), used only to read video and audio containers macOS cannot open itself, such as MKV, WebM and AVI. It runs entirely on your Mac and never connects to anything. The unmodified source is at ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-8.0.tar.xz, and the exact build configuration is published in bHive’s repository (Frameworks/ffmpeg/configure-bhive.sh); the licence text ships in the app at Contents/Resources/ffmpeg-COPYING.LGPLv2.1.

Both apps receive updates through Sparkle (MIT), and the wordmark is set in Comfortaa (SIL Open Font License).

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email hello@bhive.software.

Changes

If we update this policy, we will change the date at the top of this page.