Privacy Policy
Panda Contacts has no servers. Your contacts, calendar events, and email metadata move directly between your device and Google. We do not receive or store that data on our own servers or sell it. Features such as address suggestions, maps, subscriptions, and settings sync connect directly to Google or Apple as described below. On Mac, optional Raycast sharing creates a local copy only after you enable it.
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. The app processes this information on your device and connects directly to the services described below.
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 (read-only, optional). If you enable the email timeline, the app uses Gmail's read-only permission to search for mail exchanged with your contacts and reads message headers — sender, recipients, subject, and date — to show your recent correspondence. Message bodies and attachments are never read, stored, or displayed.
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.
Search indexing, duplicate detection, contact–event matching, and reminders run 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 cleared when you sign out or disconnect in the app. Deleting the app removes its sandbox on iPhone; on Mac, sign out first or remove the app's sandbox container as well.
- In your Google account. Your contacts remain in Google Contacts, which stays the source of truth.
- In your personal iCloud (settings only). App preferences — including selected calendar and contact identifiers, label names and colors, and dismissed suggestions — sync between your devices through Apple's iCloud Key-Value Store, tied to your Apple Account. These account-scoped settings are deleted from iCloud when you explicitly sign out in the app. 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.
- Optional local Raycast copy (Mac only). If you enable “Share contacts with Raycast,” the app writes a local snapshot and contact photo thumbnails for the Raycast extension to read. The snapshot includes contact names, phone numbers, email and postal addresses, websites, organizations, labels, birthdays, contact-quality indicators, and a summary of the last touchpoint. It excludes contact notes and message bodies. This sharing is off by default. Turning it off or signing out removes the exported snapshot and photos. Other software running with access to these files can also read this local copy.
- No Panda Contacts backend. Your Google user data is not sent to servers operated by us. Some features send information directly to Google or Apple, as described under “Third-party services” below.
Limited Use disclosure
Panda Contacts' use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Specifically, Google user data is used only to provide the user-facing features described above. It is never:
- sold, transferred to advertisers or data brokers, or shared for purposes unrelated to the features you use;
- 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. Google Maps Platform documents that API requests are logged with service/account identifiers and the requester's IP address, and that logged user data may be retained according to its storage and retention policies. See Google's security and compliance overview.
- Apple Maps (MapKit). To show contacts on a map, contact addresses are sent from your device to Apple's MapKit service for geocoding. Results are cached locally and cleared when you sign out.
- 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.
Gmail permission scope. Google grants the app the broader
gmail.readonly permission, but Panda Contacts only requests
message metadata and selected headers (such as From, To, Cc, Subject, and
Date). It does not request or display message bodies.
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 does not intentionally set first-party cookies and uses no third-party analytics. The hosting provider may apply operational security headers or cookies independently of the app.
Your choices and controls
- Revoke Google access at any time from myaccount.google.com/permissions. Revocation prevents the app from refreshing access. The next launch or Google request detects the revoked grant, signs the local session out, and clears its account cache.
- Disable optional features (calendar context, email timeline) in the app's settings; the corresponding permissions are no longer used.
- Stop Raycast sharing on Mac by turning off “Share contacts with Raycast” in Settings → Raycast. This removes the local export maintained by Panda Contacts; it cannot remove copies you or another app have saved elsewhere.
- Delete your local data by signing out or disconnecting inside the app. On iPhone, deleting the app also removes its sandbox. On Mac, sign out first or remove the app's sandbox container along with the app.
- Your contacts remain yours — they live in your Google account and are unaffected by removing the app.
Data retention
We do not retain your Google user data on Panda Contacts servers. Local caches and any Raycast export are cleared as described above. Google and Apple handle information sent to their services under their own retention policies. Information you choose to send us in a support email is used to respond to your request.
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. You can view and edit contacts in the app or your Google account, and clear local data as described above. Google and Apple provide controls for data handled by their services. 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 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