Last updated 7 September 2026
Bottleneck is a trading name of [REGISTERED ENTITY NAME], registered at [REGISTERED ADDRESS], which is the data controller for anything described here. It is short because the product genuinely does very little with your data.
Bottleneck does not send us anything about your computer. Ever.
There is no account, no telemetry, no crash reporting and no code path that transmits a scan
result. Scans are written to your own disk — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Bottleneck\history,
or beside the executable in portable mode — and stay there until you delete them.
The application makes exactly one kind of outbound request: a download of the reference dataset of expected hardware performance. That request carries nothing about your machine — no hardware details, no results, no licence key, no identifier of any kind. It is an ordinary file download, it can be switched off in Settings, and the application works identically without it.
Your licence key is verified on your own machine against a public key compiled into the application. There is no activation server, so there is nothing to phone home to.
Scan files record the machine’s own network configuration — IP address, subnet, gateway and DNS suffix. On a single machine that file never leaves your disk. In an estate deployment the files are written to a shared folder you choose, so treat that folder as inventory data: it describes your network layout. Nothing is sent anywhere either way.
No analytics, no advertising trackers and no cookies of our own. We do not build a profile of visitors.
When you open the checkout, Paddle’s script loads and Paddle sets what it needs to process the transaction and prevent fraud. That is Paddle’s processing under their privacy policy, not ours.
Purchases are handled by Paddle.com Market Ltd as merchant of record. Paddle collects your payment details and billing information; we never see your card number.
What reaches us is what we need to issue and support a licence:
Our lawful basis is performance of a contract: without an email address we cannot deliver what you paid for. We keep these records for as long as the licence is valid and for seven years afterwards, which is the period tax law generally requires for transaction records.
If you buy a renewal, you also send us your existing licence key so we can verify it. It is used for that check and to issue the replacement, and is not retained beyond your order record.
We keep the correspondence so we can follow up, and delete it when it is no longer useful. If you send an exported report, note that reports describe your hardware and may include your machine’s network configuration — but never your licence key. Send only what helps.
Paddle, as merchant of record. Our email provider, to deliver your key. That is the whole list. We do not sell data, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it. Deleting your record does not revoke your licence — the key works offline and is unaffected — but it does mean we can no longer reissue it if you lose it, so we will say so before we act.
Email sales@bottleneckonline.com. If you are unhappy with how we respond you can complain to [SUPERVISORY AUTHORITY].
If we ever add anything that collects data — analytics, crash reporting, the opt-in results service the file format leaves room for — we will update this page before it ships, not after, and it will be opt-in.