Privacy policy
No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, and apps that never phone home. This policy also covers the editions sold in the Microsoft Store, and it names the payment provider that handles card data. Here is exactly what we do and do not hold.
1. The short version
- This website has no accounts, no cookies of its own, no analytics and no advertising.
- The desktop apps work offline and do not send anything to us. There is no telemetry and no usage reporting.
- The editions sold in the Microsoft Store are the same apps and behave in exactly the same way: we receive no data from them at all.
- The only personal data we hold is what you write to us in an e-mail or an order. Card payments are handled by Waffo Pancake, our payment provider: the card data is theirs, and we neither see it nor store it.
2. Scope and who is responsible
This policy covers three things together: this website (www.hammsoft.com), the Hamm Software desktop applications downloaded from it, and the editions of those same applications published in the Microsoft Store. Where a Microsoft Store listing links to a privacy policy, this is the page it points to.
The data controller is Zhongcheng Huang, an individual (sole proprietor) trading as "Hamm Software" - we decide what is done with the personal data described here and we answer for it. We are a one-person business rather than a company, so there is no separate privacy department and no data protection officer to look for (at this size the law does not require one): every privacy question, request to see, correct or delete your data, and anything else covered by this page goes to myhama@hotmail.com, and the person who runs the business answers it personally, within 30 days at the latest. Our payment service provider, Waffo Pancake, is an independent controller of the card data it collects to process a payment; what we receive from it is limited to the order details listed in section 7.
3. This website
The pages here are static files. We do not set cookies, we do not embed third-party fonts, scripts, analytics or advertising, and we do not build visitor profiles. Like almost every web server, our hosting provider keeps standard access logs - the IP address, the date and time, the file requested and the browser identification - for security and to keep the site running; the legal basis for that is our legitimate interest in a working, abuse-free website. Those logs are used only for that purpose, they are not combined with anything else, and they are deleted after about 30 days.
4. Cookies and tracking
There is nothing here to consent to, because there is nothing that tracks you. This website uses no cookies at all - not even the "strictly necessary" kind - no local storage, no device fingerprinting, no analytics, no advertising pixels, no social plug-ins, no embedded players, no third-party fonts and no tag manager. We do not sell advertising and we have no interest in following you from one site to another.
| Type | Used here? | What it would do | Can you turn it off? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strictly necessary | No | Would keep a login or a basket alive, and this site has neither | - |
| Functional | No | Would remember a language or layout choice, and nothing is remembered | - |
| Analytics | No | Would count visits and pages, and we use no analytics tool | - |
| Marketing | No | Would show or measure advertising, and we run no advertising | - |
Because nothing is stored on your device by this site, there is no cookie banner to click and no preference centre to clear. If that ever changes - if we add something that counts downloads, for instance - we will name the tool, link to its own privacy policy, ask for your consent where the law requires it, and describe it here before it goes live. The desktop apps are the same story, and the next section covers them.
5. The desktop applications
The apps are designed to work without an internet connection. They do not create an account, they do not phone home, and they contain no analytics or advertising components. Everything they remember lives on your own PC:
- your settings, window position and preferences, in
%AppData%\<Product>; - the state of the free trial, in the same folder and in your Windows user registry;
- your licence key, stored locally when you activate it, so it can be verified offline.
None of that is transmitted to us. If you delete those folders, the app forgets them - including the stored licence.
The Windows packages we publish - the installers offered on this site and the Microsoft Store packages alike - declare only the
runFullTrust capability. They do not request internetClient, so they cannot open a network connection, and they
do not request access to your location, files, contacts, camera, microphone or notifications. The applications contain no code that
sends data anywhere.
6. The Microsoft Store editions
The Microsoft Store sells the same applications under the same names. The Store copies are built from the same source code, but with the trial, licence-key and activation screens left out, because Microsoft handles licensing for Store purchases itself. Two consequences matter for privacy:
- We receive nothing from the app. Installing, opening, using, updating or uninstalling a Store edition sends no data to us. Our licence keys are not used there and no activation request is ever made to us.
- Only Microsoft sees the purchase. Microsoft is the seller for Store transactions. Your Microsoft account, your payment method, your receipt and your order history are held by Microsoft under the Microsoft Privacy Statement. We never see your card details or your Microsoft account, and we cannot look them up or change them.
Microsoft does give developers some reporting about their products, and what we may receive is aggregate and non-identifying: how many people acquired, installed or updated the app, how many use it at country or region level, and quality reports such as crash and hang counts where Microsoft provides them. None of it contains your name, your e-mail address or your account, and we cannot use it to identify you. Ratings and reviews you leave in the Store are handled by Microsoft and appear under whatever Store profile name you chose.
If you want to see, correct or delete the purchase and account data connected with a Store order, use your own Microsoft account settings or contact Microsoft support - Microsoft, not we, hold that data. Anything you send us by e-mail is covered by sections 7 to 12 below.
7. What we hold, and why
We are not a data business. What we hold is what is needed to sell you a licence, deliver the key, answer you if something goes wrong, and satisfy the tax rules that apply to the sale. It arrives from two directions: what you send us, and what our payment provider passes back after a payment.
| What | Why we hold it | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your e-mail address | To answer you, to send the licence key, and to re-issue a key you have lost | Performance of our contract with you |
| Your name, if you give it | To address our reply and to match a payment to an order | Contract, and our legitimate interest in keeping the records straight |
| Your country | To apply the correct tax treatment and to show you the payment options available there | Contract, and our legal obligation in tax matters |
| The product you bought, and the amount | To send the right key and to know what was purchased | Contract |
| Payment status and payment reference | To confirm that the order was paid, to handle a refund or a chargeback, and to keep the accounting records we must keep | Contract, and our legal obligation in accounting and tax matters |
| What you write in a support message | To reproduce the problem, answer it and improve our help pages | Contract, and our legitimate interest in supporting what we sell |
| Server access logs (IP address, date and time, page, browser) | To keep the site running and to defend it against abuse | Our legitimate interest in a secure, working website |
Card data is deliberately not in that table. Payments are processed by Waffo Pancake, our PCI-DSS compliant payment service provider. Your full card number is entered into their systems, not ours: it does not pass through our servers, we cannot see it, and we do not store it. We do not ask for anything we do not need, we buy no lists of addresses, and we do not use your e-mail address for newsletters or advertising - we write to you about your own order, licence or question and nothing else.
Nor do we collect, or have any way of seeing: passwords or other account data (there are no accounts to hold them for), location data, contacts, calendar, photos, files, browsing history, device or advertising identifiers, or biometric or health data. Nothing on this site or in the apps involves profiling or automated decision-making, and no decision about you is ever taken by a machine.
8. How long we keep it
Retention follows from what a record is for, and the periods below are the ones we actually work to. When a period ends, the record is deleted rather than left lying about:
| Record | How long we keep it | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Order and payment records (what was bought, the amount, the payment reference, the invoice) | 7 years from the end of the tax year in which the sale was made | Deleted |
| Licence-key issuance records | As long as the order they belong to | Deleted with the order record |
| Support and other e-mail conversations | 24 months after the last message in the conversation | Deleted, unless they form part of an order record we must keep |
| Server access logs | About 30 days | Deleted automatically by the hosting provider |
You can ask us to delete a support conversation at any time and we will, apart from the parts we must keep for accounting or tax purposes - and if that applies we tell you what was kept and why. There is no account to close, so once the order and support records have served their purpose there is nothing of yours left with us. Nothing is kept "just in case".
9. Who we share it with
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not "sell" or "share" it in the meaning those words have under the California Consumer Privacy Act - no money or other valuable consideration changes hands for personal data, nothing goes to advertising networks or data brokers, and we do not hand data to anyone for cross-context behavioural advertising. We also do not rent or trade it. It goes only to:
- Waffo Pancake - the payment service provider that takes your payment, and only what is needed to process it, match it to your order and refund it if necessary. Card data stays inside their PCI-DSS compliant systems;
- our e-mail and web hosting providers, which store the messages and the server logs on our behalf and may not use them for anything else;
- Microsoft, and only in the indirect way described in section 6: for a Store purchase Microsoft is the seller and shares nothing about you with us;
- a public authority, and only if we are legally required to disclose the data, or where disclosure is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.
That is the complete list. Nobody else receives your data for their own purposes, and no data leaves these providers to be used for marketing. If we ever add a new kind of provider, section 15 says how we announce it before it starts.
10. How we protect it
Access to the support mailbox and to the order records is limited to the person who needs it to answer you - and in a one-person business that is the same person who wrote this page. Those records sit behind a strong passphrase and two-factor authentication and are reached over encrypted connections; nothing is left on a shared or unguarded machine. We keep no customer database and no card data, so the categories that cause the worst damage when they leak simply are not in our hands. If a breach ever did affect your personal data, we would tell you and the relevant supervisory authority without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and we would say what happened, what data was involved and what we are doing about it.
On your side, keep your licence key and your mailbox private, and never send a card number by e-mail: we never ask for one and our support never needs it.
11. Your choices and your rights
Write to myhama@hotmail.com from the address you used before, say what you would like us to do, and we will do it. It is free, you do not have to give a reason, and we answer within 30 days - usually within a few days. If a request is clearly unfounded or repetitive we may charge a reasonable fee or decline it, and we will explain why. Depending on where you live, these are the rights involved and what each one means here:
| Right | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| To be informed | This page: what we hold, why, for how long, and who else sees it |
| Access | A copy of the personal data we hold about you |
| Correction | We fix anything wrong or incomplete, such as a mistyped e-mail address |
| Deletion | We delete what we are not required to keep; records we must keep for tax stay, and we tell you so |
| Restriction | We pause the use of your data while a question about it is being settled |
| Portability | We hand over the data you gave us in a common, machine-readable format |
| Objection | You can object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and we stop unless we can show compelling grounds |
| Withdraw consent | Where something rested on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time |
Depending on where you live you may also be able to complain to your national or regional data-protection authority, and in California you have the right not to be discriminated against for using any of these rights. We would rather you came to us first, but you do not have to. Two limits are worth stating plainly: records we are required to keep for tax and accounting purposes cannot be deleted early, and data that Microsoft holds about a Store purchase is not ours to delete - for that, use your Microsoft account settings or Microsoft support.
12. Where your data is processed
We are a one-person business, and the services we depend on are not necessarily in your country: our e-mail and hosting providers, and our payment service provider, may process data on servers outside it, including in the United States and in other regions. Where personal data leaves the country you live in, it does not leave unprotected: we choose providers that offer recognised safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses, an adequacy decision or an equivalent mechanism; we send no more than the task in hand requires; and there are no special categories of data to transfer because we do not hold any. If you want to know which safeguard applies to your data, ask us at myhama@hotmail.com and we will tell you which provider holds it and on what basis.
13. Marketing and e-mail
We do not send marketing e-mail or newsletters, we do not sell your address, and there is no mailing list to be on or to leave. What we send are service messages about your own order, licence, refund or question - the kind you cannot opt out of while the order or the licence is live, because they are how the purchase is carried out. If we ever start sending anything promotional, it will be with your consent only, every message will carry a working one-click unsubscribe link, and this page will say so before the first one is sent.
14. Children
The products and this website are aimed at adult learners and are not directed at children. We ask that anyone who orders from us, or writes to us about an order, is at least 16 years old; we do not knowingly collect data from children below that age, and we ask you not to send us a child's name or e-mail address. We do not profile children, and we do not advertise to them. If you believe a child has sent us personal data, write to myhama@hotmail.com and we will delete it as quickly as we can. In the Microsoft Store the listing shows the age rating we set for the product in Partner Center, which is a separate Store-level setting.
15. Changes to this policy
This policy carries a version number and a date at the top of the page, and previous versions are kept in a dated log, so it is always possible to see which version applied at any moment. If something material changes - a new provider, a new purpose, a longer retention period - we announce it in plain words at least 15 days before it takes effect, by e-mail to the address we hold for you or by a dated notice on this page, and we say what changed in the same sentence in which we announce it rather than hiding it in legal language. Every version of this page since 1 October 2026 also serves as the privacy policy for the Microsoft Store editions of the apps; those sections were added on that date and did not change how the apps behave, because the apps have no data collection to change.
16. Contact
Write to myhama@hotmail.com - one address for orders, licence keys, refunds, billing questions, privacy requests and bug reports, and it reaches the person who runs the business:
- Who you are dealing with: Zhongcheng Huang, trading as "Hamm Software", a one-person business rather than a company. There is no registered office or company number to publish, and we do not publish a postal address; the e-mail address above is the channel we answer on.
- Response times: privacy requests within 30 days; support and billing questions within two business days; refund decisions within two business days. Service hours are broadly Monday to Friday, 09:00-18:00 Hong Kong time (UTC+8).
- What to include: write from the e-mail address you used before and say what you would like us to do. For a privacy request that address is what lets us find your records; for a licence question the first four characters of the key are enough - never send the whole key.
Questions about this page? Write to myhama@hotmail.com.