Colabio Privacy Policy
We build tools to empower teams, not to compromise individuals. This policy outlines exactly what telemetry our desktop and backend systems gather, how your data is handled, and your fundamental privacy rights.
1. Overview & Privacy Commitments
Colabio is designed as a hybrid time-tracking, project management, and transparency portal. In order to provide organization managers and employees with accurate insights into concentrations, focus zones, and payroll hours, we process specific usage telemetry.
Bounded Collection
Colabio only logs activity signals, window focused contexts, and screenshots when your time-tracking timer is actively running. Stopping the timer ceases all background trackers immediately.
Employee Ownership
We advocate for transparency. Employees have full access to inspect all time entries, screenshot assets, app lists, and activity percentages mapped to their profile.
2. Telemetry and Data Collection
When the time-tracker is toggled, Colabio syncs specific system triggers to calculate concentration metrics and document project hours:
Keyboard & Mouse Activity Metrics
We log whether input events occur (mouse clicks, mouse cursor displacements, and keyboard presses) during each 1-second interval. This compiles into an average "Activity Percentage" to measure focus patterns.
Focused Applications & Browsed URLs
We log the titles of active window applications and active browser tab URLs while working. We do not monitor background application operations or private system files.
Periodic Screen Captures
If configured by your organization, our background scheduler captures periodic screenshots (typically once per 10-minute block). Screenshots are stored as captured; you can review and delete your own screenshot records from the dashboard.
AI On-Task Suggestions (Advisory, Opt-In for Captures)
On eligible plans, Colabio may analyze activity metadata (application names, window titles, and visited URLs) with an AI model to check whether tracked time matches the selected task, and suggest creating a task for the actual work. Suggestions are always advisory — you accept or dismiss them, and nothing is ever created or switched automatically. Screenshots or screen recordings are only submitted to the AI model if an organization manager has explicitly enabled AI screen analysis for your profile (off by default). AI outputs are limited to a verdict and a short work description; models are instructed never to transcribe visible personal content, and no data is retained by the model provider.
Voice Typing (Optional)
The desktop app's optional Voice Typing feature records audio only while you are actively dictating — holding the hold-to-talk key, or between pressing the shortcut to start and to stop. In hold-to-talk mode the microphone is not even opened until the key has been held on its own for a moment, so taps and keyboard shortcuts never touch it. Recording is never silent: an on-screen indicator with a live waveform stays visible the entire time, with stop and cancel controls. Audio is used solely to produce your transcript, and is never stored permanently, never analyzed for monitoring purposes, and never visible to your organization. If a transcription fails, the recording is kept in memory for 20 seconds so you can retry with one keypress instead of dictating again; it is never written to disk and is discarded as soon as the retry succeeds, you start a new recording, or those 20 seconds elapse. Voice Typing is entirely separate from time tracking and works only when you invoke it.
On-device (macOS): speech is transcribed by a model running on your own Mac. The audio never leaves your computer and no outside provider is involved at any point — including translating Hindi speech into English.
Cloud (Windows and Linux, and as a macOS fallback): the recording is processed by specialist providers acting on our behalf, none of whom retain it. Your audio is sent to Deepgram for transcription. If the recording contains speech that is not English, the same audio is also sent to Amazon Transcribe so those words are not lost. The resulting text — not the audio — is then sent to Anthropic, which removes filler words and false starts, applies corrections you spoke aloud, fixes punctuation, and renders any non-English wording in English. Your meaning is preserved and nothing is invented, but the final text will read more tidily than you spoke it. None of these providers store your audio or transcript, use it to train models, or receive anything identifying your organization.
3. No-Keylogging Guarantee
We believe keyloggers are intrusive and compromise security. Colabio holds a strict zero-keystroke logging policy:
What We Log
The total count of keyboard presses and mouse events per minute to score relative focus activity levels.
What We Never Log
We never capture the content of what you type, passwords, text entries, or credit card details.
4. How the Desktop Client Interacts with Your OS
Our desktop time-tracking client (`collabio-desktop-v2`) is built using a decoupled worker-thread architecture to separate operations:
Multi-Platform Hooks
We hook into low-level OS inputs safely depending on your environment. On macOS, this leverages user-granted Accessibility APIs. On Linux, specialized Wayland and X11 bridge workers capture focused app metadata without excessive overhead.
Local Offline Buffering
If your internet connection drops, our system automatically caches all tracked active sessions, keystroke frequency graphs, and window metadata securely on your local storage drive. All buffered events synchronize immediately upon connection restoration.
5. Focus, Automation, & Suspicious App Analytics
To guarantee payroll integrity and protect honest workspace hours, Colabio executes server-side metrics engines to flag non-human activity signatures:
Automated Activity & Jiggler Detection
Our backend rules-engine parses activity logs for mechanical or simulated activity. The system executes heuristics to flag automated clicks or artificial cursor cycles:
- Consistent Activity Checks: Flags continuous zero-variance activity sequences (typical of physical jigglers or scripts).
- High Activity Checks: Flags continuous keystroke frequencies simulating human-impossible speeds.
Organization-Configured Suspicious Applications
Organization administrators can declare a specialized "Suspicious Apps" list (such as jigglers, games, unauthorized streaming tools, or key scripts). Colabio checks active window titles against this blacklist to flag metrics, helping maintain focus standards without reading internal content.
6. Advanced Encryption & Cloud Security
We employ banking-grade security architectures to guarantee that your activity signals, metadata, and screenshots are fully protected at every stage:
Encrypted in Transit (TLS 1.3)
All traffic flowing between the desktop client (`colabio-desktop`), the web application, and our API gateways is strictly encrypted in transit using industry-standard TLS 1.3 (Transport Layer Security) over secure HTTPS/WSS channels.
Encrypted at Rest (AES-256)
All core database systems and structural metrics are protected via AES-256 transparent data encryption (TDE). All screenshot media and recordings are hosted inside isolated private Amazon S3 buckets utilizing AWS-managed Server-Side Encryption (SSE-S3).
Temporal Signed URLs
Your screen capture media is never exposed publicly. Access is gated behind short-lived temporal AWS signed URLs generated dynamically on our backend after validating active session roles, preventing asset leaking.
Data Minimization
To protect personal workspaces, active application window tracking automatically strips local system home path folders (e.g. replacing local system usernames with normalized workspace indicators) prior to transmission.
Absolute Zero-Selling Commitment
Your focus metrics, logs, and screenshots are stored strictly to deliver analytics to your team. We maintain a zero-compromise guarantee: we never license, aggregate, or sell your operational time data to third-party ad networks, tracking indices, or external profiling platforms. The advertising and analytics tags on our public website (section 9) never load inside the signed-in app.
7. GDPR & Global Data Subject Rights
We align our services with leading data protection frameworks, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Users hold the following fundamental rights:
Right to Access & Portability
Request a structured export of all your time tracking, screenshot, and focus app telemetry logged in our systems at any time.
Right to Rectification
Correct or adjust manual time entry records directly from your dashboard to maintain accurate and fair hours logs.
Right to Restriction
Opt-out of specific optional tracking parameters (such as screenshots or app lists) through your organization's compliance coordinator.
8. Employee Control & Permanent Account Erasure
We empower employees with native controls to govern their workspace data:
Screenshot Deletion
If organization policies permit (configured by managers), employees can delete their screenshot records. Deleting a screenshot subtracts the corresponding 10-minute block from their active work duration.
Permanent Data Deletion
If a user deletes their profile or an organization terminates their workspace, all associated keystroke metrics, application headers, timesheets, and Amazon S3 screenshots are permanently purged from all production servers and secure S3 buckets within 30 days.
10. Error Reports & Feedback Alerts
When something breaks in Colabio (on the website, in the app or on our servers), our systems send a short technical report to a private Telegram group our engineering team uses for alerts, so we can fix it quickly. A report contains the error message and where it happened in our code, the page address without its query string, the ids of the records involved (such as your user or organization id), whether you were signed in, and your browser and operating system. Email addresses, passwords and access tokens are removed before it is sent, and screenshots are never attached.
When you submit feedback, its title, the start of its description and your user id are posted to the same group. When an organization starts a checkout, subscribes, pays or has a payment fail, its name, its plan and the amount are posted there too; card details and email addresses never are. Telegram processes these messages under its Privacy Policy.
11. Connected Calendars
Connecting a calendar is optional and is something only you can do, from My Account → Integrations. You can connect Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook by signing in with that provider and granting read-only access, or paste the private address of any iCalendar (.ics) feed. Colabio uses it for two things: to count your meeting time in your work reports, and so that quiet minutes during a meeting are not mistaken for idle time.
What we read and keep
For each timed event in a rolling window of the past five weeks and the coming week: its start and end time, its title, how many people were invited, and whether it repeats. We also keep the email address of the account you connected, so the Integrations tab can show which one it is. Attendee addresses are used only to count attendees and to leave out meetings you declined; they are not stored. All-day entries, cancelled events and entries longer than twelve hours are ignored. The copy is refreshed a few times a day.
What we never do
Access is read-only: Colabio never creates, changes, shares or deletes events. We do not read event descriptions, notes, locations, attachments, video-call links or your other calendars' sharing settings, and we never send event titles or attendees to any AI model. Your access tokens and feed addresses are stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and are used by our servers alone; they are never sent to your browser or to anyone else.
Who can see it
You see everything we keep. Your organization's managers, and the team leaders of the projects you belong to, see your meeting hours and counts; for meetings you attended in a meeting app during tracked time they also see the meeting's title and attendee count, and managers may see an estimated meeting cost based on your hourly rate. Our AI features (Pulse scoring and the manager's assistant) receive only the number and length of your meetings, never their titles. Nobody outside your organization sees any of it.
Disconnecting
Press Disconnect on the Integrations tab at any time. That deletes the stored tokens or feed address and every event we synced from that calendar, and tells the provider to revoke Colabio's access. You can also withdraw access from your Google Account's third-party connections or your Microsoft account's app permissions; the next sync then stops and the tab asks you to reconnect or disconnect.
Colabio's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements: calendar data is used only to provide the features described here, is never used for advertising, and is never sold or transferred to third parties except as needed to provide those features, to comply with the law, or as part of a merger or acquisition with notice to you.
12. Slack
An organization manager can connect your organization's Slack workspace from the dashboard's Integrations page and choose, per event, a channel and the members it covers. Colabio then posts short messages there: that a member filed a daily update (with its first lines), completed a task, asked for manual time or a correction (with the note they wrote), that an alert rule opened, and, if the manager turns it on, that a member started or stopped the timer. Each message names the member, the task or project and the time, and links back to Colabio.
What is sent
Only what the member can already see on their own dashboard, captured at the moment it happened. Slack receives the workspace's own bot token from the install; Colabio stores it encrypted (AES-256-GCM), uses it from its servers alone and never sends it to a browser. Every connection, disconnection and routing change is written to the organization's audit log.
What is never sent
Screenshots, recordings, activity levels, app and URL history, AI prompts, pay rates, calendar titles and the full text of a daily update never go to Slack. Colabio reads nothing from the workspace beyond the list of channels it may post to; it does not read messages. Timer events are off until a manager turns them on and chooses whose they are.
Disconnecting, on the same page, revokes the token, deletes the routing and stops every post at once; messages already in Slack stay there under Slack's own retention. The Slack guide lists each event and what its message contains.
13. Jira
An organization manager can connect the organization's Jira Cloud site from the dashboard's Integrations page and link Jira projects to Colabio projects. Colabio then reads the issues of those projects every 15 minutes and keeps a Colabio task for each open one, so members can track time on it. Access is read-only and limited to what the connecting manager can see in Jira; Colabio never creates, changes or comments on an issue.
What is read and kept
The Jira sites the connection covers and their project names; for issues in linked projects, the key, summary, status, priority, due date, original estimate, last update time and the assignee's name, Atlassian account id and, when their Atlassian profile shares it, email address, used to match them to a member. Atlassian's tokens are stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and used from Colabio's servers alone. Every connection, linked project and people match is written to the organization's audit log.
What is never read or sent
Issue descriptions, comments, attachments and worklogs, and anything in projects nobody linked. Nothing from Colabio is sent to Jira: no tracked time, screenshots, activity, pay or daily updates.
Unlinking a project or disconnecting, on the same page, stops the sync at once and deletes Colabio's tokens; tasks already made stay in Colabio with their tracked time. The Jira guide explains what syncs and how people are matched.
14. Chrome extension
The Colabio Timer extension for Chrome starts and stops the same server-side timer as the dashboard's timer window. It signs you in through colabio.org and keeps its own session on your computer; it never sees your password.
What it records
The task, start and stop of each timer, and whether your computer has been idle (no keyboard or mouse input) for a minute, so idle time can be held back under your organization's idle rule. If you switch on its activity setting, which asks Chrome for access to all sites, it also sends, for each minute a timer runs, in how many 15-second stretches you used the keyboard or mouse on the page you were on: a number from 0 to 4, nothing else. On Jira Cloud pages it reads the issue key in the address, to offer a timer for the matching task.
What it never records
Which keys you press, where the mouse is, the pages you visit, their content or titles, screenshots, or anything while no timer runs. Turning the activity setting off removes the site access again.
Have questions about our tracking systems?
Our engineering and compliance teams are ready to assist you.