Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026.

This page explains what information is collected, and what is not, when you use the FracSTAT desktop application and when you browse this documentation site. FracSTAT is developed as an open-source academic research tool, and this policy is written in that spirit: to be short, plain, and honest about the very limited amount of data involved.

On this page

1. The FracSTAT Desktop Application

FracSTAT itself is a locally-run, Python-based desktop application (see the Installation Guide). It does not phone home, does not include any analytics or telemetry, and does not transmit your fracture data, project files, imported SVG/Excel content, calibrated photographs, or exported reports to FracSTAT's authors, servers, or any third party. Everything you load, digitize, or calculate is processed locally unless you yourself export or share a file. Local storage is not limited to the project folder: application preferences and the recent-project list are also stored in .fracstat_settings.json and .fracstat_projects.json in your user home directory. A project or export saved in a cloud-synchronized folder may be uploaded by your synchronization provider. Opening documentation, tutorials, or other external links launches your browser and makes requests to the destination service.

Because FracSTAT is open source (see the License page), you or your institution's IT team are always free to inspect the source code on GitHub to independently verify this.

2. This Documentation Website

The documentation's own code does not add analytics cookies, advertising trackers, or visitor fingerprinting. Hosting and embedded-content providers may receive information such as your IP address, browser type, and requested resource. Their logging, cookies, and retention practices are governed by their own policies, not by this site's source code. FracSTAT's authors do not separately collect or analyze visitor logs through this site.

Images and some fonts on this site are served from third-party content delivery networks (see Section 3); loading a page may cause your browser to make requests to those providers in the ordinary course of rendering the page.

3. Third-Party Services

This site uses third-party services for assets and embedded viewers:

  • Cloudinary — hosts the FracSTAT logo, screenshots, and other images embedded in these pages.
  • Google Fonts / cdnjs — may be used to serve web fonts or small JavaScript libraries referenced by individual pages.
  • YouTube / Google Drive — tutorial thumbnails can trigger requests before playback. Video viewers load when activated, and the PDF manual page embeds a Google Drive viewer that can load without a play-button click. These requests and any provider cookies are subject to the provider's privacy policy.
  • GitHub — the source code and issue tracker live on GitHub, subject to GitHub's own privacy policy.

FracSTAT does not add advertising-profile code to these pages. This does not guarantee that third-party embeds are cookie-free or prevent providers from processing request data under their own policies and your account or browser settings.

4. Data Retention and Deletion

Because FracSTAT's authors do not operate a database of personal visitor information, the authors do not have a visitor database to search or delete. Provider-held logs and embedded-service data described in Section 2 are subject to those providers' retention and deletion policies; this site cannot promise their retention period. If you have contacted the team directly by email (see the Contact page), that correspondence is retained only as long as reasonably needed to respond to and resolve your query.

5. Children's Privacy

FracSTAT and this documentation site are intended for structural geologists, geoscience students, and engineering professionals, and are not directed at children. No age-gating is implemented. The third-party request-data practices described above still apply when someone visits these pages.

6. Changes to This Policy

If this policy is ever updated — for example, if a future release of FracSTAT introduces an optional, explicitly opt-in feature such as crash reporting — the "Last updated" date at the top of this page will be revised and the change will be described here.

7. Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to any of the addresses listed on the Contact page, or raised as an issue on the project's GitHub repository.