Privacy
What Shunt knows about you
Shunt decides which browser opens a link. That means every link you click passes through it. This page says exactly where that information goes, which is almost nowhere.
Who operates Shunt
Shunt is made by Nia D Pham, a sole proprietorship based in Vietnam. There is no company behind it and no other staff. Questions about this page go to support@shuntapp.com, which reaches the same person who writes the code.
What stays on your Mac
All of the following is written to your own disk. Shunt itself never transmits it; the only way any of it leaves your Mac is the optional Assistant described below, and only when you use it:
| What | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Your routing rules | ~/Library/Application Support/com.niafam.Shunt/rules.json, a plain text file you can read and edit |
| Recent links, so the app can explain a routing decision | The same folder, on your disk only |
| The diagnostics log | ~/Library/Logs/Shunt/, and you can switch it off and delete it in Settings |
| Which browsers and profiles you have | Read from your disk each launch, never recorded off the machine |
| Your preferences and your licence record | The standard macOS defaults system for this app, under com.niafam.Shunt |
| Copies of another app’s settings file, kept before Shunt changes it for you | ~/Library/Application Support/com.niafam.Shunt/Backups/ |
No link you open, no domain you visit and no browsing history leaves your Mac. Profile names leave it only through the Assistant, below. There is no analytics SDK in the app, no crash reporter, no usage counter and no account to sign in to.
The optional Assistant
The Assistant is off until you turn it on in Settings, Assistant. It can run in one of two ways, and you choose which.
- Apple Intelligence. The model runs on your Mac. Nothing you type leaves it.
- An AI command-line tool you already use, such as Claude Code. Shunt runs that tool on your Mac, under your own account with its provider, and the provider receives what Shunt passes to it. When you ask for a rule, that is your description, the names of your browsers and profiles, and your existing rules. When you ask Shunt to send another app’s links to Shunt, that is the app’s name and version and the layout of its settings files, with every value replaced by a placeholder. The provider handles that data under its own terms with you; it is not sent to us and we never see it.
Shunt shows which tool it will use before anything is sent, and it changes another app’s settings only after you confirm the exact change. It saves a copy of that file first, and Undo puts it back.
The one request Shunt makes
Apart from the licence requests described further down and the optional Assistant above, Shunt makes one kind of network request of its own. At most once a day it fetches https://shuntapp.com/updates.json, a small static file, and compares the version listed there against the version you are running. If a newer build exists the app tells you and offers to open the download page. It never installs anything by itself.
That request carries no data about you beyond what any web request unavoidably carries: your IP address and the standard user agent string. shuntapp.com is served by Cloudflare, so Cloudflare handles the request and keeps its own short-lived server logs under its policy. Nothing is added to that request to identify you or your installation.
You can switch it off. Settings, General, Updates, "Check for updates automatically". With that unchecked, Shunt makes no update requests at all. If you have entered a licence key it still contacts Polar as described below. You would then need to check shuntapp.com yourself for new versions.
What happens when you buy a licence
Payment is handled entirely by Polar, which acts as the Merchant of Record for this sale. The purchase takes place on Polar's own checkout page, not on shuntapp.com, and no payment details ever reach this site or the app.
Polar receives and retains what a payment processor needs: your email address, your payment method details, your country for tax purposes, and the transaction record. Polar issues your licence key and can email it to you. Their handling of that data is governed by Polar's privacy policy, which you should read before buying.
What reaches the operator of Shunt from that transaction is your email address, your licence key and the order record, visible in the Polar dashboard. That is used to support you and to honour refunds, and for nothing else. It is never sold, never passed to an advertising network and never used to send marketing you did not ask for.
What the app sends to Polar
Shunt talks to Polar only once you enter a licence key. Activating sends the key, Shunt's own account identifier at Polar and this Mac's model identifier, such as Mac15,3, never its name. About once a week Shunt checks the key again, sending the key and the activation it received. Removing the licence from a Mac sends the same two values once. None of these requests carries anything about your links, your browsers or your rules. During the 14-day trial and after it, without a key, Shunt makes no request to Polar at all.
This website
shuntapp.com is static HTML served by Cloudflare. It loads no third-party font and, until you accept the banner, no measurement script. The graphics you see are drawn in your own browser. Cloudflare keeps standard server logs for the requests it serves.
The site asks once whether it may count your visit with Google Analytics. Until you accept, no analytics script is loaded and no cookie is set. If you accept, Google Analytics sets two cookies and records the pages you view, how you arrived (a search, a link, an ad), your approximate location derived from your IP address, and your browser and device type. Google signals and ad personalisation are off, so the visit is not joined to a Google account or used for advertising profiles. We see only aggregate reports. Google processes that data under Google's privacy policy.
The same answer also turns on the OpenAI Measurement Pixel, which lets us see whether an ad shown in ChatGPT led to a visit, a download or a purchase. It reports when you view the pricing page, click Buy or Download, or land on the thank-you page after paying, together with the page address and two cookies that hold the ad reference and a random browser identifier. It never receives your name, email address or payment details. OpenAI processes that data under its Conversion Terms and privacy policy. The cookies, their lifetimes and the button to change your answer are on the cookie page.
None of this touches the app. Shunt on your Mac contains no analytics and never reports what you do on this site or anywhere else.
Email sent to us
Mail to any address at shuntapp.com is forwarded by Cloudflare Email Routing to a personal mailbox. Cloudflare processes the message in transit; Google holds it at rest as the mailbox provider. Support mail is kept as long as it is useful for supporting you, and you can ask for a thread to be deleted.
Your rights
You can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Write to support@shuntapp.com. Requests are answered by the one person who runs this, normally within a few days. Payment and tax records that law requires to be kept are the one exception to deletion; everything else can go.
Because the app has no account system, there is no profile to delete on our side. To remove everything Shunt stored on your Mac, first remove your licence in Settings, Licence, so the activation is released, then delete the app, the folder ~/Library/Application Support/com.niafam.Shunt, the folder ~/Library/Logs/Shunt and the preferences file ~/Library/Preferences/com.niafam.Shunt.plist.
Changes to this page
The date at the top changes when the text does. A change that widens what is collected will be stated plainly here and in the release notes of the version that introduces it, never slipped in quietly.