Holden.digital takes your privacy very seriously. We treat your personal data as confidential and obey all laws and regulations.
No personally identifiable information including your photographs is communicated to any external server.
The app, which runs on MacOS, iOS and iPadOS, reads your personal photos, albums and folders within Apple’s Photos app, folders, and/or Google Photos account. It then writes an albumdrop file to your Apple iCloud and/or Google Drive accounts. It makes no other use of your precious photos. No user identifiable data is collected or used by the application aside from what is required to do its job. The app relies on Apple’s system login security for platform security and Apple Photos permission request for access to the Photo Library. The narrowest scopes available from both Google Drive and Google Photos are used. The app requires no separate account or login information. The Apple App store manages your payment for the app and future updates of the app. The app never communicates to an external website or server for any purpose.
The web app that is used for moving an albumdrop folder to and from Google Photos is specifically designed for privacy. This web app is delivered by the albumdrop.holden.digital website. This website never sees the contents of your albumdrop file as this is 100% processed in your browser. The authentication between your browser and Google runs in a separate browser window and was designed by Google to keep your login information safe. The web app has no access to this information. Since this web app is free, no account or login information of its own is needed. No personally identifiable information including your photographs is communicated to any external website or server. The website hosting company keeps its own server logs of IP addresses and request types, which are available to holden.digital, but these are not personally identifiable.
This section describes, specifically, how Album Connect handles data obtained through Google APIs. It applies to both the Album Connect app and the Album Connect web app.
Album Connect requests four narrowly scoped permissions and accesses nothing beyond them. (1) The photos and videos you yourself select in Google’s own Photos Picker, together with their basic metadata such as filename, creation date and dimensions. (2) Permission to add photos, videos and albums to your Google Photos library; this permission grants no ability to read your library. (3) The photos, videos and albums that Album Connect itself has created in your Google Photos library, and nothing created by you or by any other app. (4) Files that Album Connect itself creates in your Google Drive, and files you explicitly open with it; it cannot see, list or read any other file in your Drive. Album Connect does not access your Google contacts, email, calendar, location history, or any other Google service, and it does not access your name, address or telephone number. Signing in additionally produces an OAuth token: a credential that authorises the access described above, and not content of any kind. Album Connect never receives your Google account’s name, email address or profile, because it does not request the permissions that would supply them. Where that token is kept, and how to remove it, are described under protection and retention below.
Google user data is used solely to carry out the transfer you have asked for, on the device in front of you. Photos you pick are packaged into an albumdrop package and written to the destination you choose. Files in your Google Drive hold that package and are read back when you or a recipient open it. Photos uploaded to your Google Photos library are read back only so that Album Connect can report how many items transferred and identify any that failed. Album Connect does not use Google user data for advertising, for profiling, for building or improving any product other than the feature you invoked, or for training artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models.
Nobody. Album Connect does not transfer, sell, rent, disclose or otherwise share Google user data with any third party. There is no Album Connect server: your data moves between your own devices and your own Google and Apple accounts, at your instruction, and never passes through us. No employee, contractor or other person at Holden.digital can read it, because we never receive it. If you choose to share an albumdrop package by link, you are sharing it with a recipient you have chosen; that link is created only when you ask for it, and you may revoke it at any time in your Google Drive.
All communication with Google is over encrypted HTTPS/TLS connections. In the app, the OAuth tokens that authorise access are stored in the operating system’s Keychain, protected by your device passcode or password; in the web app they are held in browser memory only and are discarded when the tab closes. Album Connect uses no client secret, and authenticates using PKCE, so no shared credential exists that could be stolen. Only the narrowest available scopes are requested, which limits what any compromise could reach. The web app processes your package entirely inside your own browser; its contents are never uploaded to the albumdrop.holden.digital website. Every file in a package carries a SHA-256 checksum that is verified when the package is opened, so corruption or tampering is detected.
Holden.digital retains no Google user data, because none is ever sent to us. Data exists only in the places you control, and you can remove it there at any time. The OAuth token is stored on your own device; choosing Disconnect in the app deletes it immediately, and you may also revoke Album Connect’s access at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions, which invalidates it everywhere. Files that Album Connect wrote to your Google Drive are yours: delete them in Google Drive. Photos that Album Connect added to your Google Photos library are yours: delete them in Google Photos. If you write to us through the support page, we keep that message and any attachments only for as long as is needed to answer you, and we will delete them sooner on request.
Album Connect’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.