This policy covers the ANLINK iPhone and iPad app and the ANLINK Windows agent. The AssetNode privacy policy covers the rest of our products and this website.

1. The short version

ANLINK has no accounts, no sign-up and no login. We do not collect, receive or store any personal information about you. There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party code of any kind in the app.

Everything ANLINK holds about your computers lives on your own device and on your own machines. We never receive it, and when ANLINK connects your phone to a PC over the internet, our relay carries sealed traffic it cannot read.

There are two different questions in a policy like this, and it is worth keeping them apart. What reaches us is nothing: sections 6 and 7 cover that. What the software can do on your own computers is a great deal — that is what you installed it for — and sections 4 and 5 set it out in full. Encryption keeps other people out of your session. It does not make the agent less capable, so we list what the agent can do rather than implying it cannot.

2. Data stored on your device

ANLINK keeps the following on your iPhone or iPad, in a local file encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key held in the iOS Keychain:

The PCs you have paired — name, network address and port, group, favourite flag, that PC's identity public key and the fingerprint of its TLS certificate, its hardware (MAC) address and wake address where ANLINK has learned them, its relay address, its agent version, and when it was paired and last seen.
An activity log of the commands you have sent, capped at the most recent 500.
The alerts your PCs have raised, and any group names you have made up.
A short rolling window of the statistics your PCs report, kept so the dashboard can draw its graphs — about two hours per PC.

Three things sit outside that encrypted file. App settings — whether the app lock is on, your wake and alert preferences, and whether the Network tab may identify your connection automatically — are stored as ordinary iOS preferences. Files you download from a PC are written into the app's own cache as ordinary files, so that the iOS share sheet can reach them; a copy you then save elsewhere is outside ANLINK's control. And your speed test results are kept in a plain file of their own — the most recent 50, so the Speed tab can show a history — which you can thin out one result at a time or clear entirely from the tab itself.

This device's own identity key is held in the iOS Keychain. On any device with a Secure Enclave the private key is generated inside it and cannot be extracted — not by ANLINK and not by anything else.

None of this is transmitted to us. Settings → Erase all ANLINK data deletes the encrypted store and its key, the activity log, alerts, group names, cached downloads and this phone's identity key. Deleting the app removes its data; if you want the Keychain entries gone too, erase from within the app first.

3. Device permissions and why

Local network. ANLINK looks for the ANLINK agent on your home network so it can find your PCs and talk to them directly. The app's Network tab also uses the local network: when you start a scan it probes each address on the network you are connected to, lists the devices that answer, and where it can name them from their hostname, the services they advertise over Bonjour, or the manufacturer prefix of their hardware address. Ping, traceroute, DNS lookup and port scan work the same way — they run from your phone, to a destination you choose. None of what these tools find is uploaded, stored off your phone, or reported to us. It is shown to you and discarded when you leave the screen.
Camera. Used only to read the pairing code your PC displays. Nothing is recorded, saved or transmitted; the camera view exists purely to decode that code and closes as soon as it has.
Face ID / Touch ID. Used to unlock the app, and to confirm before any command that could disrupt a PC or act on the session someone is signed in to. This is handled entirely by iOS — ANLINK is told only whether the check succeeded, and never sees your biometric data. It is a guard on your phone; the PC does not rely on it, and decides what your phone may do from its own permission list.
Notifications. ANLINK asks to send notifications so a PC can tell you when something needs attention — a processor running hot, a drive filling up or wearing out, a battery running low, an update waiting on a restart, or a drive reporting that it is failing. The text is composed by your own PC and shown on your device, and ANLINK sets an app badge. No push service is involved and we never see them: they travel over the same connection as everything else, directly on your network or sealed through the relay, which cannot read them either. That also sets their limit — they arrive while the app is running; a phone that is locked or closed cannot be woken without a push service, which ANLINK does not have yet. You can turn alerts off in Settings.

4. What the agent can see and do on your PCs

The ANLINK Windows agent runs on your own computer, and everything below stays between that PC and the phones you have paired with it. We receive none of it.

What it reports. Processor, memory, storage and network use, temperatures, fan speeds, battery, uptime, drive health and hardware inventory. It also reports a snapshot of the desktop, sent every couple of seconds for as long as a paired phone is connected: whether anyone is signed in and under what username, how long the machine has been idle, the name and window title of the application in the foreground, whether a window is filling a monitor, how many monitors there are and the resolution of the main one, the current volume, and whether the webcam or microphone is in use. That is more than hardware statistics and we would rather say so plainly than file it under "and similar". It is what makes the app able to tell you the PC is busy rather than merely on.

What a phone can do. Every command is checked against a permission list held on the PC itself, editable only by someone sitting at that PC, under Paired devices in the tray app. Granted when you pair, because each of these is undone by walking over to the machine: sleep, hibernate, restart, force restart, shut down, lock, log off and cancel a pending shutdown; wake, including asking another paired PC on the same network to send the wake packet; play, pause, skip and stop media, and set or mute the volume.

Off until someone at that PC turns them on, one phone at a time: browsing and downloading shared files (section 5); listing running processes and Windows services; ending a process or starting and stopping a service; putting text on the PC's clipboard; opening an http or https address in its browser; reading the PC's network detail — its adapters, their addressing and DNS servers, and its Wi-Fi connection down to the network name; measuring the speed of the local network between that PC and your phone with randomly generated data; reading the Windows event log — the System and Application logs only, and the Security log is unreachable by design; the crash and reliability history — how each boot ended, the crashes and what they blamed, Windows' own stability score, what was installed or updated recently, and the crash dumps on disk, listed by name and size only, because a dump is an image of what was in memory when the machine died and its contents never leave the PC; and starting a program on the signed-in desktop — or listing what is installed, the Start Menu's own shortcuts, so a phone can pick an app by name instead of typing a path. That last one is running code of the caller's choosing on your PC, which is exactly why it is off by default, granted separately, and written in full to that PC's own log.

ANLINK cannot read your PC's clipboard — there is no command that returns it — and cannot see your screen: there is no screen capture or remote desktop in the product.

What the PC sends out. Three things leave your PC by default, and each can be switched off:

If a relay is configured — and the Windows installer configures ours by default — the agent holds an outbound connection to relay.assetnode.net so your phone can reach it from away, with a keepalive roughly every minute. Turn it off in the tray under Remote access.
The agent asks api.ipify.org, a third-party service, for your home's public IP address every fifteen minutes, and reports it to your paired phones so the app can tell you where the machine is. That request goes to them, not to us. Set ANLINK_PUBLIC_IP=0 to stop it.
The tray app checks whether a newer version exists by fetching a small file from relay.assetnode.net, at most once every twenty hours and when you open the tray menu, sending the installed version in the request. An ANLINK tray you never open never asks. It can be disabled.

The agent also announces itself on your local network so phones can find it without you typing an address, and keeps its own local log of the commands it has carried out, which stays on that PC and is the record that counts.

It also keeps a history on the PC itself: the dashboard's numbers — processor, memory, temperatures, network and disk — rolled up over the last hour, day and week, and a record of play sessions: when one application holds the screen, full-screen, for five minutes, that is recorded with its duration, at most 500 sessions and none older than thirty days. Your phone's Performance screen asks for these when you open it. They travel nowhere else.

5. Browsing and downloading files

ANLINK can browse folders on a PC and copy files from them to your phone. It ships switched off, and three separate things must all be true before a phone can read a single byte:

Someone at the PC has shared a folder, under Shared folders in the tray app. Nothing is shared by a fresh install, and an update never adds one.
That phone has been granted file access on that PC. It is not granted when you pair. It stays off until someone at the PC turns it on for that device, and it is turned off in the same place.
The path is inside a shared folder. The PC resolves every path it is given, follows links and junctions to the real file first, and refuses anything landing outside. Hidden and system entries are never listed.

It is read-only. The file feature has no upload, write, rename, move or delete — there is no command in it that changes a file on your PC.

The bytes never touch anything of ours. A download runs as a direct request from your phone to the PC, over the same pinned connection your commands use. It is not offered at all when your phone is reaching that PC through our relay: ANLINK hides the file browser, and the PC refuses to issue a download. Each download is authorised by a short-lived token naming one already-resolved file, valid for two minutes and spent once the file has been sent, so an interrupted transfer can resume but a token that leaks afterwards is worth nothing.

A file you download is copied onto your phone, into the app's cache — see section 2. The PC keeps a record of which device asked for which file.

6. Connecting from outside your home

When your phone and your PC are on the same network, they talk to each other directly and that traffic never touches our relay. Separately from where your phone is, the PC itself keeps the outbound connection described in section 4 whenever a relay is configured.

When you are elsewhere, ANLINK routes the connection through a relay we operate at relay.assetnode.net.

The relay is deliberately blind. Your phone and your PC establish their own encryption keys with each other, and the relay is never given them. It moves sealed traffic between the two ends of a connection and cannot read it, alter it, or replay any part of it: every message is sealed with a counter that both ends check, so anything removed, repeated or reordered ends the session rather than being accepted.

What the relay does handle:

A routing identifier for each PC, derived from that PC's own public key. It is how the relay knows which two connections to join together. It is not tied to a name or an account — ANLINK has neither — but it is a permanent identifier for that PC, and the relay necessarily sees it alongside the IP address the PC connects from.
Connection records. The relay logs a line when a PC connects and when it disconnects, and its web server logs a line for each request, which includes each phone session by routing identifier. These are operational logs, used to keep the service running and for nothing else, and they are rotated rather than archived.
The list of currently connected PCs is held in memory only. It is not written to a database and does not survive a restart of the service.

Traffic to the relay passes through Cloudflare, which provides our network connectivity and, in the ordinary course of delivering that traffic, processes connection metadata such as IP addresses. See Cloudflare's privacy policy. The contents of your session remain encrypted end to end and are not readable by Cloudflare or by us.

You are not required to use our relay, but you should know that the Windows installer enables it by default. In the tray app under Remote access you can point a PC at a different relay or turn it off entirely, in which case that PC is reachable only on your local network. That is a decision made at the PC, not from your phone.

7. What we never do

We do not collect analytics or usage statistics.
We do not use tracking, advertising identifiers or cookies in the app.
We do not include any third-party SDKs, frameworks or services in the iPhone app. The Windows agent uses open-source libraries to read hardware sensors, announce itself on your network and draw the pairing code; none of them contacts a server of its own. The one third-party service the agent talks to is the public-IP lookup named in section 4.
Parts of the app's Network tab reach a server we chose, and this is where that is written down in full. When you open the Network tab — and, on a PC that has granted it, that PC's network page — and when a speed test you started finishes, the app works out the public address in use and asks the internet registry that holds it who it belongs to, which is how the app can name your ISP or mobile carrier. Working out the address asks your own router, which involves no outside server at all, and a small request also goes to a STUN server (stun.cloudflare.com), once per address family on networks that have both — comparing the router's answer with the outside view is how the tab spots a VPN or a double NAT, and on mobile data, where there is no router to ask, the STUN server is the only one that can answer. The registry lookup goes through IANA's public directory at data.iana.org and is answered by ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC or AFRINIC. Each answer is remembered so the question is asked once per address, the screen always says which server answered, and Settings → Look up connection details automatically turns the automatic part off, after which it runs only when you tap it. WHOIS asks the same registries about an address you type, only when you tap it; traceroute can, when you tap “Identify networks”, ask them who runs the routers on a path it has just traced. None of this sends anything about you, your devices or your network beyond the address being asked about. One narrow addition: when the registry answers that the address's block is assigned out of a larger one — the business-line case, where the block is registered to the company rather than the ISP — the app asks the same registry one follow-up question about that larger block, because the larger block's holder is the provider the screen is trying to name. The connection card, a finished speed test, a PC's network page and the WHOIS tool do this; traceroute's hop labels do not. Nothing beyond the two block ranges is sent, and only to the one registry that already answered.
The app's Speed tab reaches one more server we chose, and only when you tap Start — a speed test never runs on its own. It measures your connection against the nearest Cloudflare server (speed.cloudflare.com) by downloading and uploading randomly generated data, made up on the spot to be timed and then thrown away; none of it says anything about you, your devices or your network. Cloudflare refuses to answer some networks — on some mobile carriers, many customers share one address, and Cloudflare sometimes declines automated requests from an address it distrusts. On those networks the test falls back to our own relay server (relay.assetnode.net, the same relay described in section 6), says so on screen, runs at its smaller size, and labels the result as measured against our server; you can also pick the relay directly from the tab's server list. The relay receives the same randomly generated data and nothing else, and the only records it keeps are the ordinary web log already described in section 6 and a short-lived tally per connecting address — held only in memory to enforce the test's size caps, never written down, and gone when the service restarts. The tab can also measure the local network between your phone and one of your paired PCs instead of the internet: the same randomly generated data then travels directly between your phone and that PC, stays on your own network, runs only while the two are connected to the same network, and needs its own permission granted at that PC — we see none of it, and those runs are not kept in the history. Your internet results stay on your phone (section 2), and the ISP named on a result comes from the registry lookup described above, not from the test server.
The other tools go wherever you point them, which is the whole point of them. Ping, traceroute and port scan contact the host you type. DNS lookup sends the name you typed to the resolver you pick — your own router by default, with one-tap presets for Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8) and Quad9 (9.9.9.9), or any address you enter. Those are ordinary internet services with their own privacy policies, and choosing one is your decision, not something the app does quietly in the background.
We do not sell, rent or share data with anyone — there is nothing to sell.
We cannot read your files, your screen or the contents of your PCs. Traffic between your phone and your PC is sealed end to end and we are never given the keys, and file transfers do not pass through us at all. That is a statement about us. What the agent itself can do on your own PC, when you tell it to, is set out in sections 4 and 5.

8. Support requests

If you contact us for help, we receive whatever you choose to put in that message — typically your email address and a description of the problem. We use it to answer you and for nothing else. Beta testers may also be asked to send a diagnostic log; those are only ever sent by you, deliberately, and never collected automatically. If you install a beta through TestFlight, Apple provides us with the crash reports and any feedback you submit through TestFlight itself, under Apple's privacy policy.

9. Children

ANLINK is a tool for managing your own computers and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age.

10. Your rights

Because we hold no personal data about you, there is generally nothing for us to disclose, correct or delete. If you have contacted our support and want that correspondence removed, email [email protected] and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new date. Material changes affecting how ANLINK handles your data will also be noted in the app's release notes.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about how ANLINK handles anything not covered here? Email [email protected].

ANLINK Privacy Policy