PCWattVault — Privacy Policy
Last updated: September 2026 · Publisher: tmnetworks
PCWattVault is local-first by design. This page is the complete inventory of the data the app touches.
What the app stores — on your PC only
| Data | Purpose | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware sensor readings (power, temperature, load, …) | live display; power readings are integrated into energy | memory only (live); energy aggregates on disk |
| Energy (Wh) and cost per hour, per component category | history charts, totals, forecasts | the app's private data folder on your PC |
| Settings (tariffs, currency, power model, behaviour, language) | app configuration | same folder |
| Power per app history (Pro, optional) | each app's energy and cost per day, by process name (for example “firefox”), for the Apps page; hidden apps are never recorded; can be switched off or cleared | same folder |
| Learnt idle draw per component | the baseline that power per app is shared above: watts and timestamps only, no app names | same folder |
| Founder marker | the date you first ran the app, so your early-adopter status survives a reinstall | %USERPROFILE%\.pcwattvault\founder.json — outside the app's folder on purpose, so an uninstall does not remove it; delete it by hand if you want no trace |
| Session summaries (Pro, optional) | named cost recordings you start and stop | same folder |
| License receipt (Pro, optional) | offline validation of a purchased license | same folder |
| Smart-plug credentials (Pro, optional) | TP-Link account login, used only for the local-network handshake with your Tapo plug | same folder, encrypted with Windows DPAPI |
Raw per-second sensor samples are not stored — only hourly aggregates, and with power per app, daily totals per app. Nobody can reconstruct your minute-by-minute activity from the history files. Demo-mode data is never written to disk.
The power-per-app view reads Windows' own per-process CPU and GPU time counters, locally; no other process is opened or read, and nothing about which apps ran is sent anywhere. The last 24 hours of per-app data behind the live chart's tooltip live in memory only.
What the app sends — essentially nothing
- No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts, no cloud sync. The app's interface cannot make network requests at all (it is locked down with a Content Security Policy of
connect-src 'none'). - The app talks to the local LibreHardwareMonitor web server only if you configure that source — a connection inside your own machine.
- With the Pro smart-plug feature enabled, the app talks to your plug's IP address on your own network. The Tapo protocol authenticates locally with your TP-Link account credentials; PCWattVault never sends them to the internet, never transmits them off your machine, and stores them only in encrypted form. "Clear credentials" in Settings deletes them immediately.
- When a Pro license is activated, its key is validated against the commerce provider's API — the one internet call the app can make, at most every 14 days. No usage data accompanies it.
Your control
- About → Open data folder shows you everything the app has stored, as human-readable JSON files.
- Copy the folder to back your history up; delete it to erase everything.
- Hide on an app's row on the Apps page keeps that app out of the history from then on, and removes its name from everything already saved.
- Settings → Power per app switches the app history off, or erases it with Clear app history; your total consumption history is not touched.
- As with every Microsoft Store app, Windows removes the app's data when you uninstall it — except the founder marker, which lives outside the app's folder on purpose. Delete
%USERPROFILE%\.pcwattvault\founder.jsonby hand if you want no trace. Copy the data folder first if you want to keep your history — putting it back later restores everything.
Summary for the Microsoft Store listing
- Data collected: none.
- Data transmitted off the device: none (optional Pro license activation validates a key against the license server; no personal or usage data is included).
Contact
Questions about this policy: [email protected] (tmnetworks).