Privacy Policy
Upwork Reply Watcher — back to the home page
Effective 10 September 2026
Upwork Reply Watcher is a personal tool. It is used by one person — its developer — on his own Gmail mailbox, to notice replies to job applications he has sent. There are no other users, no customers and no accounts. This policy describes what the application does with the data it reads.
What Google user data is accessed
The application holds a single OAuth scope:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly. That scope permits reading mail and settings;
it does not permit sending, modifying or deleting anything.
Within that access, the application requests only:
- messages received in the owner's own mailbox from the freelance platforms he works on
(currently
upwork.comandfiverr.com), limited to the last few days; - for each such message: its identifier, sender, subject, date and plain-text body.
No other mail is requested, and no mailbox other than the owner's own is involved.
Why it is accessed
To recognise a reply to a job application the owner has sent, and to notify him about it promptly. Without this, a client's answer can sit unnoticed. That is the only purpose.
Where processing happens
Processing happens on a single private server rented and controlled by the developer (a virtual machine in Frankfurt, Germany). Messages are fetched over an encrypted connection, examined in memory, and discarded. No third-party service processes this data, and it is not sent to any analytics, advertising or model-training service.
What is stored and what is not
| Stored | Why | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Message identifiers of already-handled messages (a rolling list of at most 500) | So that the same message does not trigger a second notification | A file on the private server |
| A short record per handled message: platform, message identifier, subject line, sender category, the times it was sent, received and read, and whether a notification was sent | So the owner can see how many replies arrived and how quickly they were noticed | A log file on the private server |
Message bodies are not stored. The text of an email is read into memory to decide whether it is a reply and to compose the notification, and is not written to disk. Nothing is stored in any database accessible from the internet, and nothing is published.
Who the data is shared with
No one. The data is not sold, rented, traded, published or transferred to any third party. The only place anything leaves the server is a private notification sent to the developer's own messaging account — that is, from the owner to himself. Notifications may quote a fragment of the message so that he can see what arrived without opening his mailbox.
How long it is kept
- Message identifiers: the most recent 500; older ones are dropped automatically as new ones arrive.
- The per-message records described above: kept while the tool is in use, because they are the owner's own record of his work. They contain subject lines, not message bodies.
- Message bodies: not kept at all.
How to remove the data or revoke access
Because the only mailbox involved belongs to the developer himself, he can at any moment:
- revoke the application's access at myaccount.google.com/permissions, which immediately ends all reading;
- delete the two files described above, which removes everything the application has kept.
If anyone else believes their data has somehow been processed by this application, they may write to the contact address below and it will be located and deleted.
Limited Use
Upwork Reply Watcher's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Security
Credentials are held only in an environment file on the private server, readable solely by the account that runs the application. They are not stored in source control. Access to the server is by SSH key only. All connections to Google are over TLS.
Changes to this policy
If what the application does changes, this page is updated and the effective date above is changed before the new behaviour begins.