Who this policy is from
Mote Desktop is published by Anton Vo, an individual, who decides what the application and this website do with the information described here. It covers the Mote Desktop application for Windows and the motedesktop.com website. Questions about it go to support@motedesktop.com.
Mote has no accounts. There is nothing to sign in to, so there is no profile held about you, and no way to tie a copy of Mote to a person.
What Mote stores on your PC
Mote keeps what it needs to reconnect to your Hue hardware and to restore how you left the application. All of it stays on your PC:
- Hue Bridge and Hue Play HDMI Sync Box connection details
- Application preferences, including appearance and window behavior
- Your dashboard layout and the widgets you have configured
- The automations you have set up, including selected presence devices and calendar rules
- The names of the rooms, zones, lights, and scenes your bridge reports
- When this copy of Mote started its Mote Pro trial, and when it last ran
The credentials Mote is issued when you pair with a bridge or a Sync Box are held in the Windows credential store rather than in a settings file. The trial dates are kept both in Mote's settings folder and in the credential store, so that reinstalling Mote does not start a second trial. None of this is sent to the publisher: the trial is counted on your PC, with no account and no check against a server.
Removing a saved bridge or Sync Box in Mote's settings is what clears it. Uninstalling the application may deliberately leave your preferences and credentials behind, so that reinstalling or upgrading does not silently erase a setup you spent time on. The trial dates are left behind on purpose, for the reason above. They record only when a trial began and when Mote last ran, and they can be removed like any other entry in Windows Credential Manager. If you want everything else gone, remove the saved bridge and your widgets inside Mote first.
What travels on your local network
Control is direct. When you change a light, the command goes from your PC to your Hue Bridge or Sync Box across your own network, and the state Mote shows you comes back the same way. It is not relayed through the publisher, and it does not need an internet connection.
Anything else on your network that can already reach your bridge sees that traffic the way it would from any other Hue client. Mote does not open your bridge to the internet.
PC Sync, screen capture, and audio
PC Sync follows what is on your display or coming out of your speakers. To do that it reads captured display frames or the system-audio loopback while sync is running, and reduces them to the color and brightness values sent to your entertainment area.
That reduction happens on your PC. Captured pixels and audio are not written to disk, not kept past the frame they came from, and not uploaded anywhere. What leaves your PC is lighting output — the same kind of instruction any other Hue command carries.
Automations, the microphone, and the camera
The on-air light, a Mote Pro automation, changes your lights while an app is using your microphone or camera. To know when that is, Mote reads the record Windows keeps of which apps are using them — the same record behind the microphone and camera indicators in the taskbar. It learns an app's name and whether it is capturing, nothing more. Mote never opens your microphone or camera and never receives any audio or video.
The away automation reacts to this PC locking, unlocking, sleeping, and waking. Both run only on your PC and send nothing anywhere. The one thing either keeps is what you choose: apps you tell the on-air light to ignore are saved with your automation settings.
If you set up presence, Mote looks for devices on your home network and saves the names, network addresses, and device identifiers you select. It checks for those devices while Mote is running to decide whether someone is home. These checks stay on your local network; Mote does not send the device list to the publisher.
If you connect a calendar, Mote requests the iCal address you provide from its calendar provider over HTTPS. That provider receives the request from your PC and may see your IP address. Mote keeps the address in the Windows credential store and the connection name and rules in local settings. It reads event details to match your rules but does not save event content or send it to the publisher.
When Mote reaches the internet
Mote may contact Signify's Hue discovery service at discovery.meethue.com when it cannot find a bridge on your local network. That request comes from your PC, so Signify receives your IP address and returns the bridges seen on your connection. Signify's own privacy terms cover what they do with it.
Opening a website, privacy, terms, support, or release-note link from inside Mote hands the address to your default browser; nothing about the visit comes back to the application. Updates are delivered by the Microsoft Store, not by Mote. Mote asks the Microsoft Store whether this copy owns Mote Pro and whether an update is waiting; those questions go to Microsoft, not to the publisher.
What Mote does not do
The application has no Mote accounts, no advertising, no automatic analytics, no automatic crash uploads, and no session replay. Nothing is uploaded unless you fill in the feedback form or open a diagnostics report and press Send. Mote does not send the publisher your Hue names, bridge or Sync Box addresses, credentials, screenshots, captured frames, audio, clipboard contents, or file paths.
Nothing about your lighting or your PC is sold, rented, or handed to advertisers or data brokers. There is nothing collected to sell.
This website
motedesktop.com is a static site hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Delivering and protecting it means Cloudflare processes the ordinary details of each request — IP address, approximate location, browser, and the page asked for — as the site's hosting provider.
Visits are measured with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views so the publisher can tell whether the site does its job. It records no custom events, so it cannot see which links you follow. It sets no cookies, stores no identifier on your device, and builds no profile of you across sites or visits. The site sets no cookies of its own either, which is why it never asks you to accept any.
The Microsoft Store
Mote Desktop is distributed through the Microsoft Store. Your Store account, the download, and a Mote Pro purchase are handled by Microsoft under the Microsoft privacy statement. The publisher never sees your payment details.
Microsoft gives the publisher aggregated reports about the listing: install and acquisition counts, ratings, reliability data, and the reviews people choose to leave. Individual visitors cannot be picked out of the aggregate figures. A review shows whatever nickname you have set in the Store, because you chose to publish it there.
Links from this site to the Store carry a short campaign tag naming the button you used — the header, the hero, the footer, the feature comparison, or the setup guide. It identifies the link, not you, and it reaches the publisher only inside those same aggregated reports.
Feedback you send from the app
Mote has a feedback form in its title bar and under Settings. It sends nothing until you press Send. When you do, your message is delivered to a Cloudflare Worker on this domain and stored in a Cloudflare D1 database in the European Union, together with the application version, the platform, the release channel, and the time. You get back a short reference such as f_abc123 so you can quote the report later.
A report can also carry diagnostics: when an error screen offers Send diagnostics, and when you leave Include diagnostics ticked in the feedback form. Diagnostics are a short technical summary of what Mote tried recently and how each step ended — for example, that a search of your network found no bridge after three seconds — along with facts about your PC's network setup: whether the network is marked public or private, whether Windows Firewall allows or blocks Mote, whether a VPN is active, whether your PC and the device Mote was reaching are on the same subnet, and the Windows version. They also say which plan Mote is on: Free, the trial, an ended trial, or Mote Pro. They are made of fixed codes, counts, and yes-or-no answers; they never contain names, addresses, identifiers, or credentials, and the hosted endpoint refuses any that do. Mote keeps them only in memory while it runs and sends them only with a report you send. You can expand the form to read exactly what will be sent first.
Before your message leaves your PC, Mote removes text that looks like an email address, a phone number, an IP or bridge address, a Hue resource identifier, a credential, or a Windows file path, and replaces each with a placeholder. The form says so, and the hosted endpoint repeats the same pass on arrival. It is a safety net rather than a guarantee: please still leave personal details out of the message.
The email field is optional and empty by default. Leave it blank and no address is sent or stored. Fill it in and it is attached to that one report, used only to answer you or to tell you what happened to it, and never used for a newsletter, for product announcements, for analytics, or to recognise you across reports. It is deleted ninety days after the report is resolved, or after twelve months, whichever comes first, and the message text is kept without it. Ask for it to be deleted sooner and it will be.
No account, device identifier, or installation identifier is sent. Your IP address is not stored: it is combined with a daily-rotating secret and hashed to count submissions per connection, and those counters expire on their own. Feedback is private and is not published anywhere.
Email you send to support
If you email support@motedesktop.com, the publisher receives your address, your message, and anything you attach, and uses them only to answer you, to fix what you reported, and to meet legal obligations. The mailbox for motedesktop.com is hosted by Domeneshop, a Norwegian domain and email provider.
Your email is kept until the thing you reported is resolved and for ninety days after that, or for at most twelve months with no further activity — whichever comes first — and is then deleted. Ask for it to be deleted sooner and it will be. Please do not send Hue application keys, entertainment credentials, Sync Box tokens, bridge addresses, captured PC Sync content, or unrelated personal information; support does not need them.
Children
Mote Desktop controls lighting hardware and is not directed at children. The publisher does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, and there is no account, profile, or messaging feature through which a child could supply any.
Your rights
Because Mote holds nothing about you beyond the email you choose to send, most requests resolve quickly. Write to support@motedesktop.com to ask for a copy of your support correspondence, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted before the retention period is up.
Depending on where you live you may also have a statutory right to object to or restrict how that correspondence is used, to receive it in a portable form, and to complain to your national data protection authority. Anything Mote stored on your own PC is already yours: it is in your hands, not the publisher's.
Changes to this policy
This page carries the date its current wording took effect. If what Mote or this site does with information changes, the wording and that date change with it, and a material change is called out in the application's release notes rather than left for you to notice. The version published here is always the one in force.
Questions, corrections, and requests all go to support@motedesktop.com.