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During the 0.81 release process, I found out that the Windows Store now requires applications to provide a privacy policy, so I had to write one in order to get 0.81 into the Store. This initially seemed like makework (especially having to do it in a hurry as a prerequisite to get a really important security fix distributed!). But after I started writing it, I found there was actually quite a lot to say. It's easy to think "PuTTY doesn't phone home to the developers, that's all, we're done". But of course it _does_ store information on your machine (host key cache, saved sessions, etc). And it does send information to servers on the network (only the ones you ask it to, but even so). And it's not 100% obvious in every case what is and isn't stored, and what a privacy- conscious individual might be revealing about themself by doing this or that thing. So I think the web page I hastily put up at the time of the 0.81 release deserves to be promoted into part of the documentation. Here's a (very lightly) copy-edited version in the form of a docs appendix. (Once this is committed and built, I expect I'll turn the privacy web page into a mirror of this docs appendix, in the same way as the website FAQ and feedback pages.)
PuTTY source code README
========================
This is the README for the source code of PuTTY, a free Windows and
Unix Telnet and SSH client.
PuTTY is built using CMake <https://cmake.org/>. To compile in the
simplest way (on any of Linux, Windows or Mac), the general method is
to run these commands in the source directory:
cmake .
cmake --build .
These commands will expect to find a usable compile toolchain on your
path. So if you're building on Windows with MSVC, you'll need to make
sure that the MSVC compiler (cl.exe) is on your path, by running one
of the 'vcvars32.bat' setup scripts provided with the tools. Then the
cmake commands above should work.
To install in the simplest way on Linux or Mac:
cmake --build . --target install
On Unix, pterm would like to be setuid or setgid, as appropriate, to
permit it to write records of user logins to /var/run/utmp and
/var/log/wtmp. (Of course it will not use this privilege for
anything else, and in particular it will drop all privileges before
starting up complex subsystems like GTK.) The cmake install step
doesn't attempt to add these privileges, so if you want user login
recording to work, you should manually ch{own,grp} and chmod the
pterm binary yourself after installation. If you don't do this,
pterm will still work, but not update the user login databases.
Documentation (in various formats including Windows Help and Unix
`man' pages) is built from the Halibut (`.but') files in the `doc'
subdirectory. If you aren't using one of our source snapshots,
you'll need to do this yourself. Halibut can be found at
<https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/>.
The PuTTY home web site is
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
If you want to send bug reports or feature requests, please read the
Feedback section of the web site before doing so. Sending one-line
reports saying `it doesn't work' will waste your time as much as
ours.
See the file LICENCE for the licence conditions.