What leaves your computer, and when?
Nothing leaves your computer until you select specific errors and press Analyse. At that moment, exactly three fields are sent for each selected error: its Event ID, the name of the source that logged it, and the error message text, truncated. Opening the app, refreshing the list, and filtering all happen entirely on your machine.
Sent when you press Analyse
- Event IDThe number Windows assigned to the event, e.g. 41 or 10016.
- Source nameThe component that logged it, e.g. Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power.
- Message text (truncated)The description Windows wrote for that event. This is the field that can contain personal data — see the warning below.
Never sent, at any point
- Your files, documents, photos or their contents
- Your browsing history, passwords or saved credentials
- Screenshots, keystrokes or anything you type
- Events you did not select — including whole logs you never opened
- Your email address, as part of any analysis request
The one thing worth being careful about
Windows error messages can themselves contain personal data. A crash in a program often logs the full path of a file, and that path usually contains your Windows username; some events include device names, application names, or IP addresses. Since the message text is part of what gets analysed, that text goes with it. This is especially true of Security-log events, which is why they are never included unless you deliberately select them.
What is never sent
ErrorAnalyser has no access to your files, and asks Windows for nothing except event records. It has no background service, no scheduled scan, and no reason to run when you are not using it.
The desktop app also does not record what you do inside it. Session replay — the screen-recording technology used on parts of this website to find usability problems — is deliberately not present in the desktop app at all, so your error data and everything you do with it is never recorded.
Does it change anything on my PC?
No. Reading the event log is a read-only operation, and it is the only thing the app does to your system. It does not clear logs, edit the registry, install drivers or services, or change any Windows setting.
Under the hood it asks Windows for events through PowerShell’s Get-WinEvent — the same interface Event Viewer and every Windows administrator uses. You can run the equivalent query yourself and compare the output:
PowerShell — the same read, by hand
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; Level=1,2} -MaxEvents 50Fix instructions are exactly that — instructions. If an analysis tells you to update a driver or run a disk check, you run it. The app never acts on your system on the strength of an AI answer.
Does it need administrator rights?
Not for normal use. The System and Application logs — where nearly all crash, driver and disk evidence lives — are readable by any user. Windows restricts only the Security log to administrators, and that is a Windows rule that applies to Event Viewer in exactly the same way.
If you never select the Security log, ErrorAnalyser never needs elevated rights to do its job.
Why does Windows warn me when I install it?
Because the installer is not code-signed yet. Windows shows “Windows protected your PC” for any installer without a purchased signing certificate, regardless of what the software does — it is a statement about the certificate, not about the file.
We would rather tell you this here than have you meet it unexplained. What you can check before continuing:
- The download link on this site points at
github.com/xFroty/erroranalyser-releases— a public release page. The file you get is the file published there, and anyone can see its name, size and publication date. - The installer is named
ErrorAnalyser-Setup.exe. If you downloaded something with a different name from somewhere else, do not run it. - If you want a second opinion, upload the file to VirusTotal before running it. An unsigned installer is a reasonable thing to be suspicious about.
To proceed anyway, the dialog hides the option behind More info → Run anyway. Signing certificates are on the list of things to buy; when that happens, this warning disappears and this section comes off the page.
Where does the data end up?
Your account and analysis history live in the EU. The AI processing itself happens at Google, outside the EU, under standard contractual clauses — that is unavoidable for the feature to exist, so it is stated plainly rather than buried.
| What | Where | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Account, subscription, analysis cache | Supabase — EU (Ireland) | Sign-in, plan and quota, cached explanations |
| The error text you submit | Google Gemini API — USA / global | Generating the explanation |
| Crash diagnostics | Sentry — EU (Germany) | Error type and stack trace only, never your event content |
| Product analytics (opt-in) | PostHog — EU (Germany) | Counts and flags, never error content or your email |
| Payments | Stripe — USA / global | Subscription billing; we never see your card number |
Cached explanations deserve a note of their own. To avoid paying to explain the same common error thousands of times, each analysis is stored under a one-way SHA-256 hash of the error content. The raw message is not stored, the cache is shared between all users, and it is not linked to your account or identity.
Is my error data used to train AI?
No. Analysis runs on the paid tier of Google’s Gemini API, under which Google does not use submitted content to train its models.
This is a contractual property of the API tier, not a promise we can enforce ourselves — which is exactly why it is named here, so you can verify the claim against Google’s own API terms rather than taking our word for it.
Can I delete everything afterwards?
Yes. Deleting your account from the account settings page removes your account data, subscription record and usage counters. Uninstalling the desktop app removes its local data with it.
One honest exception: cached explanations are anonymous by construction — hashed, shared, and never linked to an account — so there is nothing in them to attach to you and nothing to delete on your behalf. Everything else goes.
The complete picture, in the language lawyers require, is in the privacy policy. If something on this page and something there ever disagree, the privacy policy is the binding document — and the disagreement is a bug we want to hear about.