AdBolish - Privacy Policy

Effective date: Draft, not yet in effect (last updated October 21, 2026) - pending counsel review Product: AdBolish Provider: Clearware, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("Clearware," "we," "us," or "our") Contact: [email protected] | https://www.adbolish.io

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The short version (plain-language summary)

This summary highlights the key points. The full policy below controls.

• AdBolish runs on your device. It filters your computer's DNS lookups locally. Lookups it allows are never recorded. Its block counters and charts are saved on your computer, and its Activity log of recent blocks is held in memory only. We don't upload any of it.
• We never receive the domains you look up. Not the ones AdBolish allows, not the ones it blocks, and not your exclusions or custom blocks. Our crash and usage reporting is built around a code-level allow-list that can say which setting you changed, but never a domain, URL, rule or file name.
• How AdBolish is funded - bandwidth sharing. While AdBolish is installed, it shares a slice of your idle internet bandwidth when it can through a bundled partner network (Massive) to relay other parties' traffic. Only one Clearware app shares on a device at a time. When it is running, it runs in the background and keeps sharing even after you close AdBolish, until you turn it off or uninstall. If sharing is off for about two minutes, AdBolish pauses blocking. It does not read or upload your data, and AdBolish does not filter or record the traffic it relays. See Section 3. This is disclosed in the EULA and shown by an always-visible status indicator in the app and by Massive's own system-tray icon.
• To operate the network, Massive processes some device data (such as your IP address, an anonymous device identifier, city-level location, device specifications, and bandwidth statistics). Massive is an independent data controller for that processing under its own privacy policy. See Section 3.
• What we do collect is limited and carries no name or contact details: crash reports and usage events, which you can turn off, and install and uninstall signals keyed to a random install id. We also record your device's IP address with these signals, and the first launch sends basic hardware details; we use both to detect fraudulent installs. If you send feedback, we receive what you write and any name or email you add. See Section 4 for exactly which of these you can switch off.
• We don't sell your personal information.
• You have rights to access, delete, and control your data - see Sections 12-13.

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1. Who we are

Clearware, LLC develops and distributes AdBolish, a free Windows app that blocks ads, trackers and malware at the DNS level. This policy explains what information the Software and our related services handle, how, and your choices. It applies to the AdBolish application and the adbolish.io website's interactions with it. It is incorporated into the End User License Agreement.

2. Our core principle: local-first

AdBolish is designed to keep your data on your device:

• Filtering is on-device. DNS lookups are checked against the blocklists on your computer. Blocked lookups are answered locally and go nowhere. Allowed lookups are forwarded to the DNS servers your network was already using, exactly as they would be without AdBolish. If you turn on Encrypted DNS (off by default), allowed lookups are instead sent encrypted to the provider you pick (Quad9, Cloudflare, NextDNS or a server you enter); that provider receives them under its own privacy policy, and your network and ISP can no longer read them. Names on your local network and on a connected VPN's own domains always go to your network's or VPN's DNS.
• Allowed lookups are never recorded. AdBolish only counts what it blocks.
• Block counters and charts are saved on your device. Blocks per day, per category, per network, per blocked domain and per app are saved in AdBolish's data folder so your charts survive a restart. Settings → Protection → Reset statistics clears them.
• The Activity log is held in memory only. The live list of recent blocks (domain, time, list, category and, where Windows reports it, the app that made the lookup) is kept in memory and is gone when AdBolish closes. To tell which app asked, AdBolish briefly reads Windows' own DNS activity trace in memory; nothing from it is kept except on blocked lookups, and none of it leaves your device.
• Your settings are local. Preferences, exclusions, custom blocks and downloaded blocklist updates are stored on your device. We don't have a copy.
• No account required. AdBolish does not require you to create an account or give us your name, email, or other identifying details to work.

System DNS settings. When you turn on system DNS routing, AdBolish saves your network adapters' DNS settings on your device and points them at itself; it restores them when you turn routing off or quit, and the uninstaller restores them if needed. These saved settings never leave your computer.

3. The bandwidth exchange (how the app is funded)

AdBolish is free because, while it is installed, it shares a slice of your device's idle, unused internet bandwidth when it can through a bundled third-party network operated by Massive and/or its partners (the "Exchange"). Your connection relays third-party internet traffic. This is how we generate revenue instead of charging you or showing ads.

Only one Clearware app shares on a device at a time. The Exchange currently allows a single connected client per machine. If you have more than one Clearware application installed, only one shares bandwidth at any moment; another that does not currently hold the slot keeps retrying and takes over automatically once it frees up. When another Clearware app on the same device is already sharing, AdBolish counts that as sharing.

The Exchange runs in the background, including after you close AdBolish. The Massive agent starts with your Windows user session and keeps sharing while you are logged in, even after you close or quit AdBolish, until you turn sharing off, sign out of Windows, or uninstall. It shares only for the logged-in Windows user; it is not a system-wide service and does not run for other users of the device or at the Windows sign-in screen.

The Exchange does not access your data. Specifically, it does not read, upload, or share your files, your DNS lookups, the domains AdBolish blocks or allows, your exclusions or statistics, your browsing or search history, the sites you visit, your credentials, cookies, keystrokes, or screen contents. It relays other parties' traffic - not yours.

AdBolish does not filter or record the agent's traffic. The domains the agent looks up belong to the traffic it relays for other people. When AdBolish is running as administrator (which system-wide filtering also needs), it recognizes the agent's process and passes its lookups through untouched: they are not blocked, not rewritten by SafeSearch or YouTube Restricted Mode, and never added to your statistics or Activity log.

What Massive processes to operate the network. To route traffic, Massive processes a limited set of device data: your IP address (during active sessions), an anonymous device identifier, city-level location, device specifications, and connection and bandwidth statistics. Massive retains this data on a capped schedule (currently up to 60 days) and is an independent data controller for it, governed by Massive's own terms and privacy policy, not ours. See:

• Massive license: https://www.joinmassive.com/en/terms
• Massive privacy policy: https://www.joinmassive.com/en/privacy
• Massive SDK privacy policy: https://www.joinmassive.com/en/monetization-sdk-privacy-policy
• Massive FAQ: https://www.joinmassive.com/faq

Resource use. Sharing uses network bandwidth and a small amount of CPU. AdBolish does not itself instruct the Massive agent to keep your computer awake; depending on your system and the agent's own default behavior, participating may keep your device awake or reduce how often it sleeps while sharing is active, and otherwise defers to your operating system's normal power and sleep settings.

Your control. You can turn sharing off at any time from AdBolish's Settings, AdBolish's tray menu, or Massive's own system-tray icon; a stop from Massive's icon is honored and the app will not restart sharing behind you. Note: AdBolish stops blocking while sharing is off (see the EULA Section 5). Once sharing has been off for about two minutes, AdBolish stops filtering ads, trackers and malware and refuses new protection settings until sharing is running again. Your internet keeps working, unfiltered, and SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode settings you already turned on keep applying. Turning things off, pausing, allowing a domain and restoring your DNS settings are never refused. Turning sharing back on resumes blocking within a few seconds. To end participation permanently, uninstall the app, which stops the Massive agent and removes it from your device, unless another Clearware app you still have installed uses it.

4. Information the Software collects

Nothing below carries a domain you looked up, a URL, a file name, or the content of your exclusions or custom blocks. Apart from feedback you choose to sign, nothing carries your name or email address. The table says which items you can switch off.

How the "no PII" design is enforced. In the Software, every analytics event passes through an allow-list that permits only the fixed event names and the non-identifying properties above; anything else is dropped, and any value that looks like a URL, a file path or a filename is dropped too. Every crash report passes through a scrubbing step that removes user/identity fields and redacts URLs, Windows and Unix file paths, and filenames from the text before transmission. Nothing you type into Feedback is passed to crash reporting, analytics or logs. This is a design safeguard, not an absolute guarantee.

5. Information we do NOT collect

We do not collect, and the Software is built not to transmit:

• the domains your computer looks up, whether AdBolish allows or blocks them;
• your Activity log, your block counters and charts, or which apps on your computer made which lookups;
• your exclusions, custom blocks, or any domain, URL or rule you type into AdBolish;
• the names or contents of any file on your disk;
• your browsing history, search history, or the websites you visit, or any page content;
• your name, email address, passwords, payment details, or precise location (except a name or email address you choose to add to feedback);
• persistent cross-site advertising identifiers.

6. How we use information

We use the limited information we do collect only to:

• keep the Software stable (diagnose crashes and errors);
• understand which features are used and how reliably, to prioritize improvements;
• measure install activation, retention and uninstalls in aggregate, and attribute installs and bandwidth-sharing activity to the channel that delivered them;
• detect fraudulent or non-genuine installs and protect our referral and affiliate program (install-quality data, Section 4);
• read and reply to feedback you send;
• deliver updates and current blocklists.

We do not use it to build advertising profiles or to identify you.

7. Cookies and tracking

The AdBolish desktop application does not use advertising cookies or cross-site trackers. The website does, and rather than describe that in the abstract, here is the exact list of what runs on adbolish.io and why:

What we send to the ad platforms, and what we do not. When a download or install happens, our server reports that conversion to Microsoft Advertising and to Google Ads. The Microsoft report contains exactly: the Microsoft click id, the random install id, your browser's user-agent string, the name of the event (for example download, install, or first_open), and a number we assign to weight how meaningful that event is. The Google report contains the Google click id, which conversion it counts as, when it happened, a value, and a transaction id built from the random install id so the same event is never counted twice. Neither contains your IP address, your email address, your phone number, or any hashed version of them. That is not an accident of implementation — the IP addresses we record for install quality (Section 4) are never added to these reports, and we deliberately declined to start collecting any of those in order to improve ad matching.

What we send to Asterra, and what we do not. Some of our advertising runs through Asterra, whose links carry their own click id. If you arrive through one and later install and open the app for the first time, our server tells Asterra so by requesting its conversion address with that click id. The request carries the click id and nothing else: no install id, no IP address of yours, no email address, no device details. A visitor who declined in the cookie notice never has the click id stored or forwarded, so nothing is sent.

What we send to other partners. When a download or install arrives through a partner's ?aff= link, our server reports it back to that partner using the parameters the partner put on its own link, so that partner can count the conversion. It does not add your IP address, your email address or device details. A visitor who declined in the cookie notice never has the parameters stored or forwarded.

This is measurement, not targeting. These identifiers exist to count conversions from ads we already paid for. We do not use them to build advertising audiences, we do not run remarketing or dynamic remarketing, and the consent signal we send Google explicitly withholds permission to personalise ads from these conversions. If we ever adopt any of that, this policy changes before it is switched on, not after.

Your controls. The site and the download work with all of this blocked. Your browser's cookie and tracking-protection settings, or any ad/tracker blocker - AdBolish included - will stop the Google and Microsoft tags loading and prevent any click id being stored — nothing on adbolish.io depends on them. You can also use Google's and Microsoft's own opt-outs, linked in their policies above.

The cookie notice. Where consent is required — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — adbolish.io asks before any of this runs. Until you answer, the Google and Microsoft tags are held in a no-storage mode in which they neither read nor write cookies, and the click ids, partner parameters and install id described above are not stored at all. Choosing Decline keeps it that way, and a download you make afterwards is counted only against the campaign, with no identifier attached and nothing reported to Microsoft Advertising or Google Ads about you. Your answer is remembered in your browser and travels with you; declining here stays in force even if you later visit from elsewhere. You can reopen the notice at any time from Cookie settings in the site footer.

Changing your mind later. If you accepted and then decline — from Cookie settings at any time — we do two things, not one. Your browser's copies of the click ids, the partner parameters, the install id and the stored campaign record are erased, and we also tell our own server to stop reporting you, because a click id recorded while you were consenting would otherwise still be sitting there. From that point no further conversion of yours is sent to Microsoft Advertising or Google Ads. Reports already delivered to those platforms are subject to their retention schedules, not ours.

8. Legal bases for processing (EEA/UK users)

Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we rely on these legal bases:

• Legitimate interests - for crash and usage reporting and install and uninstall measurement, to keep the Software secure, stable, and improving, balanced against your privacy (and, for crash reports, usage analytics and the first-launch signal, you can opt out).
• Consent - where required, including your acceptance of the bandwidth exchange at install, and feedback you choose to send; you may withdraw consent by disabling the relevant option or uninstalling.
• Performance of a contract - to provide the Software and deliver updates and blocklists under the EULA.

9. How information is shared

We share information only as follows:

• Service providers (sub-processors): Sentry (crash reporting), Aptabase (privacy-friendly analytics) and ip-api.com (IP address lookups for install quality) process the limited data described above on our behalf.
• The Exchange operator: Massive and/or its partners operate the bandwidth-sharing network as an independent data controller, subject to their own terms and privacy practices. Massive is not our service provider or processor for that activity.
• The Encrypted DNS provider you choose: if you turn on Encrypted DNS, the lookups AdBolish allows go directly from your computer to that provider (Quad9, Cloudflare, NextDNS or a server you enter), under its own privacy policy. We do not see them.
• Update and website hosting providers deliver updates and blocklists and run adbolish.io.
• Legal and safety: we may disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Clearware, our users, or others.
• Business transfers: if Clearware is involved in a merger, acquisition, or asset sale, information may transfer as part of that transaction, subject to this policy.

We do not authorize these providers to use the data for their own unrelated purposes.

10. We do not sell your personal information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) and similar U.S. state laws. Apart from the install-quality data described in Section 4 and anything you choose to put in feedback, the Software is built to avoid collecting personal identifiers in the first place, so there is very little personal information involved at all.

11. Data retention

• On your device: your settings, exclusions, custom blocks, block counters and charts, and downloaded blocklist updates stay in AdBolish's data folders until you reset or delete them. The Activity log is never saved; it is gone when AdBolish closes. Uninstalling keeps your data unless you ask it not to - the uninstaller offers a checkbox to delete the application data. Leave it unticked and the folders under %LOCALAPPDATA%\io.adbolish.app and %APPDATA%\io.adbolish.app stay, ready for a reinstall.
• Crash and usage data: retained by our providers, and by Clearware's usage service, for a limited period consistent with diagnosing issues and understanding trends, then deleted or aggregated.
• Install-attribution, install and uninstall signals: retained in aggregate/measurement form; the random install id is not linked to your identity.
• Install-quality data: IP addresses, the information looked up from them, and hardware details are kept until you ask us to delete them (Section 12).
• Feedback: kept so we can read it and reply; ask us to delete it at any time (Section 12).
• Microsoft click id (msclkid) and Google click id (gclid): each stored in your browser for 90 days from your most recent ad click, then it expires; a newer click replaces an older one. Where one has been used to report a conversion, the platform's own copy is subject to its retention schedule, not ours.
• Asterra click id (asterra): stored in your browser for 30 days from your most recent Asterra click, then it expires; a newer click replaces an older one. Where it has been used to report a first launch, Asterra's own copy is subject to Asterra's retention schedule, not ours.
• Affiliate link parameters (st_ap): stored in your browser for 30 days from your most recent partner-link arrival, then they expire; a newer arrival replaces them. Where they have been used to report a conversion, the partner's own copy is subject to its retention schedule, not ours.
• Consent withdrawal: if you decline after having accepted, we keep a minimal record that you withdrew — the anonymous install id and the date — because that record is what stops any further conversion being reported for you. It contains nothing else.
• Exchange data processed by Massive: governed by Massive's own retention schedule (currently capped at up to 60 days), under Massive's privacy policy.

12. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to:

• access the personal information we hold about you;
• correct inaccurate information;
• delete your information;
• object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent;
• portability of information you provided;
• non-discrimination for exercising your rights.

Because AdBolish is local-first and largely anonymous, the fastest way to exercise most of these rights is directly in the app - turn off telemetry, reset your statistics, delete your local data, or uninstall. To make a formal request, or if you're in the EEA/UK, California, or another region with statutory rights, email [email protected] and we will respond as required by law. You may also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.

For rights relating to the data Massive processes to operate the Exchange, contact Massive through the privacy policy linked in Section 3.

13. Your choices and controls

You are in control of the optional data flows:

This policy does not claim automatic pausing on metered connections or during active use, and does not claim a bandwidth cap. Those controls are not part of the shipped build.

14. Security

We design the Software to minimize the data at stake: filtering happens on your device, allowed lookups are never stored, and the Activity log never touches the disk. Blocklist updates come only from Clearware's own feed, and AdBolish installs a list only if its signature, SHA-256 checksum, size and domain count all check out. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect the limited information we handle.

15. Children's privacy

AdBolish is not directed to children under 13 (or the minimum age required in your jurisdiction), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact [email protected] and we will address it.

16. International data transfers

We are based in the United States, and our service providers may process data in the U.S. and other countries. Where required, we use appropriate safeguards (such as standard contractual clauses) for transfers of personal data out of the EEA, UK, or other regions with transfer restrictions.

17. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes to the Software, our practices, or the law. When changes are material, we will update the effective date and provide reasonable notice (for example, in-app or on adbolish.io). Your continued use of the Software after an update takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

18. Contact us

Clearware, LLC Email: [email protected] Web: https://www.adbolish.io

For privacy requests, please put "Privacy Request" in the subject line so we can route it quickly.