KB525C Control Privacy Statement

What KB525C Control does on your machine

The application drives the four collaboration buttons of a Dell KB525C keyboard. To do this it reads a small number of things, listed here in full:

• The keyboard. It opens the KB525C's vendor USB HID interface to switch the buttons on, set their LEDs and receive presses. It does not read ordinary keystrokes; those go through Windows' normal keyboard interface, which the application never opens.
• Microphone and camera usage flags. Windows keeps a record of which applications currently hold the microphone and the camera (CapabilityAccessManager\ConsentStore in the registry). The application polls that record once a second to decide whether a meeting is in progress. It reads the flag, never audio or video, and it does not keep a history.
• The window in front. To send a meeting shortcut to the right application, it reads the process name and window title of the foreground window at the moment a button is pressed.
• The folder in front. For "run in the active folder" actions, it reads the path of the Explorer window or Total Commander panel in front. With Total Commander this can involve briefly placing the path on the clipboard through TC's own command; the previous clipboard content is restored immediately afterwards.
• The Windows microphone mute state, so the Mic LED can show it.
• The time of the last mouse or keyboard input (Windows' GetLastInputInfo), only while the LED sleep option is on, to turn the idle-layer LEDs off after a period without activity. It is a single timestamp: the application does not see which keys were pressed or where the pointer went.

None of this is stored beyond the moment it is used, except in the live log window you can open from the tray menu — which lives in memory, shows what the application decided and why, and is discarded when the application exits.

What it starts

Buttons run the actions you configured: programs, keyboard shortcuts, documents, macros. The application starts only what you told it to. Programs it starts receive a few environment variables naming the button, the layer and the folder so scripts can react; nothing else is passed.

What it changes on your machine

The install script copies two executables into your user profile, adds that folder to your user PATH, registers the application to start at logon, and — because Dell Peripheral Manager holds the keyboard's command channel exclusively — disables the DPMService Windows service, asking for administrator rights to do so. The uninstall script reverses all of it, including restoring the service. Every step is visible in the script, which is plain PowerShell text.

What it keeps

Your settings, in %APPDATA%\KB525CControl\config.json, a readable text file you can open from the tray menu. That is the only file the application writes. Deleting the folder removes everything.

The named pipe

Other programs on the same machine can send the application commands — LED signals, status queries — over a Windows named pipe. The pipe accepts connections only from the logged-in user's own processes. It is not reachable from the network.

How to verify this

The complete source is at github.com/hollovar/KB525CControl. Searching it for HttpClient, Socket or WebRequest finds nothing; the only I/O is the HID interface, the named pipe, the registry keys named above and the configuration file. The released executables are built from that source by a public GitHub Actions workflow, so a build can be traced to the commit it came from.

Changes

Any change to this statement is published on this page with an updated date at the top.

Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent to hollovarlabs@gmail.com, or see the support page.