Privacy Policy

Last updated: 4 November 2026

This policy is about the Pulse desktop application for Windows, published by Refora Technologies. In short: Pulse has no account system, no telemetry and no analytics. Your readings and your settings stay on your PC.

1. What Pulse reads

Pulse reads hardware sensors from your computer through LibreHardwareMonitor and, if you install it, the PawnIO kernel driver, and frame timing through the bundled PresentMon. Depending on your hardware and drivers that can include processor usage, temperature, clock speed and power draw, the same for your graphics adapter, memory and video memory use, network throughput, disk activity, battery charge, and frame rate.

These readings exist in memory while Pulse is running and are shown on your screen. They are not written to disk and they are not sent anywhere.

If you turn on the in-game overlay, Pulse also looks at the program in front of you to decide whether it is a game it can show in: where its file is, the names of the libraries it has loaded, the names of the files in its folder, and whether its window fills the screen. Nothing is read from inside the program, and none of this is stored or sent.

2. What Pulse stores on your PC

Pulse writes two things, both inside your own user profile.

Your settings. A single settings.json file holding your chosen tiles and their order, overlay position, size, opacity, refresh rate, keyboard shortcuts and similar preferences. No personal information and no hardware identifiers. If you use the in-game overlay, it also lists the file names of any games you turned it off for, or told Pulse to show in. Those lists stay in the settings file on your PC.
Its own logs. A rotating text log under %AppData%\Refora\Pulse\logs, recording what Pulse itself did and anything that went wrong. The active file rotates at 1 MB and five older files are kept, so the total is capped. If you use the in-game overlay, it keeps a small log of its own there too, written from inside the game and capped the same way. Uninstalling Pulse deletes them.

Before anything is written to that log, Pulse replaces your Windows user profile path with %USERPROFILE%, so your account name is not stored. Pulse never records the name of an application, game, window or file, so the logs cannot show what you were running. The in-game overlay refers to a game only by its process number.

3. What Pulse sends over the internet

Hardware monitoring itself works with no connection at all. Pulse makes network requests for one purpose only, updates:

On startup it asks api.github.com whether a newer release of Pulse exists. That request carries nothing about you or your machine beyond what any web request carries, namely your IP address, and it is handled by GitHub under their own privacy policy.
If you choose to install an update, Pulse downloads the installer from GitHub and checks its SHA-256 checksum before running it.

There is nothing else. Pulse contacts no server belonging to Refora Technologies, because there is none. We receive no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reports and no usage data of any kind.

4. Diagnostics you choose to share

The About section has a Save diagnostics button. It writes a report to your desktop, and nothing more. The file is not uploaded and we are not notified. Sharing it, by attaching it to a GitHub issue or emailing it to us, is entirely your decision.

A diagnostic contains the Pulse and Windows versions, where Pulse is installed, your graphics adapter model names, display resolutions, whether sensors are working, the state of the startup entry, and the log messages of Pulse and its in-game overlay, with timestamps. It is redacted the same way as the log, so your account name is not in it and no application, game, window or file name appears anywhere. The only thing in one we would call personal is that its timestamps show roughly when the machine was in use.

5. Administrator access

Pulse asks for administrator privileges because reading sensors at that level needs them, and some readings also need a kernel driver. That access is used to read hardware sensors and, if you turn on the in-game overlay, to add that overlay to the game in front of you. Pulse does not modify system settings or hardware configuration, beyond an optional scheduled task if you switch on start with Windows, and the sensor driver if you choose to install it.

6. Children

Pulse collects no data from anyone, so there is nothing to protect differently for children and no age verification is needed.

7. Changes

If this policy changes, the new version appears on this page with a new date above. Since Pulse collects nothing, changes are likely to be small and to follow changes in the software.

8. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything Pulse does, are welcome.

Pulse is free software under the GPLv3, so none of the above has to be taken on trust. Every claim on this page can be checked against the source code.