formatho privacy, in one line: formatho talks to your Azure DevOps organisation, and to nobody else. It is a viewer for work items you already have access to. There is no account to create with us, no red8.io server involved, no analytics and no third-party code in the app at all — your credentials and everything formatho fetches stay on your Mac.
Last updated: 25 August 2026
The formatho app
Your Azure DevOps credentials
To reach your work items, formatho needs your organisation name, the email address you use with Azure DevOps, and a Personal Access Token you generate yourself in Azure DevOps. You enter them once in Settings.
They are stored on your Mac, in formatho’s own sandboxed storage, which it shares with its widget so the widget can refresh on its own. They are sent to exactly one place — dev.azure.com — as the standard authorisation header every Azure DevOps client uses. They are never sent to us, never written to a log file, and never shared with anyone else.
Because the token is yours, you remain in control of it: you can revoke it in Azure DevOps at any moment and formatho immediately loses access, with no involvement from us. Deleting the app removes the stored copy.
What formatho reads — and why it cannot change anything
formatho requests work items, your saved queries and their results, your recent activity, and a work item’s history and related items. It reads all of this from your own organisation, with your own permissions — it can never see anything you could not already see in Azure DevOps yourself.
Every request formatho makes is a read. The app contains no code that creates, edits or deletes anything in Azure DevOps, so it cannot alter your work items even by accident — and a read-only Personal Access Token is enough to run it. If you would rather not grant more than that, don’t.
One scope worth knowing: the recent activity view asks Azure DevOps for the items you have touched across the whole organisation, not only the project you have selected. That is how the underlying service reports it.
Where the fetched data goes
Nowhere. Work items, query results, activity and history are held in memory while the app is running and are gone when you quit — formatho keeps no database and writes no cache of your work items to disk. The only thing it remembers between launches is the list of project names in your organisation, kept so the project picker is populated when you open the app, along with your own settings.
Other people’s details
Work items carry colleagues’ names and email addresses — who created an item, who it is assigned to. formatho displays that information and holds it in memory while you are looking at it. It does not collect it, store it, or send it anywhere.
That data belongs to your organisation’s Azure DevOps tenancy, and your organisation remains responsible for it. formatho is a window onto it, not a copy of it.
The widget
If you place the formatho widget, macOS refreshes it on a schedule of its own, which means the widget may fetch a work item while the main app is closed. It uses the same credentials and contacts the same single destination — there is no additional data flow and nothing new leaves your Mac. Remove the widget and the scheduled refreshes stop.
The clipboard
Copying a formatted work item writes to your clipboard, and that is the whole of it. formatho never reads your clipboard — it has no code that looks at what you have copied from anywhere else. The text it writes is assembled on your Mac from work items already on screen.
No analytics, no advertising, no account, no purchases
formatho contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no third-party software development kits — in fact no third-party code of any kind. There is no sign-in and no profile of you anywhere, because there is no account to hold one. The app is free, with nothing to buy inside it.
It also asks for no system permissions at all — no camera, microphone, contacts, calendar, location or notifications — and stores nothing in iCloud, so your settings do not travel between machines.
This website (red8.io)
The formatho pages on red8.io carry no analytics, no advertising and no third-party tracking scripts, so there is nothing here to consent to. The site is served through Cloudflare, which handles the request and keeps the standard security and performance logs any host keeps, under its own privacy policy.
Nothing on this website can reach the app, your credentials or your work items.
Children
formatho is a tool for software teams, is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.
Your rights
We hold no account, no profile and no copy of your data, so there is nothing for us to retrieve, correct or delete on request — everything formatho holds is on your Mac, and deleting the app takes it with you. Requests about the work items themselves belong to your organisation’s Azure DevOps administrator, not to us, because that is where the data lives.
Contact
Questions about this policy: privacy@red8.io.