readbofm In this difficult time, I want to express my deep support and solidarity with you. I hope the hurricane did not cause serious consequences for you and your loved ones.
Please check our privacy policy to learn what exactly data application collects and for what purpose. The short answer - no, unlike Google, Apple or Microsoft, we do not get access to your photos, even face recognition is performed locally at your PC.
Program does not requre internet connection to run, but some functions may not work without internet, like Maps for example. However, if your computer is connected to the internet, program will try to connect to licensing server to refresh your activation token so program can continue to work with full functionality. This happens when application is started.
I guess what happened, is you had partial internet connectivity. For some reason program thought you are actually connected to the internet and therefore tried to refresh activation token, but it took forever, since obvoiusly it could not reach the server. I believe if you just waited (about 1 minute), then request would fail with timeout, and program would start normally after that. But you had not chance to know about this, ofcourse. Sorry for that.
