LibreOffice is a free, open-source desktop office suite (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, Math) developed by a volunteer-and-company community and stewarded by The Document Foundation (TDF), a charitable foundation under German civil law headquartered in Berlin and supervised by the Berlin Senate Administration for Justice. It is a local application with no account: TDF's privacy policy and help pages describe only two software-originated network flows — an opt-in, per-crash prompt to send an anonymized crash report (minidump) to TDF, and a periodic update check whose optional 'User Agent' setting sends LibreOffice version, operating system and basic hardware to TDF servers — while TDF's Mac App Store build carries an Apple privacy label of 'Data Not Collected'. Caveats: LibreOffice writes the user's configured name and edit timestamps into document metadata unless the 'Remove personal information on saving' option is enabled; TDF's website uses self-hosted Matomo analytics (IP-masked) plus third-party embeds such as Google Maps, reCAPTCHA and YouTube; and mobile editing apps in the app stores are sold by ecosystem company Collabora, not TDF. TDF publishes its statutes, annual reports (2012–2024) and accounting ledgers, and maintains a public security-advisory registry, but no independent third-party security or privacy audit of LibreOffice was found in this research.
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The Document Foundation's privacy policy (English translation, 'As of: February 2022') states that each time LibreOffice crashes a crash report (minidump) is generated, that the user chooses whether to submit it and is prompted each time, that it can be disabled entirely under LibreOffice > General, and that the report contains the LibreOffice version, loaded modules and library paths, stack traces, OS name and version, CPU/GPU model and driver, UI language and crash timestamp — with no user-created documents included.
LibreOffice's Online Update help page states that the update-check module is installed by default, checks once a week by default as soon as an Internet connection is detected, and has a separate 'User Agent' option that, when enabled, sends the user's LibreOffice version, operating system and basic hardware to optimize the download — the only telemetry-like flow described for the software besides opt-in crash reports.
LibreOffice's 'Security Options and Warnings' help page documents that saved documents carry user data (author names in file properties, comments and tracked changes, plus edit time values) and that users must enable 'Remove personal information on saving' to have names replaced with generic 'Author1'-style values and time values reset — i.e., personal metadata is written into files by default and follows the document to whoever receives it.
The Document Foundation's published statutes (non-binding English translation alongside the binding German Satzung) state that TDF is a legal foundation headquartered in Berlin, subject to state supervision under Berlin foundation law by the Senate Administration for Justice, with a Board of Directors, Board of Trustees and Membership Committee as its bodies, that work in those bodies is voluntary, and that no person may benefit from inappropriately high compensation.
LibreOffice's Licenses page states that the suite is Free Software made available under the Mozilla Public License v2.0, that it is based on Apache OpenOffice code under the Apache License 2.0, that no copyright assignment is required, and that contributors are asked to license code jointly under MPL v2 and LGPL v3+ — with a public list of contributors and their license statements.
The Document Foundation's 'other download methods' page states that the Microsoft Store and Mac App Store versions of LibreOffice are TDF's own free-software builds with a small charge, that TDF itself offers only a viewer app for Android, and that mobile editing apps in the app stores are a LibreOffice-based product from Collabora, described as one of TDF's certified developers and ecosystem members — so app-store LibreOffice-branded editing on phones is a separate company's product with its own policies.
The README of the public LibreOffice core repository states that the suite is backed by The Document Foundation, which represents an independent community of enterprises, developers and volunteers, and that it is open source and free to download, use and distribute; the README also displays Coverity Scan and OpenSSF Best Practices badges.
The Document Foundation's Financials & Reports page publishes annual reports for every year from 2012 through 2024 (in English and German) and its accounting ledgers, which it states are prepared by a professional accountant and published slightly anonymized, as part of its transparency principles.
The Document Foundation operates its own crash-report server (crashreport.libreoffice.org) for LibreOffice, publicly listing crash statistics per version from 5.2 through 26.2 — opt-in crash data goes to a first-party TDF-run service rather than a third-party crash-analytics vendor.
The Document Foundation's privacy policy states that transmitted crash reports are deleted immediately after processing with only anonymized reports stored permanently, and discloses the website-side third-party recipients it uses: donation payment processors (PayPal, Stripe, CoinGate, BitPay, Flattr, Visa, Mastercard) that receive the donor's IP address, amount, currency, referring page and optionally email, and embedded third-party services that can set cookies — no other data recipients are described for the software.
The Document Foundation maintains a public Security Advisories page for LibreOffice that lists CVEs from 2010 through 2026 (roughly 96 unique CVE identifiers at fetch time), each with a description, the fixed release, and credits to reporters and fixers — an open, continuous vulnerability-disclosure process; no independent third-party audit, breach of TDF-held user data or regulator action was found in this research.
LibreOffice's Options > General help page describes the software's 'Help Improve LibreOffice' section as consisting solely of a prompt to send crash reports containing anonymous debugging information to The Document Foundation; no usage-analytics, advertising or third-party tracking setting is described for the application.
The Document Foundation's privacy policy discloses that its websites use self-hosted Matomo analytics that mask two bytes of the IP address, retain data 180 days and transfer nothing to third parties, and separately that the sites dynamically embed third-party services — Google Maps, reCAPTCHA, YouTube, Vimeo, Gravatar, Google Fonts and others — that can set their own cookies and execute JavaScript; this is website-side tracking, not tracking inside the LibreOffice application.
The Document Foundation's own Mac App Store listing for LibreOffice (paid build, seller The Document Foundation) carries Apple's privacy label 'Data Not Collected', with the developer indicating it does not collect any data from the app.
Privacy Guides lists LibreOffice on its Office Suites recommendations page, whose stated criteria require an open-source, cross-platform suite that functions offline, exports to standard document formats and does not require logging in to an account to access its full functionality (page last updated 2024-10-24).