Privacy for focus apps

To keep you on task, a focus app has to watch what you do. That’s a lot of trust to hand to a small app on your Mac. Here’s what a tool like this can see, what it actually needs, and what it should never keep.

What it can see

On a Mac, what an app can see depends on the permissions you give it in System Settings → Privacy & Security:

• Accessibility lets it read the title of the window in front, and hear when it changes. (Which app is in front, any app can see.) Window titles say a lot: document names, email subjects, chat names.
• Automation, once per browser, lets it ask the browser for the active tab’s address and title.
• Screen Recording would let it see what’s on your screen, pixel for pixel.
• Input Monitoring would let it see the keys you press.

The last two are the ones to be wary of. A focus app doesn’t need either to tell work from drift.

What it needs

To decide whether a window fits what you said you’d do, it needs the app, the window title and, in a browser, the site and page. That’s all. Not the page’s content, not what you type, not screenshots. And not the query string, the part of an address after the “?”, which is where search terms, account numbers and one-time tokens live.

What it should never keep

• Query strings, fragments and passwords in addresses. SqwarkSelf strips them the moment an address is read, before anything is stored or sent. Only the site and path survive.
• Titles from the private corners: password managers, banking and payment sites, Google, Apple and Microsoft sign-in pages, mail apps and Messages. SqwarkSelf never stores their window titles, reduces their path to “/”, and never sends them anywhere.
• Private windows. In Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc and Firefox, SqwarkSelf drops the site too. Safari doesn’t say which of its windows are private, so a Safari private window is treated like any other. That’s a real gap, and worth knowing.
• A copy in someone else’s cloud, unless you chose that.

Where it goes

SqwarkSelf keeps its log and settings in one folder on your Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/SqwarkSelf/. There’s no account and no sync, and nothing it records is sent to us. Delete that folder and everything it has recorded is gone.

Two things do leave, and only these:

• Jev, if you add your own key. For the cases its rules can’t settle, it sends TypeSafe the app’s name, the window title, the site and path, and the sentence you typed for the watch. Nothing from the private corners above. The key sits in your Keychain and is never logged. No key, no calls.
• The licence check, once SqwarkSelf is on sale. When you paste your key, and then on launch and at most once a day, the app will send the key, a random id made for your Mac and the Mac’s name to our licensing server. Never anything it has recorded. The free trial is counted on your Mac and sends nothing.

Six questions to ask any focus app

1. Does it need an account? What’s kept in it?
2. Where does the log live: on your computer, or on their servers?
3. Does it read keystrokes, take screenshots, or read what’s on the page?
4. What does it do with addresses: keep them whole, or just the site?
5. If it uses AI, what’s sent, to whom, and can you switch it off?
6. Can you delete everything, and how?

Good apps answer these on their own site, in plain words. The comparisons quote what each one says.

The full detail, including what the licensing server will keep, is on the privacy page.