Your habits stay on your Mac.

1. How the app actually tracks your time

A lot of "productivity" apps quietly record your screen, log your keystrokes, or sample what you're doing every few seconds. Are You Productive does none of that. There is no screen recording. There is no input monitoring. There is no AI watching what you do.

Here is everything the app does, every time you switch windows:

Plain English — we know you switched to Slack at 2:14 PM and stayed for 11 minutes. We have no idea what you said in there, who you talked to, or what channel you were in.

^* Firefox does not expose its active tab URL to other apps on macOS, so we cannot read it. In Firefox we still see the app and its window title, but not the per-tab URL.

2. Incognito and private browsing windows are skipped

When you open a private/incognito window in Safari, Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, or other supported browsers, Are You Productive detects it and ignores it entirely. The session isn't recorded, the tab URL isn't read, and the app doesn't even log that you opened a private window.

What's private to you stays private. Whether you're researching something sensitive or just don't want a tab to show up on your weekly chart — incognito means invisible.

3. Private Mode — pause tracking entirely

One click on the Private Mode toggle in the title bar fully pauses the tracker. No window changes are detected, no rows are written to the database, and a soft red aurora appears on screen so you never forget it's on.

Use it for personal time, meetings you'd rather not log, banking, journaling, the rest of the night — anything you don't want recorded. When you flip it back off, tracking resumes from that moment forward; nothing is back-filled.

4. Where your data lives (and where it doesn't)

Every session, every category mapping, every Focus Mode setting — all of it lives quietly on your Mac, inside your own user folder. There is no companion server, no cloud bucket, no background sync.

• ✓Local-only. Nothing is sent to any server, ever.
• ✓No cloud sync. No multi-device sync, no backup-to-cloud option, no "sign in to save your data."
• ✓No account required. The app does not have a login screen.
• ✓FileVault-encrypted if you have FileVault on (which macOS recommends by default).
• ✓Yours to delete. Drag the folder to the trash and your history is gone.

5. No telemetry. No analytics. No crash reporting.

The app itself does not phone home. There is no analytics SDK (no Mixpanel, no PostHog, no Google Analytics, no Sentry, no Amplitude). We do not know which features you use, how often you open the app, what your productivity score is, or whether the app even crashed.

The only network calls the app makes are:

• Update checks. The app fetches a small JSON file from our update endpoint to see if a new version is available. That request includes only your current app version and OS — no identifier, no email, no usage data.
• Downloading the update itself if you choose to install it.

That's it. If you turn off Wi-Fi the app keeps working forever.

6. Email — the one thing we ask for, and only if you say yes

When you click Download for macOS on this website, a small popup asks for your email. This is the only piece of personal data we ever collect, and you have full control over what happens with it.

• ✓We never sell, rent, or share your email with third parties.
• ✓We never email you marketing from other companies.
• ✓Every email we send includes a one-click unsubscribe.
• ✓You can request full deletion of your email at any time — no questions asked.

7. macOS permissions the app asks for

macOS will prompt you for two permissions on first run. Here's exactly what each one is for and what it does not let the app do.

• Accessibility Required so macOS will tell us when the front-most window changes and let us read the focused app's title and active browser tab. We do not use this permission to read other windows, simulate clicks, or observe input events.
• Automation (browser tab URL) Used only to ask your browser for its currently active tab URL, and only when a browser is the front-most app. We do not read other tabs, history, bookmarks, downloads, or saved passwords.

8. Changes to this policy

If we ever change how the app handles data, we will update this page and bump the "last updated" date at the top. If a change is material — for example, if we ever added an opt-in cloud sync — we would announce it in the changelog and require you to explicitly opt in. We will never quietly start collecting data we used to leave alone.