Skip to main content

Privacy in the desktop app

File paths never leave your Mac. The app has no telemetry: no analytics, advertising or tracking tools. It reads folders on your Mac to measure them, shows you the result, and sends that information nowhere.

On your Mac​

Logs, reports, receipts and archives are written to ~/.macleanup/ and stay there, shared with the command line. Settings live in ~/.macleanuprc and in the app's local storage.

What syncs when you sign in​

An account is optional. Signed in with Google, each run summary syncs only:

SyncedNever synced
Section idsFile and folder paths
Byte countsFile names or contents
Statuses — completed, skipped, failedReports, logs and receipts
macOS versionArchives

The account itself holds your email address and name from Google, your plan, your monthly run count and your saved shortcuts. It is stored with Supabase, the backend provider. Payments go through Polar, which tells the app your plan and payment status; the card number never reaches macleanup.

The same rule is a guarantee of the JSON event stream: path appears only in the local stream, log and report.

Network requests​

  • Update check — contacts GitHub Releases.
  • Sign-in and sync — only when you sign in.
  • Checkout — opens in your browser.
  • Release notice — the app reads the newest release notice from the backend provider at start, every 15 minutes and when you return. It sends the product's version and nothing about you.
  • Assistant — only when you ask. It sends your question and per-section numbers, sizes and counts, never paths. Answers come from Anthropic's Claude models through FilesHub; a spoken question is transcribed by Groq and the recording is not stored. See Assistant and backups.
  • Receipt backups — only on Pro or Team, when you back up or restore. The summary is stored privately with FilesHub and holds no paths.

Each service receives normal request details such as an IP address.

You can download your account data or delete your account from the Account screen. Deleting it removes the account, plan record, synced run numbers and receipt backups from the servers; everything on your Mac stays until you remove it. The full policy is the Privacy Policy.

Next​