All local. Never your screen.
re:Work is built to know what you worked on without seeing what you wrote. This page lists what it reads, what it keeps, and what leaves your Mac, which is nothing about your activity. These are rules the app is built and tested against, not settings.
01What it reads
- The frontmost app’s name, its window title, and the document it has open.
- In a browser, the active tab’s address.
- When you started and stopped, and whether you were idle.
- How many keys were pressed, as a count from the system’s own counter. Never which keys.
- Whether the clipboard changed. Never what is on it.
- Whether the frontmost app is playing media. Never the media itself.
- Identifiers in the focused window that match a published pattern, such as a link, a ticket key, or a repository name. Only those values are kept; everything else is discarded in memory.
- If you turn on Calendar: event structure and attendee counts, never event notes.
02What it never touches
- No screenshots, screen recording, or reading text off the screen.
- No audio, and no microphone.
- No keystroke content, no event taps, no global input monitoring.
- No clipboard content.
- No page or document contents.
These are enforced in the app’s source: a check that runs on every change rejects the system interfaces that could do any of the above, and is itself tested to prove it fails when one is added.
03What it skips
Apps you exclude. Apps added under Settings → Privacy are not read, recorded, or counted from the moment you add them. Earlier history stays where it is.
Private windows. A recognized private window in Chrome or Firefox records only the app, its category, and how long, with no title, address, or content. When detection is unsure, re:Work treats the window as private. Safari’s private windows cannot be told apart without reading pixels, so exclude Safari under Privacy if you want no Safari detail at all.
04What it keeps
- Everything lives in one local database on your Mac, plus a cache of site icons. There is no account, no cloud sync, and no export endpoint.
- Titles are cleaned before they are stored. Raw titles are never written to disk.
- Query strings, URL fragments, and credentials are stripped from every address, including addresses that appear inside window titles.
- Terminal command text is never stored, only the project it belongs to.
- The app’s own logs never contain titles, addresses, domains, paths, or names.
- You choose how long history is kept: forever, or 30, 90, or 365 days. Settings → Data → Clear all data deletes every recorded day.
The database is not separately encrypted; turn on FileVault to encrypt your whole disk.
05What leaves your Mac
Nothing you did. No app names, titles, addresses, domains, paths, people, or timing of your work is sent anywhere, for any reason.
The app does make a few requests of its own, each through one gate that refuses private and internal addresses and writes every request to a ledger you can read in Settings → Privacy. One switch there turns all of it off.
| Request | Sent to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Site icon and title | The site you visited, directly | So a website shows its own icon and name. No third-party icon or classification service is used. |
| App management | re:Work’s own update and support endpoints | Updates and support requests. |
| Crash reports | Only if you opt in | A fixed form that cannot carry your data. |
06Permissions
re:Work asks for one permission during setup. The others are optional, and each asks only when you turn on the feature that needs it.
| Permission | Unlocks | Without it |
|---|---|---|
| Accessibility (required) | Window titles, document paths, browser addresses | Recording waits for the grant. If it is lost later, apps, time, idle, and typing counts keep recording, marked as degraded. |
| Calendar | Meeting names and attendees, and Plan | Meetings are still detected from Zoom, Teams, Webex, and Meet. Plan is unavailable. |
| Notifications | The daily recap and focus nudges | Silent. |
| Contacts | Photos for people re:Work already knows by name, if you turn People on | Monogram tiles. |
re:Work never asks for Screen Recording, Input Monitoring, Automation, or Full Disk Access.
Why it is not in the Mac App Store. A sandboxed app is never offered the Accessibility permission, so re:Work is distributed directly rather than through the Mac App Store.
07This website
This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Its fonts, images, and scripts are served from the site itself, so visiting it makes no requests to anyone else.