Help · The app

Privacy and what leaves your Mac

owntime works with no connection at all. That is not a setting you have to find, it is how it is built. No account, no sign in, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no usage statistics.

The complete list of network uses

1. Activating your licence, once. When you paste a key, owntime checks it with the store you bought it from. It does not re-check on every launch.
2. Checking for updates. When you ask it to from Settings, it fetches a small version file from owntime.click.
3. Backing up to your own bucket, only if you configured R2 or S3. That request goes from your Mac to your bucket, with your keys.
4. Sending a budget alert, only if you set up email alerts. That goes to your mail provider.

Nothing else. There is no fifth item on that list, and no background pinging.

The app works offline forever

Pull the network out and everything still works: tracking, invoices, reports, imports, backups to a local folder. The four items above are the only things that need a connection, and three of them are optional and off until you turn them on.

What the app reads on your Mac

• Nothing, by default. The passive timeline is off until you enable it.
• If you enable the timeline: the name of the frontmost app and its window title, every few seconds, stored only in your own database. It is read to help you reconstruct a day, and it is never uploaded.
• Idle detection only asks whether the machine has had input. It does not record what you were doing.

The local endpoint

owntime listens on 127.0.0.1:45123 so the optional command line tool can start and stop timers. It is bound to your machine only, it refuses requests that do not come from localhost, and writes need a token. Nothing about it is reachable from outside your Mac.

Where your data is, and who can read it

One file in your Documents folder. It is as private as your Documents folder is private. If someone has your unlocked Mac, they have your timesheet, which is the same deal as any document you keep. Encryption at rest is your disk encryption’s job, and macOS gives you that for free.

One honest note: your SMTP password and any bucket keys are stored unencrypted inside that same database file, so treat the file as sensitive. They are not included in the JSON export from Settings, and they never leave your Mac.

Next: where your data lives · timeline and the macOS permission