Privacy policy

The desktop app and the recorder, in short

Draft — pending attorney review

The short version. The sections after this one give the detail.

What the recorder records

Draft — pending attorney review

The recorder runs on your Mac and writes a record there. It records:

• Agent chats: which agent it is, such as Claude Code, the folder the chat works in, the agent’s own chat ID and settings folder, when the chat starts and ends, and the model named in its launch settings, if one is.
• Programs: the ones it ties to an agent chat, and some it sees but can’t tie to one. For each, its name, its location on disk, a fingerprint of the program file (SHA-256) and its code-signing details, the folder it starts in, whether it has a terminal, when it starts and stops, and how it ended.
• From a program’s command line, only the program’s name, with three exceptions: the model name given to a known agent program (such as the value after claude --model); one word after an administrator or system tool (such as the subcommand after launchctl, or for sudo, the name of the program it ran); and fixed labels the recorder picks after reading the next word or two in memory, such as which package manager was installing, which package tool a program was running under (a node process running npm is labelled npm), or whether a command was building, testing or packaging. The words it reads for those labels aren’t kept.
• Environment variables: only names from a fixed list that coding agents, editors and terminals set, and the values of some of them, such as the terminal app’s name, the agent’s chat ID, its settings folder and model names. Every other variable is left out.
• File names: while an agent chat is open, the names of files created, changed, renamed or removed in the places it watches: your home folder, the system’s temporary folders, /private/etc, and the folders for launch agents and launch daemons. It keeps a change even when it can’t tell which program made it, so the record can include changes you or other apps made during that time. It skips some busy folders it treats as noise.
• While an agent chat is open, sensitive places, such as shell startup files (like ~/.zshrc), SSH keys (~/.ssh) and cloud credential files (like ~/.aws): changes to them, and a note when a program it tracks has one open at the moment the recorder checks. Other files that programs only read are not recorded.
• Administrator and system tools: when a program uses tools such as sudo, launchctl, the keychain command-line tool, ssh-add, crontab or osascript.
• Network connections made by the programs it tracks: the protocol, the remote address and port, the local port, when the connection was first and last seen, and a host name where the recorder can put one. Also the ports programs listen on. For a connection made by a package tool, such as npm or pip, or a program running under one, it also records the folders the tool had files open in at that moment, and how many files in each, never the files’ names. It does not record how much data a connection carried.
• The recorder itself: when it started and stopped, gaps in its recording, its own crashes, each round of host-name lookups, and an ID for this install, made on your Mac from the time it was created and random numbers.

It keeps names and places, never what’s inside them.

What it doesn’t record

Draft — pending attorney review

• Your conversations with the agent
• What's inside your files
• The contents of network traffic
• The rest of a command line after the program’s name, apart from the three exceptions above
• Environment variables outside its fixed list
• How much data a connection carried

The desktop app can ask the recorder to read an agent’s own transcript, but only when you click for it. The next section says what that reads and keeps.

Reading an agent’s transcript, only when you ask

Draft — pending attorney review

Claude Code keeps its own transcript of each chat on your Mac. The desktop app has three controls that ask the recorder to read it: one compares a single session with its transcript, one compares every session of a day, and one shows an open chat’s last tool call in the Right now view. Each is off until you click it, and nothing remembers the choice.

When you click, the recorder opens that chat’s transcript files and keeps, in memory, only: each tool call’s name, timings and ID; one detail per tool (the file path for tools that write or read a file, the program name of a shell command, the host of a web address); and the model’s name. It drops everything else as it reads, including what you and the agent wrote and what each tool returned.

Nothing from the transcript is written to the record. The app shows the answer and doesn’t save it, with one exception: if you label a model change the comparison found, the desktop app’s label store keeps that change’s time and its kind (model.switch) with your label.

Where the record lives

Draft — pending attorney review

Nothing from the record leaves your machine.

The record is a database file on your Mac. If the recorder is installed to start when you log in, it is ~/Library/Application Support/Blackbox/blackbox.sqlite3. If you start recording from the desktop app, it is in the app’s own folder, ~/Library/Application Support/com.rootedreality.agents/blackbox.

The desktop app reads the record where it is. We don’t upload it.

Three other things stay on your Mac. The recorder keeps a log of its own running at ~/Library/Logs/Blackbox/blackbox.log (and, when it starts at login, two more log files beside it). The desktop app keeps the labels and notes you add in labels.sqlite, in its own folder; a label or note can’t contain a slash or a backslash, so it can’t hold a folder path. It also keeps a small note in that folder of which version of the beta agreement and of the recording consent you agreed to, and when. That note isn’t sent anywhere.

Rooted Reality doesn’t add its own encryption to these files. They are ordinary files in your Mac user folder.

What does go out

Draft — pending attorney review

Two things go out today, and a third is planned. None of them carries the record’s contents; the planned one, which isn’t built yet, would name only a category, such as “left running”.

The desktop app has no analytics, crash reporting, accounts or sign-in, and its window loads nothing from the internet. Apart from its lookups, the recorder has no network code.

How long it’s kept, and deleting it

Draft — pending attorney review

The record stays on your Mac until the recorder deletes it or you do. The recorder deletes events and connections after 14 days, and chats, programs and daily summaries after 365 days. There is no control to change these yet. It does this once an hour while it is running. The data handling page lists what it keeps longer.

To delete the record, first stop the recorder: click Stop recording in the desktop app if you recorded from there, or, if the recorder is installed to start at login, run blackbox watch --uninstall. The wipe command refuses while the recorder is recording, and the login item starts the recorder again if it stops. Then use the recorder’s wipe command, blackbox wipe --yes (add --data-dir and the folder above if you recorded from the desktop app), or delete that folder yourself. The desktop app runs a copy of the recorder kept beside the app or, if there is none, the one the recorder’s install command put at ~/.local/bin/blackbox. How the recorder will ship with the desktop app isn’t settled yet.

The wipe command removes the database, its working files and any exports in its default exports folder. It keeps its log, the lists you edit and your labels, and an export you wrote to another folder with --out stays there. The desktop app has no button that deletes the record; in the app you can delete a label you added.

Because the record never reaches us, we can’t see, export or delete it for you.

Questions and requests

Draft — pending attorney review

Write to hello@rootedreality.com with any question about this policy, or to ask about what we hold about you.

If you are in the EU or the UK, the GDPR page lists the rights you have and how to use them. What this website’s database holds is stored in the United States; the GDPR page says more.

Wherever you live, you can email hello@rootedreality.com to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, or to have it corrected or deleted. We don’t sell personal data, and we don’t share it for advertising.

Rooted Reality for coding agents and this website aren’t meant for anyone under 18, and we don’t knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you think someone under 18 has joined the waitlist, email hello@rootedreality.com and we’ll delete the entry.

Changes to this policy

Draft — pending attorney review

If we change this policy, we’ll publish the new version on this page and change the effective date at the top of it. If a change is material, we’ll also email the people on our waitlist, and anyone on our update list who hasn’t unsubscribed, when we publish it.

Email lists and waitlists

Draft — pending attorney review

To be removed from any list, email hello@rootedreality.com from the address you signed up with, and we will delete it. Our database host keeps restore points for a limited time, so a deleted entry can stay in them until they expire.

Analytics, hosting logs and cookies

Draft — pending attorney review