Privacy Policy

The short version

MacDotes collects nothing. It has no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no accounts, no advertising, and no network code of any kind. Nothing you do in MacDotes is sent anywhere, because MacDotes cannot send anything anywhere.

Everything it stores stays on your Mac, in two small files listed below. MacDotes is free: there is no account, no licence key and no purchase, so this website never asks you for anything either.

How that claim was checked

This is not a promise, it is a property of the shipped binary. Anyone can re-run these checks on the copy they installed:

• No network frameworks are linked. otool -L on the Release binary lists Foundation, AppKit, Carbon, Combine, CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, CryptoKit, QuartzCore, ServiceManagement, SwiftUI and the Swift runtime (which is where IOKit comes in) — no CFNetwork, no Network.framework, no Security.framework. CryptoKit is linked by a licence-key check that this free build never runs; it does no networking of any kind.
• No networking symbols are imported. nm -u filtered for URLSession, socket, getaddrinfo, nw_ or CFStream returns zero matches.
• Exactly one URL is compiled in, and the app never requests it. strings filtered for https:// returns one line: https://macdotes.aaronaludo.com/buy. It belongs to a “Buy a licence” button that the free build never shows, and the app could not fetch it anyway: see the two checks above.
• No analytics SDK is bundled. The app has no Frameworks directory at all — it bundles no third-party code.

The download from this site runs outside the App Sandbox — its entitlements set com.apple.security.app-sandbox to false, which is what lets F1–F12 reach the game. So the “nothing collected” claim above rests on the binary-inspection checks just listed, not on a sandbox boundary. If that ever changes, this page changes with it.

What MacDotes stores on your Mac

Two things, both local: your settings, at ~/Library/Preferences/com.aaronaludo.MacDotes.plist, and a log file at ~/Library/Logs/MacDotes/MacDotes.log.

1. Your settings. Whether MacDotes is switched on; which modifier mapping to apply while the game is in front and which to restore afterward; the detection rules — the app names, bundle identifiers or executable paths it treats as “the game”; the polling interval; and a pending “restore owed” marker, written before MacDotes changes anything so that a crash can be undone on the next launch. No device identifier, and nothing about you that you did not type in yourself.

2. A local diagnostic log, shown live in the app’s Log tab. It records what the app did and why: when the game came to the front or lost focus, which modifier mapping was applied or restored, and every refusal with its reason.

Please read this part carefully, because it is the one place MacDotes touches information about you. To decide whether a running application is your game, MacDotes reads that application’s name, bundle identifier, process id and executable path from macOS, and it writes those to the log when they match your detection rules. That log never leaves your Mac, is not transmitted or uploaded, is capped in size, and stays behind if you delete only the app. If you would rather not keep it, quit MacDotes and delete the file — nothing depends on it being present.

What MacDotes does not have access to

• It does not read your keystrokes. MacDotes is not a keylogger and contains no event tap. It rewrites which HID usage the Command and Option keys send, through the same low-level interface Apple’s own hidutil command uses — it never sees, receives or records which key you actually pressed. It requires no Accessibility or Input Monitoring permission, and macOS never prompts you for one — which is itself the proof: macOS requires that permission for any app that can observe keystrokes.
• It does not read your files. It never opens a file picker, never links a framework for browsing your files, and never asks for access to your documents. The only files it touches are its own settings and log, listed above.
• It does not use the camera, the microphone, your location, your contacts or your calendar. None of those frameworks are linked and none of the corresponding usage descriptions appear in its Info.plist, without which macOS would refuse the request.

Third parties

In the app: none. MacDotes bundles no third-party SDK, no analytics provider, no crash reporter and no advertising network — it has no Frameworks directory at all. Nothing is shared from your Mac, because nothing is collected there.

On this site: one. It is served by Vercel, which keeps ordinary server logs of requests to it — including the download — as any host does. There are no forms, no sign-up and no payment here. There is no analytics on these pages, no advertising, and no third-party script: the fonts are self-hosted at build time, so a network recording of this site shows no request to anyone else.

macOS itself may collect a crash report if MacDotes ever crashes, under Apple’s own privacy policy — the same as for any app on your Mac, App Store or not. That is between you and Apple; MacDotes receives nothing from it unless you separately choose to send us the report yourself.

Children

MacDotes is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, of any age.

Deleting your data

Quit MacDotes, then delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.aaronaludo.MacDotes.plist (your settings) and ~/Library/Logs/MacDotes/ (the log). If you ever ran a sandboxed test build, also delete ~/Library/Containers/com.aaronaludo.MacDotes/. Or just delete the app itself and leave the files behind — they are small, and nothing reads them once the app is gone. Either way, relaunching MacDotes afterward starts fresh from its built-in defaults.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of MacDotes ever collects anything, this page will say so before that version ships. A version that collects nothing will keep saying exactly that.

Contact

Questions about this policy: aaronaludo@gmail.com.