Privacy

Everything stays on your Mac. Exactly two things touch the network, and both can be turned off.

Everything cap stores stays on your Mac: one SQLite database and an assets folder under ~/Library/Application Support/cap/. There is no account, no sync service, no analytics, and no telemetry of any kind.

cap produces exactly two kinds of network traffic. Both are disclosed here, and both can be turned off.

1. The page fetch

When you capture a link, cap stores the readable body of the page so search can match its words. If the capture came from a Safari, Chrome, or Arc tab, cap reads the rendered page from that tab and nothing touches the network. Otherwise — CLI captures, scripts, Firefox — cap fetches the URL itself, hardened as follows:

http and https only
an ephemeral browsing context: no shared cookies, nothing persisted
navigation locked to the target URL — no redirects to other pages
a 15-second timeout and a 10 MB size cap

A failed fetch keeps the capture (title, URL, selection) and is retryable.

Opting out: per capture with cap add --no-fetch, or globally with the Fetch page content for link captures toggle in Settings.

2. The version check

The menu-bar app asks the GitHub Releases API for the latest version at most once a week. The request carries nothing beyond the version lookup itself. When a newer release exists, an “Update available” menu item appears — updating itself is always manual, via Homebrew.

Opting out: the Check weekly for a new version toggle in Settings.

On-device processing

Text recognition in captured images runs entirely on-device using Apple’s Vision framework. Nothing you capture is sent anywhere for processing.

Sandboxing

cap runs unsandboxed, with the hardened runtime on release builds. Reading the frontmost browser tab through Accessibility and Apple Events is not possible inside the App Sandbox — that is also why cap is distributed through Homebrew rather than the Mac App Store. Release builds are Developer ID-signed and notarized by Apple.

The source is MIT-licensed and open — audit any of this at github.com/jamiedavenport/cap.