See how iOS apps quietly change what they collect about you.
privacytracker keeps an eye on the privacy labels Apple shows on each app's App Store page — the Data Used to Track You, Data Linked to You and Data Not Linked to You sections — and tells you when an app you use changes them. It can also summarise developer privacy policies in plain language and pull historical label snapshots back to 2021 so you can see how an app's data practices evolved over time.
It runs entirely on your own computer. No accounts, no servers, no tracking.
brew tap privacykey/tap
brew install --cask privacytrackerGrab the latest signed .dmg from
Releases →
Apple Silicon and Intel builds are both signed and notarised, so they open without "unidentified developer" warnings and update themselves quietly in the background.
Available as a Docker image — see the user guide for setup.
📸 The user guide walks through every screen.
Full documentation lives at privacytracker-docs.privacykey.org:
- User guide — how to import apps, read privacy labels, set up alerts
- AI provider setup — bring your own OpenAI / Anthropic / local model
- Architecture — for developers and contributors
- Architecture & workflows (in-repo) — end-to-end diagrams of every process, with weak points marked and an improvement backlog
- Security — how to report a vulnerability
Everything is stored in a single local SQLite file (data/privacy.db — a
Docker named volume by default, or the app-data directory in the desktop
build). The app restricts it to your user account on open (0700 on the
directory, 0600 on the database files). Be aware that if you configure
an AI provider, your API key is stored in plaintext inside that local
database — anyone with access to your user account (or your backups)
can read it, so treat the machine as the trust boundary and prefer a
key with a spending cap. Moving desktop keys into the OS keychain is
planned.
Beta. The core loop — track apps, detect label changes, browse history — is stable and in daily use. Interfaces and database schema may still shift between minor versions; migrations run automatically on start, but keep a backup (Settings → Backup & Restore) before upgrading if your data matters to you.
| Platform | Status |
|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) | Signed, notarised, self-updating |
| Docker / self-host | Supported — docker compose up --build -d |
| Linux / Windows desktop | Not packaged yet; run the Docker image or from source |
Releases are published on GitHub Releases and the Homebrew tap, and documented in CHANGELOG.md. Versioning follows semver: while the project is pre-1.0, breaking changes can land in a minor bump, and each release note calls them out. macOS installs update themselves in the background.
Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, the commands CI runs, and the conventions that are easy to miss (the accessibility gate is blocking, and copy goes through i18n).
- Code of Conduct
- Getting help / where to ask
- Reporting a vulnerability — please don't open a public issue
- AGENTS.md — the canonical deep-dive on how everything fits together