Privacy

Your places stay yours

The short version: everything stays on your Mac.

Haunts is a local-first macOS app. It works by learning where you spend your time on your own machine and getting you back there quickly. To do that it never needs to send your data anywhere — and it doesn’t.

What stays on your Mac

  • The list of folders and projects Haunts knows about.
  • Its ranking — how frequently and recently you’ve visited each place.
  • Your settings: hotkey, scan roots, chosen editor and terminal, ranking mode.

All of this lives in Haunts’ local storage on your device. It is never uploaded, shared, or sold. There is no account to create and nothing to sign in to.

Privacy first

Haunts does not track what you open or where you go. There are no usage analytics, no crash reports tied to you, and no session or behaviour data of any kind.

Anonymous analytics

Haunts sends a single anonymous event when the app is first installed or upgraded to a new version. This helps us understand how many people are using the app and which versions are in use.

Each event contains only:

  • Event type (install or upgrade)
  • App version number
  • Operating system (macOS)

No personal data, device identifiers, IP addresses, usage patterns, or session information is collected. Analytics events are processed by GoatCounter, an open-source, privacy-first analytics service that does not track personal data.

The one permission it asks for

To open a path in Finder, Haunts uses macOS Automation. The first time it needs it, macOS shows the standard Automation (Finder) consent prompt. This is a normal system permission that lets one app tell another to do something — in this case, “open this folder”.

You grant it once. You can review or revoke it at any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation. Haunts reads folder paths locally to build its ranking; that index never leaves your Mac.

Updates

The one thing Haunts connects to the internet for is checking for and downloading its own software updates, using Sparkle. That’s a request for a version file and, when there’s a new release, the app download itself — nothing about you.

Questions

Haunts is open about how it works — the project lives on GitHub. If something here isn’t clear, open an issue there and ask.

Last updated 6 June 2026.