Privacy policy

In short: your data stays with you. Hamsty collects no telemetry, shows no ads and never sends your clipboard contents to any server.

What is stored and where

• History, images, rich text and snippets — in ~/Library/Application Support/Hamsty, encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Only your user account can access the folder.
• The encryption key — in the macOS Keychain, on this Mac only.
• Settings — in standard macOS preferences. No clipboard contents are stored there.

What is never stored

• Data marked by password managers per the nspasteboard.org convention.
• Copies made in apps you excluded under “App rules” (password managers by default).
• Text from password fields — they are never read when capturing selections.
• Anything copied while recording is paused.

Sensitive data

Hamsty detects API keys, tokens, private keys, card numbers and one-time codes right on your Mac. Such items are masked, excluded from search, deleted automatically after a set time (10 minutes by default) and never synced.

Network

Hamsty connects to the network in exactly two cases:

• Update checks — once a day, a request to GitHub Releases (can be disabled). It carries no user or device identifiers and uses no cookies.
• Sync — only if you turn it on. Data is encrypted with a key derived from your passphrase on your Mac and written to your iCloud Drive. Neither Apple nor we can read it.

Text recognition (OCR)

Text in images is recognized fully on-device using Apple’s built-in Vision framework.

This website

This site uses no cookies. To see which pages people read, we use Vercel Web Analytics: it counts page views anonymously, without cookies or cross-site tracking. It has nothing to do with the app or your clipboard.

Deleting your data

In the app: “Settings → Privacy → Delete everything”. Completely: delete ~/Library/Application Support/Hamsty, the app.hamsty.* Keychain items and the Hamsty Sync folder in iCloud Drive.

Contact

Questions about privacy or the app? Write to [email protected].