Your work stays on your Mac.

Everything Trace records — your tasks, notes, decisions, screen captures and the contents of any Slack channel you connect — is stored in a database on your own machine. It is never uploaded to us. We cannot read it, cannot recover it for you, and do not know it exists.

If you delete the app, that data goes with it. There is no copy anywhere else.

Connecting Slack authorizes Trace with your own Slack account. The resulting tokens are stored in your macOS Keychain and used only by the app on your Mac, which talks to Slack directly. No message, no reaction and no token passes through any server of ours.

Trace reads Slack as you. That has two consequences worth stating plainly:

• It can only ever see what you can already see — channels you are a member of, and only the ones you explicitly pick inside Trace.
• It cannot see anything your colleagues can see and you cannot. Trace is not added to any channel and never appears in a channel’s member list.

Trace never posts, reacts or replies in a channel. Every reply it sends is a direct message to you.

One exception, and it is the only one: the page that completes the Slack sign-in, trace.app/slack/callback, briefly receives the authorization code Slack issues and immediately redirects it to the app on your machine. That code cannot be used without a secret generated on your Mac that never leaves it, so the page cannot obtain a token, read a message, or act as you. It stores nothing and logs nothing.

Trace can record a window or your screen when you ask it to. Those recordings, and anything transcribed from them, are written to disk on your Mac and stay there.

Some features summarise or classify your own text. Where this runs on Apple’s on-device models, nothing leaves the machine at all.

Where you have configured Trace with your own API key for an outside model provider, the text needed for that request is sent to that provider under your own account and their terms — not to us. Trace never sends your content to a model provider on your behalf without a key you supplied.

Trace checks in with us about once a day. The list below is the whole of it — not a summary of it.

• An install ID.Your Mac’s serial number, hashed with a secret built into the app. The serial itself never leaves your machine, and the ID identifies the computer rather than you — we cannot turn it back into a name, an email or a person.
• Which version you are on — version, build, release channel, your macOS version and whether the Mac is Apple silicon or Intel. This is how we know an update actually reached people.
• When your licence runs to, so the app can be told whether it may still run. The reply to this check-in is your licence, which is why this part is not optional.
• Which slash commands you use, and how many times. A command’s name, the date, and a number — nothing else. This is the one part you can switch off, in /config.

What that last one never includes: the text of any task, note or journal entry, your project names, your /find questions, any command you ran with /cli, file paths, or anything else you typed after the command. If you have renamed a command, it is counted under Trace’s own name for it, so the name you chose stays on your Mac.

If you email us, join the waitlist, or request access, we keep what you sent us so we can reply to you. Nothing more.

• Sell or share your data. There is nothing to sell — we do not have it.
• Upload your record, your captures, or your Slack messages.
• Read your Slack workspace, or hold credentials that could.
• Track you across other sites.
• Store the IP address a check-in arrives from. An anonymous ID plus an IP would be a person and a place, which is the thing hashing the serial exists to prevent.

Command usage sharing is on when you install Trace, and /config turns it off. Turning it off stops the counting as well as the sending, and discards whatever had been counted so far — it is not a switch that keeps a quiet record.

Disconnecting Slack inside Trace revokes the app’s access with Slack and deletes the stored tokens from your Keychain. Deleting the app removes the local database. Because we hold nothing, there is no request you need to send us to have your data erased — but if you have emailed us and want that deleted, ask and we will.

Navitek Labs — support@justrytrace.app

Last updated 7 August 2026.