Legal

Privacy Policy

Pulse reads a lot about your Mac to be useful, and sends almost none of it anywhere. This page is the specific, checkable version of that claim.

Last updated 28 July 2026

The short version. Your clipboard history never leaves your Mac and is never written to disk — quitting Pulse erases it. Your calendar events are never transmitted. Pulse has no analytics, no telemetry and no accounts. The only things that leave your machine are a weather lookup, album artwork for web players, an update check, and feedback you deliberately submit.

What Pulse reads on your Mac

Pulse is a menu bar app that shows what is happening on your Mac. To do that it reads the following locally. Every one of these can be switched off in Settings, and switching one off stops the reading entirely rather than just hiding the card.

  • Clipboard. Pulse keeps a short history of what you copy so you can get back to it. This history lives in memory only. It is never written to disk, never synced, and never sent anywhere — quit Pulse and it is gone.
  • Calendar. With your permission, Pulse reads upcoming events to show a meeting countdown. Titles, times and attendees are read on your Mac and displayed on your Mac. They are never transmitted.
  • Now playing. Pulse reads the current track from Music, Spotify and supported browsers to show the player, and sends transport commands (play, pause, skip) when you use the controls. This uses macOS Apple Events and stays on your machine.
  • Bluetooth devices. With your permission, Pulse detects connected devices such as AirPods and reads their battery level to show the devices card.
  • System stats. CPU, GPU, memory, storage, network and power readings are sampled locally for the stats card and are not recorded or transmitted.
  • Screenshots. Pulse asks macOS to tell it when you take a screenshot so it can offer a shortcut to it. It reads the file path, not the image contents, and does not upload anything.

What actually leaves your Mac

Four things, and only these four. Each one is listed with who receives it and why.

  • Weather (Open-Meteo). If the weather card is on, Pulse sends a location to Open-Meteo to fetch a forecast. That is either your approximate coordinates, if you granted location access, or a city name you typed in Settings. No account, no identifier and nothing else about you is attached. Turn the weather card off, or set a city manually instead of granting location, and no coordinates are ever sent.
  • Album artwork (Google). When the track playing in a browser is a YouTube or YouTube Music video, Pulse fetches the thumbnail from Google's image host (i.ytimg.com). That request contains the video ID and reaches Google like any other image load. Artwork from Music and Spotify is read locally and involves no request.
  • Update checks (GitHub). If you let Pulse check for updates, it requests a small release feed from raw.githubusercontent.com once a day, and downloads the new build from GitHub if you accept one. It is a plain HTTPS request: GitHub sees your IP address and the Pulse version making the request, the same as any file download. No identifier, no account and nothing about your Mac is attached. Pulse asks before it checks the first time, and the check can be turned off in Settings — the app is fully functional with it off.
  • Feedback you submit. Nothing is sent unless you open the feedback form and press send. When you do, Pulse transmits your star rating, your written review, your email address if you chose to enter one, plus the Pulse version and build, your macOS version and your Mac model (for example MacBookPro18,3). The model and OS version tell us which notch a report came from. This is stored in our Supabase database.

Pulse contains no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier and no account system. It does not phone home on launch. The update check described above is the only request Pulse makes on its own behalf, it is announced before it first runs, and it can be switched off.

The website

This site is separate from the app and does collect a little, because it has to sell and ship a download.

  • Download email gate. To download the beta you enter an email address. We store that address, the page you started from, and a salted SHA-256 hash of your IP address. The hash lets us see that one address claimed the download fifty times; it cannot be reversed to recover your IP. Your raw IP is never stored.
  • Google Analytics. When configured, the site loads Google Analytics 4, which sets cookies and records page views plus a custom event when a download link is clicked. This is standard GA behaviour and is subject to Google's privacy policy. Browser-level tracking protection or an ad blocker will stop it, and nothing on this site breaks if you do.
  • Founder pre-order (Razorpay). The pre-order button is a link to a page hosted by Razorpay. Nothing is sent when you look at it — only if you follow it and pay. From that point Razorpay handles the transaction and receives whatever you enter there, including your email and payment details. We never see or store your card. What reaches us is the record of the payment itself: the amount, and the email you paid with, which is how your licence key finds you.
  • Server logs. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary request logs for security and reliability, as every web host does.

Who processes data for us

  • Supabase — stores beta signup emails and submitted feedback.
  • Open-Meteo — receives a location to return a forecast.
  • Google — Analytics on the website, and thumbnail hosting for web player artwork.
  • GitHub — serves the update feed and the app downloads it offers.
  • Razorpay — takes payment for pre-orders, on their own hosted page.

We do not sell your data, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not build profiles from it.

How long we keep things

Beta signup emails are kept while Pulse is in beta and for as long as we are contacting testers about it. Feedback submissions are kept while they are useful for fixing the thing they describe. Clipboard, calendar, device and system data have no retention period because we never receive them.

Your choices and your rights

Every permission Pulse asks for is optional, is requested by macOS at the moment it is first needed, and can be revoked at any time in System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security. Revoking one disables the matching card rather than breaking the app.

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete the personal data we hold — which, for almost everyone, is one email address. Email amtalreja02@gmail.com and we will action it. You do not need an account, and there is nothing to log into.

Children

Pulse is a developer utility and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal data from them.

Changes to this policy

If Pulse starts doing something new with data — a sync feature, an account system, a licence check — this page changes before that ships, and the date at the top changes with it. Material changes will also be announced on the site.

Contact

Pulse is made by Aayush Talreja. Questions about this policy, or a request about your data, go to amtalreja02@gmail.com.