Privacy & telemetry

Your index stays on your Mac. Usage analytics are anonymous counts, never file names, paths or search text, and you can turn them off.

Your index stays local

The search index, folder sizes, photo metadata and disk measurements live in a database in ~/Library/Application Support/mac-explorer/ on your Mac. The index stores names, sizes and dates, not file contents. The local API that macx uses listens only on 127.0.0.1, needs a token that only your user can read, and rejects requests from web pages.

Anonymous usage analytics

To see which features get used and whether indexing works, Mac Explorer sends anonymous usage events:

• What’s sent: counts, durations, size buckets and named events (for example “search used, query length 5–10 characters” or “indexing finished, about this many files”), the app version, macOS version and chip, and a random device ID that isn’t tied to you.
• What’s never sent: file names, paths, search text, file contents, or anything else that identifies you or your files.
• Events are batched and sent about every 30 seconds.
• Activity from macx and AI agents is never part of analytics.

Turn it off in Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Privacy ▸ Share anonymous usage data & crash logs. When it’s off, nothing is queued or sent.

Diagnostic reports

If the search engine can’t start, Mac Explorer automatically sends a diagnostic report (at most once every five minutes) so the problem can be fixed. You can also send one yourself from Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Diagnostics & Logs ▸ Send report.

A report includes the app and macOS versions, the state of Bun and the engine, the engine’s error output and the last part of the app’s log.

Update checks

Mac Explorer checks for a new version shortly after launch and every six hours after that. The check fetches the latest version number and nothing else.

When files leave your Mac

Only when you share them:

• Share via croc sends files directly to the recipient, end-to-end encrypted.
• Share as Link uploads files to the share server configured in Settings ▸ Sharing, so anyone with the link can download them until you revoke it.
• Remotes transfer files to the services you connect.