Privacy and diagnostics
Whinge records your screen and your voice, so here's exactly where that goes.
What stays on your Mac#
- The recordings. Video of every display, and the microphone, saved to the session folder.
- Transcription. Your speech becomes text on-device, with macOS's speech recognition.
- Listening for "let's whinge". Also on-device. Nothing is recorded until it's heard.
- The debug log. What Whinge was doing, including what you said and window titles, kept in each whinge's folder and in one rolling log. It's only sent if you tick it in a bug report.
There are no accounts, and Whinge has no server that sees your whinges.
What's on screen#
The recording is of your whole screen, so the privacy screen tidies it while a whinge is on: your desktop icons are covered, and in Settings → General it can also swap the wallpaper for a plain colour or a picture, and hide every app but the one you're whinging about. They come back when the whinge stops. Your Mac's own settings aren't changed.
Processing your recordings#
Whinge saves recordings locally and does not send them to Claude or another processing service. You can choose your own tools to read the saved folder later.
Update checks#
Once a day, Whinge fetches whinge.computer/appcast.xml to see if there's a new version. That request carries the app's name and version (in its user agent) and nothing else: no system profile, no ID. Turn it off with Check for updates automatically in Settings → General.
Diagnostics#
Whinge asks once whether to share diagnostics. It's off until you say yes, and you can change it in Settings → General.
Reports include the app, build and macOS versions, the architecture, which stage failed, and a numeric error code. Crash reports contain image UUIDs and offsets, not stack text. They never include recordings, screenshots, transcripts, prompts, project paths, error messages or account details. Each report has a random ID, and there's no installation ID.
Report a problem… in the menu works whether or not sharing is on. It shows you the complete report before anything is sent.
Bug reports#
A bug report is different: it's made of your content. It holds the screenshots taken while reporting, what you said and typed, and, if you leave it ticked, the debug log, as well as the app, build and macOS versions. It's only sent when you press Send in the window that shows you all of it, and nothing from the whinge itself goes with it.
It goes to Whinge's developers over HTTPS and is kept in private storage that only they can read. If it can't be sent straight away, it waits in Whinge's Application Support folder and is tried again for up to 30 days.