# 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](/docs/recording#whingeing-about-whinge) 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.