MacSonarMacSonar Space Privacy Statement
Version 1.3 · 3 October 2026
The short version: MacSonar Space makes one kind of network request, about your licence and nothing else. Nothing about your files, your folder names or your disk ever leaves your Mac.
The one thing we send
When you activate a licence, the app sends two things to our merchant of record, Dodo Payments:
| Sent | Why |
|---|---|
| Your licence key | To check it is real and has a seat left |
| A name for this Mac | So you can tell your Macs apart when you need to free a seat |
When you press Deactivate This Mac, the app sends the same key and this Mac's activation id once more, to release the seat before it forgets them.
The name is your computer's hostname plus the first eight characters of its hardware identifier — enough to tell two Macs called "MacBook Pro" apart, and not the whole identifier.
After that, the app re-checks the same key once a day. If it cannot reach the server it keeps working for thirty days, because a licence you paid for should survive a flight, a captive portal and somebody else's outage.
That is the entire list. There is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no update check, no advertising identifier and no account.
What we do not send
Not your file names, not your folder structure, not your disk size, not what you deleted, not how often you use it. The measuring, the map, the duplicate comparison and the search all run on your Mac and keep working with the network switched off.
This is verifiable rather than promised. The app contains exactly one piece of network code — Activation.swift, which posts to live.dodopayments.com — and no embedded browser, no subprocess and no helper daemon. Watch it with Little Snitch and you will see that request and nothing else. The System Monitor shows network throughput, but it reads kernel counters, which is not the same as opening a connection.
One honest qualification: buying a licence, reading release notes and reporting a problem all work by handing a link to your browser or mail app, which then connects on its own, as it would for any link you clicked.
What stays on your Mac
MacSonar keeps a small amount of data in ~/Library/Application Support/MacSonar/:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
Snapshots/ | Folder sizes from previous scans, so the app can tell you what grew |
Scans/last-scan.json | The most recent scan, so reopening the app does not mean measuring again |
licence.txt | An offline licence file, if you were issued one |
activation.json | Your licence key, the activation's id, and when it was last checked |
first-run | The date the trial started |
Preferences (scan defaults, map depth, the duplicate size floor) live in the standard macOS preferences for the app.
None of this leaves your Mac. To remove all of it, delete that folder and the app.
Full Disk Access
MacSonar asks for Full Disk Access so it can measure folders macOS otherwise hides from it — without it, parts of your home folder are blocked and the app reports them as unreadable rather than pretending they are empty.
The permission is used to read sizes. Files are moved to the Trash only when you select them and confirm, and the app tells you what it is about to move and what it will cost you.
Your purchase
If you buy a licence, the purchase is handled by our merchant of record on their own site, under their privacy policy. We receive your email address in order to issue the licence, and we use it to send you the licence and to answer support you ask for. We do not sell it and we do not add you to a mailing list.
Your licence file contains your email address. That is deliberate — it is what makes casual sharing self-limiting — and the app says so in the licence window, because anyone you send the file to can read it.
Early-access registration (macsonar.com)
If you register for early access on our website, we store only your email address and the time you registered, in a database we control. We use it to send you one confirmation email straight away, and to email you when MacSonar Space launches. We do not use it for anything else: no analytics, no third-party mailing list, no resale. Registering does not collect payment and does not guarantee a seat among the first 200 customers.
The confirmation email is sent through our email provider, Resend, which receives your email address and the message in order to deliver it. It is sent only the first time an address registers. If we are receiving an unusually large number of registrations, we may skip it; your registration is still saved.
To limit abuse, the registration form also uses your IP address briefly. It is held only in the server’s temporary memory, to count how many times the form has been used from one address in the past hour. Our code does not write it to the database, and we do not use it for anything else.
To be removed from this list at any time, email support.
This website
What the macsonar.com website itself collects, including analytics, is described in the website privacy notice.
Support
If you email support, we have whatever you put in the email for as long as it takes to answer it.