What Timeslicer does with your data
Timeslicer watches what you do on your computer so it can tell you what you worked on. That is a reasonable thing to be cautious about. This page explains what actually happens, including the parts that are less comfortable.
The privacy policy is the binding document. This page is the plain-language version of it.
The short version
Your task history lives on your computer. Timeslicer's own servers never receive it. To turn raw activity into task names, text is sent to Google and OpenAI, which are contractually barred from training on it and delete it within thirty days.
So the processing is not local, even though the storage is. Our privacy policy says exactly that, and we would rather you read it here than discover it later.
What gets recorded
By default, Timeslicer records the names of applications you use and the titles of the windows and pages you open, along with when you started and stopped.
If you turn on window snapshots, it also reads text from the front window. This is off until you enable it. macOS calls the underlying permission Screen Recording, which sounds worse than what happens: Timeslicer takes a single still image of the front window at most every few minutes, reads the text on it, and discards the image immediately. No video is recorded, and the image itself never leaves your computer.
Snapshots are what make task names specific rather than generic. Without them, Timeslicer is working from application names and window titles alone.
What leaves your device
Text does. To classify content and infer tasks, Timeslicer sends screen-derived text, application names and window titles to Google and OpenAI. Under our agreements with both, that data is not used to train or improve their models, and it is deleted after thirty days.
Processing is not local, even though storage is.
Timeslicer Privacy Policy
We say this plainly because the alternative is letting you assume otherwise. A tool that names your tasks has to understand what is on your screen, and that understanding currently happens on a model provider's infrastructure, not on your laptop.
What Timeslicer's own servers never receive
Our servers do not receive your captured text, your task titles, your task history, your durations, or the list of applications and websites you use. There is no cloud synchronization of task data.
What we do hold is operational metadata about classification and inference requests: timestamps, request counts, and which account made a request. That metadata does not include the contents of those requests.
One practical consequence is worth stating directly. If someone sends us a legal request for your task data or your captured screen content, we cannot produce it, because we do not have it. The same fact cuts the other way: we cannot delete that data for you either, because we have no access to it. It is on your machine and you control it.
What is never captured at all
Some things are excluded before any capture happens, rather than filtered afterwards. Roughly ninety government, health and payment domains are on that list, including .gov domains, hospital and healthcare sites, and banking and payment sites. Their text is never stored on your device and never sent to any provider.
You can add any site to a personal do-not-scan list, and it is excluded on the same basis.
For content that is captured, we attempt to strip certain categories of personal information before anything is transmitted, including patterns that look like Social Security numbers, email addresses and bank account numbers.
What we cannot promise
The redaction described above is pattern matching, and pattern matching is not foolproof. Depending on what is on your screen when a snapshot is taken, processed text may still contain personal information. We are not going to claim otherwise.
Your local Timeslicer files are readable by your operating system user account. They are not encrypted at rest beyond the protections your operating system already provides. If someone has your unlocked computer, they can read your task history.
Timeslicer has no published SOC 2 certification and no third-party penetration test to point you to. If your organization requires those artifacts, we do not have them yet.
What you control
| Default | You can | |
|---|---|---|
| Window snapshots | Off | Turn them on for more specific task names, or leave them off |
| Sites that are never scanned | About 90 government, health and payment domains | Add any site to your own do-not-scan list |
| Tracking | Runs while you are working | Pause it at any time |
| Your history | Stored on your device | Export it, or delete it, without asking us |
How this compares
Every automatic time tracker makes a trade between how much it understands and how much it reads. There is no option that reads nothing and still tells you what you worked on.
RescueTime reads the least. Its policy states it never collects screenshots or page content, and it correspondingly cannot tell you what you were working on, only which applications and sites you used. Rize reads window metadata and sends it to its own servers, where your history is stored, and on to third-party models. Timeslicer reads the most when you enable snapshots, sends text straight to the model providers rather than to us, and keeps your history on your machine.
Which trade suits you is a real decision, not a marketing question. If reading screen content is a line you do not want crossed, leave snapshots off, or use a tracker that cannot do it at all.
More detail in our Rize comparison and across all comparisons.
Last verified 3 September 2026. This page summarizes the Timeslicer Privacy Policy, which governs if the two ever differ.