Data usage
Where your work
actually goes
Timeslicer reads what is on your screen so it can name what you worked on. This page shows exactly what it reads, what leaves your machine, and how to check every claim on this page yourself.
Last verified 15 September 2026. The privacy policy is the binding document and governs if the two ever differ.
01 / The whole picture
Three places your data can be
Storage is local. Processing is not. That distinction is the entire story, so here it is in one diagram.
Your computer
- •Your whole timeline
- •Every title, URL and text snippet
- •Your history, until you delete it
Plain SQLite and JSONL files. No password, no encryption beyond your OS account.
Timeslicer's servers
- •Relay the text for labeling
- •Hold your settings
- •Hold your daily recap until it sends
The labeling text passes through. It is not written to any table.
Model providers
- •OpenAI names your tasks
- •Gemini classifies web pages
- •They return a label, nothing else
Retention and training terms are set out in the privacy policy.
Nothing goes to Anthropic.
If you connected Timeslicer to Claude, that is the MCP server. It runs as a process on your own machine, reads your local files, and talks over a local socket with no network listener. Your data does not travel to Anthropic to make that work.
02 / Capture
What Timeslicer reads
Six things, and one it never touches. Three are on when you install it. Three are off until you turn them on.
App and window titles
The name of the app you are in and the title of its window.
Page titles and URLs
From the browser extension, for the tab you are actively looking at.
Page text
Up to 500 characters, scrubbed for emails, card numbers and ID numbers before it leaves the tab.
AI coding assistant transcripts
Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot and others. Your prompts become part of what gets labeled. Keys, tokens and credentials are stripped first. Turn it off in Settings, System.
Text inside desktop apps
Slack, Discord, Notion, Obsidian and a few others. Needs the Accessibility permission.
Window snapshots
One still image of the front window, read on your device, image discarded immediately. Needs the Screen Recording permission.
Keystrokes
Timeslicer has no key capture of any kind, on any setting.
Sensitive sites are excluded before anything is captured. Government, health, payment and sign-in domains are on that list by default, and you can add any site to it. Their text is never stored on your device and never sent anywhere.
03 / Verify
Check it yourself
Everything above sits on your disk in formats you already know. Four commands, about five minutes. Paths shown for macOS.
sqlite3 -readonly \
"$HOME/Library/Application Support/timeslicer/task-events.sqlite" \
"select occurred_at, title, surfaces
from task_events order by occurred_at desc limit 20;"→ Plain SQLite. No key, no password. This is your entire history, on your machine.
tail -n 3 \
"$HOME/Library/Application Support/timeslicer/logs/task-spans.jsonl" \
| python3 -m json.tool→ The surface_text field is the literal text that would be sent for labeling. Nothing is hidden from you that is shown to us.
grep '"evt":"infer_call"' \
"$HOME/Library/Application Support/timeslicer/logs/task-inference.jsonl" \
| wc -l→ Every outbound labeling call is logged locally with its time and token counts. Nothing labels your day without leaving a line here.
# note the number, pause from the tray, wait, run it again
wc -l "$HOME/Library/Application Support/timeslicer/logs/task-spans.jsonl"→ The number stops moving. While paused, nothing is recorded at all.
On Windows these files live in %APPDATA%\timeslicer.
What you cannot check this way
The desktop app is not open source. You can verify what sits on your machine, and you can point a TLS proxy at the app to see exactly what our servers receive. You cannot verify from the outside what we forward from there, or what happens inside the compiled app. We would rather say that than imply an audit you cannot actually perform.
04 / Teams
If your company uses Timeslicer
Your day is sealed on your machine before it is uploaded. Timeslicer's servers hold ciphertext they have no key for. Your manager's computer holds the only key.
Your computer
- •Builds the day's summary
- •Seals it to your team's public key
Sealing happens before anything is uploaded.
Timeslicer's servers
- •Store one column of ciphertext
- •Cannot read any of it
- •Delete it after 30 days
There is no manager dashboard on our servers. We hold no key.
Manager's computer
- •Holds the only private key
- •Decrypts into a local database
Their app reads a local file, same as yours does.
Your manager sees
- Task names
- A written summary of each block
- App and site names
- Page titles and full URLs
- Start, end and active time
Your manager never sees
- Screenshots, ever
- The raw text on your screen
- Anything older than the last 7 days
- Any day before you joined
- Days under 30 active minutes
- Your in-progress block
Joining is yours alone
There is no mechanism for a manager to enroll you. You enter an invite code yourself.
Preview before you join
A button shows you the exact bundle that will be shared, built by the same code that uploads it.
Leaving is one click
Sharing stops and staged bundles are deleted from the server. What your manager already has stays on their machine.
05 / Control
Stopping it, any time
Pause from the tray. The engine stops, not just the display.
While paused
No activity is recorded. No titles, no URLs, no captured text, no AI calls. Your existing timeline stays readable. The pause is stored on your device, is never synced to us, and survives a restart or a sign-out.
One thing it does not stop
Pause covers time tracking. Distraction blocking is a separate system and keeps running, which means it still checks pages against your block list. Turn blocking off separately if you want everything quiet.
06 / Limits
What we do not claim
Every tool like this makes trades. Here are ours, stated plainly rather than left for you to discover.
Not everything stays local.
Naming your tasks happens on a model provider's infrastructure, not on your laptop.
Redaction is pattern matching.
We strip things that look like emails, card numbers, ID numbers and credentials. Pattern matching is not foolproof.
Your local files are not encrypted.
They are protected by your operating system account and nothing more. Anyone with your unlocked computer can read your history.
The daily recap email touches our servers.
If it is on, your task names, descriptions and app list sit in our database until the email sends, then they are cleared. You can turn it off.
Deletion is partial today.
You can delete blocks you added by hand, and you can delete the files yourself. There is no one-click wipe in the app yet.
No SOC 2, no penetration test.
We have no third-party security artifacts to hand you. If your organization requires them, we do not have them yet.
Last verified 15 September 2026. This page summarizes the Timeslicer Privacy Policy, which governs if the two ever differ. For the longer written version, read what Timeslicer does with your data.