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Privacy & data

ClipSlop is a local app that talks directly to the AI provider you choose. There's no Anthropic-hosted backend, no analytics, no telemetry, no signup.

What ClipSlop reads​

  • The text you select when you press a hotkey. Read via macOS Accessibility (simulated ⌘C / ⌘V).
  • The clipboard contents when you press ⌃⌘V to process from clipboard.
  • A captured screen region when you press ⇧⌘2 for OCR. Recognition happens on-device with Apple's Vision framework — pixels never leave your Mac.
  • The focused text field and the visible conversation around it when you press the Magic Button (⌘⌃M). Said plainly: a Magic press sends your identity/style rules, the field's content, and the visible surrounding messages — including text written by other people — to the provider serving the generation.magic role. Secure/password fields are never read. To keep specific apps or sites away from cloud models, list them under no_cloud in ~/.clipslop/config.yaml — presses there use a local provider or refuse with a clear message. App entries match as a substring of the bundle id, so mail covers com.apple.mail and com.google.Gmail alike, and a very short entry can cover your whole Mac; site entries match the URL host exactly or by suffix (google.com also covers mail.google.com). Over-matching only ever protects more than you asked for — but if the Magic Button suddenly refuses everywhere, check this list first.

What ClipSlop sends to providers​

For each prompt run, ClipSlop sends:

  • The selected/clipboard text as the user message.
  • The system prompt of the chosen prompt (e.g., "Fix grammar").
  • Provider-specific knobs: model name, temperature, reasoning effort.

It sends to whichever provider you configured — OpenAI, Anthropic, your local Ollama, etc. Each provider has its own privacy policy; ClipSlop's role is simply to make the API call.

What ClipSlop stores on disk​

  • Prompt library — your prompts, mnemonics, shortcuts, provider overrides. Stored in ~/Library/Application Support/ClipSlop/. Mirrored via iCloud only if you've enabled iCloud sync.
  • Provider credentials — API keys go in the macOS Keychain. ChatGPT OAuth tokens also live in the Keychain. Never written to plain files.
  • App settings — appearance, opacity, window size. Same Application Support folder.
  • The Magic Button engine tree — ~/.clipslop/ (hand-editable by design): provider configuration (providers.yaml, without keys — those stay in Keychain), role routing (roles.yaml), engine tuning (config.yaml), your core/workflow files, contentless per-press traces (decision metadata only — no field text, no window titles, URL host at most), and token-spend counts. The opt-in debug log (Settings → Magic) is the one exception: it records full press content for troubleshooting and prunes itself after 7 days. It is written for every press, no_cloud surfaces included — no_cloud governs what leaves your Mac, not what is written to it — so while the files are readable only by your own user account (0600), turn the debug log back off once you're done troubleshooting a protected app.

What ClipSlop does not store​

  • Transformation history. History is in-session only. Close the panel and the chain is gone.
  • Selected text. ClipSlop never persists a copy of what you ran a prompt on.
  • Telemetry, analytics, crash reports. None.
  • Update pings beyond Sparkle's appcast. Sparkle (the macOS update framework) fetches appcast.xml from this repo to check for new versions; that's the only outbound network call ClipSlop makes outside provider API calls.

Running fully offline​

Configure Ollama as your provider and disable iCloud sync. With those two settings, ClipSlop makes zero network requests during a transformation — Ollama runs locally on your machine. See Ollama.

Data deletion​

To wipe everything ClipSlop has on disk:

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/ClipSlop ~/.clipslop

Then revoke API keys from your providers' dashboards if you want belt-and-braces. ChatGPT OAuth tokens get cleared automatically when you sign out from Settings → Providers → ChatGPT.