The BusyWork app stays on your Mac.

What the app stores

Your preferences — chosen fidget, finish, size, speed, and the toggles for launch-at-login, meeting auto-start, and hide-while-screen-sharing. They live in macOS UserDefaults on your own machine and are removed when you delete the app and its preferences.

What the app reads, and why

To know when you're in a meeting or sharing your screen, BusyWork looks at two things:

• Running process names. Zoom, for example, runs a helper process only while a meeting is live, so its presence is a reliable signal that needs no permission at all.
• Window owners and titles — the same text you can see on your own screen. This needs macOS Accessibility permission, which the app asks for during setup and which you can skip. Google Meet, Teams, and Webex detection depend on it; the manual toggle and the ⌘⇧D shortcut work without it.

Both are read in memory, used to decide whether to show or hide a fidget, and discarded. Neither is stored or transmitted.

What the app never touches

Your microphone. Your camera. Screen contents. Keystrokes. Anything said or shown in a meeting. Your files, contacts, calendar, or location. BusyWork requests none of these permissions, and the code contains no API calls that would use them.

Copy Diagnostics

The menu bar has a Copy Diagnostics command that puts the conferencing processes and visible window titles on your clipboard so you can send them to us if detection misbehaves. It copies to your clipboard and nowhere else — you decide whether to share it, and you can read it first.

The website and checkout

The BusyWork landing page is hosted on Vercel and uses PostHog to count visits, manual demo interactions, offer views, and checkout actions. This code runs on the website only, never in the Mac app. We disable session recording and automatic capture of page contents. We do not send form values, email addresses, payment details, or URL queries and fragments to analytics.

PostHog uses a daily server-generated identifier based on a rotating salt, the request IP address, user agent, and hostname. It writes no analytics cookies or persistent browser identifier. The website passes campaign labels and referring domains so we can understand where interest comes from. Vercel also processes ordinary request logs, and the landing page loads fonts from Google Fonts.

Stripe collects your checkout email and payment details and processes the $5.99 one-time payment. Blacktop receives the purchase information needed to deliver BusyWork and help with a purchase. A random checkout reference connects the checkout to a verified payment event without sending your email or card details to PostHog. Keep your Stripe receipt for purchase help.

After a payment we record the purchase — the Stripe checkout reference, the email you paid with, the amount, and any promotion code used — so we can send your download, send it again if you ask, and help if something goes wrong. We email you a download link through Resend. That email is the receipt for a purchase, not marketing.

Your download link is signed and expires after seven days. Your purchase does not expire: reload the thank-you page, or enter your email there and we will send a fresh link. That form answers the same way for every address, so nobody can use it to find out whether an address has bought anything.

No account is required. Buying BusyWork does not subscribe you to promotions. Stripe's checkout page may show an optional box to hear from Blacktop Social; we record an opt-in only if you tick it, along with the exact wording you were shown, and every message we send that way has an unsubscribe link. Leaving it unticked records nothing. The Blacktop Social privacy policy describes our providers, contact details, and your choices.

Questions

Email hello@blacktop.social.

Last updated 8 September 2026