Last updated 2026-08-06
Hacking Monkey can hear you, see your screen, and operate your computer. That is a lot of access, so here is exactly what happens to your data — no marketing language.
There is no Hacking Monkey server. We do not receive, store, or process your data — not your voice, not your screenshots, not your files, not your API keys. The app talks directly from your Mac to the AI providers you configure, using your own accounts.
~/Library/Application Support/Hacking Monkey/config.env with permissions
0600 — readable only by your macOS user. Never bundled into the app, never
uploaded, never sent anywhere except as an authorization header to the provider they belong to.When you are actively talking to the assistant, this goes directly to the AI provider you configured, over TLS, authenticated with your own key:
| Data | Sent to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your speech audio and transcript | OpenAI (Realtime API) | To understand you and reply out loud |
| Screenshots of your screen | Anthropic (Claude) | To see the screen it is operating |
| Text of tasks you dispatch | Anthropic / OpenAI | To carry out the work |
| Front camera frames | Anthropic (Claude) | Only when you explicitly ask — see below |
Screenshots capture whatever is on screen at that moment, which may include things you did not intend to share — other apps, notifications, documents, credentials. Close or minimize anything sensitive before asking it to look at your screen.
Your relationship for that data is with the provider, under their terms: OpenAI · Anthropic. We are not a party to those requests and cannot see, log, or retain them.
The front camera opens only when you ask for it out loud. This is not a policy we promise to follow — it is enforced in code, against the actual speech-recognition transcript of what you said. The language model cannot open the camera by deciding it would be helpful, and cannot bypass the check by claiming consent in its tool arguments. A second check in the backend refuses any camera capture that does not carry the marker issued by the first.
Both checks and their regression tests are in the open source —
look for consentGate() and the consent tests in
the repository. You can read all of it.
Camera frames are captured only for the moment needed to answer your question, sent to the vision provider to be described, and not retained.
Nothing. No analytics SDK, no telemetry, no crash reporting service, no license server, no accounts, no phone-home on launch or update.
We therefore also cannot recover your data, see your usage, or identify you. If you email us about a problem, we know only what you choose to tell us.
macOS grants these per app and you can revoke any of them at any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Revoking one disables that capability; the rest keeps working.
Everything the app stores is in one folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Hacking Monkey/. Delete it and nothing of yours
remains, apart from files you explicitly asked the assistant to create elsewhere. Uninstalling
is dragging the app to the Trash.
To remove data held by the AI providers, use their own account controls — we cannot do it for you, because we never had it.
Hacking Monkey is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone of any age, because we do not collect data at all.
Material changes will be noted here with a new date and in the release notes of the version that introduces them. Because there is no server, a policy change cannot retroactively affect data from an earlier version — there is none held.