CrossHair privacy policy

Last updated: May 15, 2026

CrossHair doesn't collect or transmit any personal data. No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts.

What CrossHair does on your machine

Reads the keyboard shortcut you bind for the crosshair and the loupe, and listens for them globally via Apple's Carbon hotkey APIs (which work inside the App Sandbox without an Accessibility consent prompt).
While the loupe is visible, reads a small square of pixels under the cursor using CGWindowListCreateImage, magnifies them, and draws them inside the loupe glass. Nothing is recorded, saved, or sent. Each frame is replaced by the next one immediately and the previous frame is dropped. Reading screen pixels requires macOS Screen Recording permission, which CrossHair asks for on first launch.
Stores your preferences — the keyboard shortcuts, the loupe diameter and zoom, the pixel-grid toggle, the menu-bar icon settings, and whether onboarding has finished — in your local UserDefaults. They never leave your device.

Update checks (direct-download builds only). The Sparkle framework periodically fetches https://bendansby.com/apps/crosshair/appcast.xml to see if a newer version is available. The request carries only a User-Agent string and the current CrossHair version. No identifiers, no telemetry, no tracking. The Mac App Store build doesn't ship Sparkle — App Store updates handle that.

No analytics or telemetry of any kind.
No user accounts. No login, no remote configuration.
No advertising, third-party tracking SDKs, or fingerprinting.
No cookies, no server-side logs about you.
No screen recordings written to disk or uploaded anywhere — the pixels CrossHair reads exist only long enough to display inside the loupe and are discarded the moment the next frame arrives.

If anything material changes about what CrossHair collects, this page updates and the next version's release notes call it out explicitly.