HotShot privacy policy

Last updated: September 2, 2026

HotShot doesn't collect or transmit any personal data. No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts, and no server of ours that your captures pass through. Your screenshots and recordings stay on your Mac unless you publish one, and when you do it goes into storage you own. That is true of both versions below.

Two versions, and this page covers both. The version downloaded from this site does a few things the Mac App Store version cannot, because the store version runs in Apple's App Sandbox. Where that matters, the paragraph says so — anything marked direct download only is simply absent from the store version, and so is everything it describes. The store version asks for one permission (Screen Recording) rather than two, has no browser-extension bridge for Chrome, cannot be stopped mid-recording with the Esc key, and makes no update or licence connections of its own at all.

What HotShot does on your machine

Captures the screen, a window, or a region. Stills and recordings are taken with macOS's own ScreenCaptureKit APIs, which requires Screen Recording permission. A still capture opens straight into an unsaved document — nothing is written to disk until you save it. A recording is written to ~/Movies/HotShot/ on your Mac so you can trim and export it.
Stages the shot. Hiding desktop icons covers them with a picture of your own wallpaper for the moment the shot is taken, and is undone when the capture finishes — your wallpaper setting is never changed. Nothing about your desktop, your files, or your open windows is recorded or transmitted.
direct download only Hiding the menu bar, and resizing the window you're about to shoot. The resize uses macOS Accessibility and is the only reason that version asks for Accessibility permission; it reads and sets the size of the one window you pick, and nothing else. The store version does neither and never asks for Accessibility.
Stopping a recording. A floating HUD is on screen for the whole of every recording, so a recording in progress is never invisible. direct download only Pressing Esc to stop. That watches for one key press system-wide, which the App Sandbox does not allow, so the store version stops from the menu bar instead — either macOS's own recording indicator or HotShot's icon. Neither version records anything about the keys you press.
Records the camera and microphone, only if you turn them on. Both are off by default. The microphone is captured into the recording's own audio track; the camera records to a companion movie file beside it so the bubble stays editable afterwards. Both files live alongside the recording, on your Mac, and are never uploaded.
Browses pages you ask it to. Web Page capture is a normal web view: the site you navigate to sees an ordinary browser request from your Mac, exactly as it would from Safari. HotShot doesn't report your browsing anywhere. The addresses you've visited are kept in a local history list (in your UserDefaults) purely to autocomplete the address field; clearing them is a local operation.
Stores your preferences — capture defaults, staging toggles, chosen viewports, sharing destination, keyboard shortcut, and similar — in your local UserDefaults and application support folder. They never leave your device.

The browser extensions

The optional Safari and Chrome extensions exist to hand HotShot the page you're actually looking at, with your real session — logged in, scrolled where you left it, banners already dismissed.

When you click the extension, it serializes the page's current DOM and writes it to a temporary file on your Mac, then opens a hotshot:// URL pointing at that file. HotShot reads the file once and deletes it.
The extensions make no network connections of their own and send nothing anywhere. The page content goes from your browser to HotShot on the same machine and nowhere else.
They act only on the tab you invoke them from, only when you invoke them. They do not run in the background, watch your browsing, or read other tabs.
direct download only The Chrome extension. It talks to HotShot through a small native-messaging helper installed alongside the app, because Chrome can't open a macOS URL scheme directly; it relays the same one message and nothing else. Registering that helper means writing into Chrome's own support folder, which the App Sandbox forbids, so the store version ships no Chrome extension and no helper. Its Safari extension works exactly as described above.

Copy Link — publishing a capture

"Copy Link" uploads one file — a screenshot, or a trimmed recording — at the moment you ask for it, to a destination you pick and sign into. HotShot never holds your captures and ships no upload credential of its own that could put a file somewhere you don't control.

Recordings work the same way as images. Sharing a clip renders it to a temporary file on your Mac, uploads that one file to your chosen destination, and deletes the temporary copy as soon as the upload finishes. Nothing extra is kept, and nothing is sent anywhere else along the way.
iCloud Drive. The image is written into your own iCloud Drive and shared with macOS's own public-link mechanism. Apple's terms and privacy policy apply to the file from there.
Dropbox. If you connect Dropbox, HotShot is granted access to its own app folder only — it cannot see the rest of your Dropbox. Uploads go straight from your Mac to Dropbox. See Dropbox's privacy policy.
Google Drive. If you connect Google Drive, HotShot requests the drive.file scope — access to files this app itself created, and nothing else in your Drive. Uploads go straight from your Mac to Google. See Google's privacy policy. HotShot's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
OneDrive. If you connect OneDrive, HotShot requests the Files.ReadWrite.AppFolder scope — its own app folder only, not the rest of your OneDrive. Uploads go straight from your Mac to Microsoft. See Microsoft's privacy statement.
Sign-in tokens for Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are stored in your macOS Keychain, on your Mac. They are never sent anywhere except to that provider. Disconnect in Settings deletes them.
Links are public by design. A shared link works for anyone who has it — that's the point of a link. HotShot warns you once before your first share. Deleting the file from your own storage revokes the link. A shared video link is public in exactly the same way; on Google Drive it opens Drive's own player page rather than the file directly, which changes how it's viewed but not who can view it.

Network connections HotShot makes on its own

The store version makes none — Apple handles its updates and its purchase, so neither connection below exists there. For the version from this site, setting aside pages you browse and files you deliberately publish, there are two:

Update checks. direct download only The Sparkle framework periodically fetches https://bendansby.com/apps/hotshot/appcast.xml to see whether a newer version exists. The request carries only a User-Agent string and the current HotShot version — no identifiers, no telemetry, no tracking.
License validation. direct download only After the free trial, HotShot asks for a license key and sends that key to our payments provider, Lemon Squeezy, to confirm it's valid and activate it on your device. Only the license key and a device activation identifier are exchanged; we don't receive your name, email, or payment details through the app.

What we don't do

No analytics or telemetry of any kind inside the app.
No HotShot accounts, login, or remote configuration.
No advertising, third-party tracking SDKs, or fingerprinting.
No screenshots, recordings, or page content sent to us — ever, including when something goes wrong. There is no crash-reporting upload. When you share a link, the file goes from your Mac straight to your own storage provider; it never passes through anything of ours.
No reading of your Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive beyond the files HotShot itself put there.

Contact

ben.dansby@gmail.com

Changes

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