Why the question arises

To work at all, a text expander has to watch every key you press. That is its function, its basic mechanism.

So whenever they require an account or an internet connection, text expanders have theoretical access to everything you write, whatever their privacy policies claim, and however earnestly they promise to “take your privacy seriously”.

Our position is simple. An app that sees everything you type is entitled to nothing. And privacy-first talk is not enough: it has to be provable.

What Circut cannot do

Privacy sits at the heart of how it is built: nothing you type ever leaves your Mac. That is true by design, not by courtesy. Now for the proof.

• Circut cannot see the passwords macOS protects. Safari, Chrome, 1Password and the sudo prompt in Terminal all turn on macOS secure input by themselves for their password fields: macOS then stops passing your keystrokes to the apps that watch them, Circut included. One caveat, for completeness: a fake field, which hides the text without declaring itself a password field, does not turn it on. There, Circut sees what you type as it does everywhere else, and none of it leaves your Mac either.
• No account, no email. Install it, try it, use it: Circut does not even know you exist. Your address only appears at checkout, at Polar, so we can send you your license key.
• Even the end-of-trial reminder is local. There is no follow-up email: we have no address to write to. The app itself tells you.
• Even sharing your circuts needs no network. Share links are absurdly long, and that is the proof: they contain the shared circuts, encoded after the “#” — the fragment browsers never send to a server, by the very design of the web. There is no sharing server: nothing is stored, nothing expires, the link will still work in ten years.
• Your statistics have nowhere to go. Keystrokes saved, favorite circuts: it all lives in a local database, on your Mac, open to inspection. There is no telemetry, not even the “anonymized” kind.
• Circut has a single network channel: checking for its own updates. It is spelled out in the settings, and it can be switched off. The rest of the time, the app does not contain a single line of networking code. A few buttons open your browser, for checkout or the version history: your browser connects, we do not.
• Synced backup, if you turn it on, goes to YOUR cloud. Your Dropbox, your iCloud Drive, your Google Drive. A readable file, in a folder you pick. Never ours: we do not have one.

Do not take our word for it: check

• Click into a password field: Circut’s menu bar icon switches to two bars, the pause sign, and turns back into two chevrons when you leave the field.
• Run an outbound firewall (Little Snitch, LuLu) and work for a day: you will see nothing go out. Turn off update checks, and nothing remains at all.
• Open your backup file in a text editor (right-click, Open With): it is plain text, you can read it.
• Look at a share link: everything after the “#” never left your browser.

The only thing we have of you is a name and an email address, and only if you asked for access or bought a license. Beyond that, your data stays with you. That is the least you can expect from an app that sees everything you type.

And this website?

The app knows nothing about you. This website knows the bare minimum, and we would rather tell you ourselves than let you find out.

• We measure traffic with Fathom, which sets no cookies and follows nobody from site to site.
• If you request access, your name and address go through Tally.
• If you buy a license, payment goes through Polar, our merchant of record, and your license key is sent with Brevo.

We never sell it, we cross-reference nothing, and you can ask us to delete all of it whenever you like.