Privacy Policy

Cable Detective is a diagnostic utility for USB-C, Thunderbolt, and MagSafe ports on your Mac. It is built to be private by design.

What we collect

Nothing. Cable Detective performs no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, and no remote logging. The app does not contain any third-party tracking SDKs.

What we send over the network

Nothing, from the app itself. Cable Detective does not make network requests. It has no servers, no accounts, no sign-in. The app's signed bundle does not contain the com.apple.security.network.client entitlement, so even if the code tried to open a socket, the macOS sandbox would refuse.

The optional feedback button

Each scan report has a button labelled “Did we get something not quite right?”. Tapping it does two things, both local to your Mac:

1. It builds a redacted Markdown copy of the current report and writes it to your clipboard. The redaction strips your Mac's serial number, hardware UUID, host UUID, hostname, board ID, regulatory model number, and any USB device serial numbers it found. Your Mac model identifier (e.g. Mac14,2), OS version, and all cable / power / port data are kept — that's the diagnostic value.
2. It opens your default browser to cable-detective.franzai.com/feedback/.

The app does not make a network request. The browser does. On that page you see the full redacted report, you can edit it freely, you can attach photos, you write what was wrong and what you expected, and only when you press Send case does anything leave your machine.

What we receive: the report you reviewed, your description, your photos, and (if you chose to provide it) your GitHub @handle. We do not ask for and do not store your email address. The submission becomes a public issue on github.com/Arthur-Ficial/cable-detective-cases — please don't paste anything in the report or photos that you don't want to be public. If you provided a GitHub @handle, we will cc @handle in the issue body so GitHub's own notification system pings you when we update the case. We don't run a notification service of our own.

Submissions are protected by per-IP rate limits on a Cloudflare Worker; we do not log IP addresses beyond the rate-limit counter, which expires within an hour.

What stays on your Mac

The app reads the macOS I/O Kit registry locally to identify the cables and chargers connected to your ports. When the optional “Generate plain-English explanations” feature is enabled in Settings → AI, the app sends the structured port snapshot to Apple's on-device Foundation Models language model on your Mac. Apple processes this on-device only — see Apple's published documentation for Apple Intelligence on-device privacy.

Permissions

The app uses the macOS USB device entitlement (com.apple.security.device.usb) to read port state. It does not access files, the camera, the microphone, the network, the keychain, contacts, photos, or location.

Children

Cable Detective is a hardware utility and is not directed at children under 13.

Contact

[email protected]

Changes

If a future version changes data handling, this document and the version number will be updated.