Privacy Policy

Last updated 16 August 2026

The short version: MacQ collects no data about you. It has no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no accounts and no advertising. It makes no network connections of any kind. Every setting it saves stays on your Mac, and nobody, including its developer, can see it.

This policy explains that in full. It covers the MacQ application and this website at macq.birju.dev. MacQ is free and open source software published by Birju Vachhani.

1. Information we collect

None. MacQ does not collect, transmit, sell, share or otherwise process any personal information. Specifically, it does not collect:

• Names, email addresses or any other contact details.
• Account credentials. MacQ has no signup, no login and no user accounts.
• Usage analytics, feature telemetry, diagnostics or crash reports.
• Device identifiers, advertising identifiers or IP addresses.
• Location data.
• Anything you type, click or view on your Mac.

There is no opt out because there is nothing to opt out of, and no setting that turns any of the above on.

2. Information stored on your Mac

MacQ saves your preferences so it can behave the same way the next time you open it. This is stored locally by macOS, in the standard preferences file for the app, and is never transmitted anywhere. It consists of:

• Your media key settings: whether MacQ handles the brightness and volume keys at all, which rule the volume keys follow, and whether MacQ draws its own level indicator.
• Any names you give your monitor's input sources, such as renaming HDMI 1 to MacBook, stored against an identifier for the monitor they belong to.
• Whether MacQ starts at login, which macOS itself records.

This data is yours and stays on your machine. To remove it, delete ~/Library/Preferences/dev.birjuvachhani.macq.plist along with the app.

3. System permissions

MacQ asks for one optional permission, and only if you turn on the feature that needs it.

Accessibility. Routing your keyboard's brightness and volume keys to the monitor requires an intercepting event tap, which macOS gates behind Accessibility (System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Accessibility). MacQ installs no tap at all until you enable that feature, and removes it when you turn the feature off.

We want to be precise about what the tap can see, because the honest answer is not "only the media keys". Volume and mute arrive on a dedicated system event stream that carries nothing else. Brightness does not: on most keyboards those keys are delivered as ordinary key presses. Watching for them therefore means watching the same stream every other keystroke travels on.

What MacQ does with that access: it reads which key an event was, acts on it if it is brightness, volume or mute, and returns immediately for everything else. Nothing you type is inspected further, recorded, written to disk, or sent anywhere. Because MacQ has no network access at all, there is nowhere for it to send anything even in principle. You can verify all of this in the source code.

MacQ does not request Input Monitoring, Screen Recording, Camera, Microphone, Contacts, Calendar, Photos or Full Disk Access.

4. Network access

MacQ makes no network connections. It does not check for updates, phone home, load remote content or contact any server, including any server operated by its developer. There is no developer server. MacQ talks only to your monitor, over the display cable, using DDC/CI.

5. Third party services

MacQ itself integrates no third party services, SDKs or trackers. Two third parties are unavoidably involved around it:

• GitHub hosts the source code and the downloads. When you download MacQ or visit its repository, GitHub receives that request and handles it under GitHub's Privacy Statement. This website is served by GitHub Pages, which means GitHub also receives requests for these pages. We add no analytics, cookies or tracking scripts to them.
• Apple may verify the app's notarisation when you first open it, which is a macOS security feature rather than something MacQ initiates. That check is handled by macOS under Apple's Privacy Policy.

6. Cookies

This website sets no cookies and uses no analytics, tracking pixels or fingerprinting of any kind.

7. Children's privacy

MacQ is not directed at children, but since it collects no data from anyone, it collects no data from children either.

8. Your rights

Privacy laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export and delete the personal data a company holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing to request and no request to make. The data described in section 2 never leaves your Mac, which means it is already entirely under your control: you can inspect it, change it or delete it yourself at any time.

We also do not sell or share personal information, because we have none.

9. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new date at the top. Because this website is open source, you can also see every revision of it in the repository's history. Any change that would materially affect your privacy will be called out in the release notes for the version it applies to.

10. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything above that seems unclear or wrong, are welcome as an issue on GitHub.