Macdials

Privacy

What leaves your Mac

Your license key is checked on your Mac, with no network. By default, what leaves your Mac is the check for a new version and, once, when you activate a license, a record that ties it to your Apple Account. Everything else is off until you turn it on. Nothing about your screens or your settings leaves the machine, and there is no account. The one thing you can turn on is sending a problem report, from Report a Problem.

What is collected

Nothing. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no advertising identifier, no crash reporting that leaves the device and no account to make.

What the app stores, and where

Everything Macdials keeps is a human-readable JSON file in ~/Library/Application Support/Macdials/ on your own Mac:

  • Your per-display settings. These are keyed by the identity a monitor reports over its own cable (its manufacturer, model and serial number, read out of the EDID), so that unplugging a screen and plugging it into another port does not lose its settings.
  • Your presets and your schedules. If you use a sunrise or sunset schedule, that includes the latitude and longitude you typed in. The calculation is arithmetic done on the device; no location service is asked and no request is made.
  • Your preferences: which displays are shown, what the keys do, whether the app appears in the Dock.
  • A diagnostics log of what the app was recently doing, written on the device so that a fault can be described accurately. It records display models and what the app tried to do with them. It leaves your Mac only in a problem report you choose to send, or one you email from your own mail.

Your screens

A monitor's EDID carries its manufacturer, model and serial number. Macdials reads that to tell one screen from another and writes it into the settings file described above. It stays on the Mac.

Network

Your license key is checked offline, against a public key compiled into the app, so Macdials does not phone home to keep working and works with no network at all. It makes three kinds of connection:

  • Checking for a new version, on by default. The app fetches https://macdials.com/appcast.xml, a static file on a content delivery network. That request carries what any web request carries: an IP address, the app version and the macOS version. It is not tied to a person and no profile is built from it. You can turn automatic checks off in Settings.
  • Activating a license. Activating records a hash of your license key and an opaque Apple identifier for your iCloud account in Apple’s CloudKit, so the same key works on every Mac signed in to that account and nowhere else. That record holds no email address, no name and nothing about your monitors. You can release it from the License pane at any time.
  • Sending a problem report, off until you switch on sending in Report a Problem. A report carries what you wrote, the diagnostics log described above, the Mac's model, the macOS and Macdials versions, and a random id for this copy of the app. Email It Instead sends the same report from your own mail.

Buying it

Purchases are handled by Paddle.com Market Limited, the merchant of record. Your card details, billing address and tax details are given to Paddle and are not seen by us. We are told the order, the email address you bought with and the license key issued against it, which is what lets us reissue a key you have lost. Paddle's privacy notice covers the payment itself.

The newsletter

If you sign up for the newsletter on this site, your email address is held by Netlify and used to send Macdials news: new features, product news and discounts. The emails go out through Resend. It is not sold and not passed to anybody else. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and writing to the address at the end of this page deletes it.

Children

Macdials collects no personal information from children or from anybody else.

Your rights

The app holds your data on your own Mac, so you can read it, change it or delete it in the Finder without asking us. For the two things we do hold, your order record and your place on the email list, write to the address below and we will send you a copy or delete it.

Changes

If any of this changes, this page changes with it and the release notes say so in the same words.

Contact

support@macdials.com. Macdials is published by High5 Labs LLC, a North Carolina limited liability company at 4030 Wake Forest Road, Ste 349, Raleigh, NC 27609.

Last updated October 7, 2026