Privacy with ActivityWatch

General
#1

Hi there to the community of ActivityWatch,

I am new here and just found you through Firefox addons. The idea and the project itself is exactly what I was looking for, but more than anything privacy is important to me. That’s why when it comes to personal apps that I use (beside Apple’s native apps), I only use apps such as Bear and Tyme where your data is only stored locally or in your icloud, rather than the servers belonging to the app or it’s company/developers.

I was wondering where does AW stands when it comes to data collection? Is there any data collection by your app? In fact your Firefox add-on says that you access to tab names and two ports on localhost. Additionally when I installed your app I had to give several permissions to the app (obviously to enable it to be able to track my usage) and I am curious to know if anything here is not being compromised XD

Would you mind elaborating on that a bit or guide me to a page that I possibly missed that includes all this information??

Thank you!!

#2

Everything is stored locally on your computer and we are quite strict on that.

The reason why the extension needs permissions is for the extension to have the ability to send the activity to the locally run application (aw-server) instead of being saved in the browser. Localhost literally means that the extension is allowed to talk to your computer (by default extensions are isolated within just the browser but we need to access an application outside of the browser).

1 Like
#3

Thank you so much for the answer. Is there any place that what you just commented on is documented?

#4

I don’t think so, the following is probably the closest thing we have right now

https://docs.activitywatch.net/en/latest/security.html

1 Like
#5

Hi,

I also have privacy related question. Does that mean that Acitivity Watch does not produce any internet traffic at all? I’m asking because I’d like to know when certain apps communicate, send or receive info. (And I’m not really technically proficient enough to tell.)

Thanks

#6

Hello Roger, sorry for the late reply.

The only internet traffic ActivityWatch uses is that if you open the web-ui, it might check if there is an update available if that has not checked before within the last 7 days. Except for that, there is no communication over the internet.

However, it is of course still possible to get a virus or be hacked which could take the local data and upload it somewhere. So if you are doing something very sensitive, I’d recommend turning off ActivityWatch during that time.