AscideanMac Dynamic Island Privacy Policy
For the Mac Dynamic Island (Mac灵动岛) app for macOS, published by Ascidean LLC.
Last updated .
The short version. Mac Dynamic Island has no account, no analytics and no servers of ours. Your clipboard history, your files shelf and your coding agents’ activity stay on your Mac. The only things that leave it are a song’s title and artist, sent to look up lyrics and missing album artwork — and you can switch lyrics off.
1. Who we are
Mac Dynamic Island is made by Ascidean LLC, 2585 S Broadway St, Truth or Consequences, NM 87901, US. It is distributed outside the Mac App Store, as a disk image from this website that is signed with our Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and its source code is public onGitHub.
2. Information we collect
None. The app has no sign-up, no login and no telemetry, and Ascidean LLC runs no server that it reports to. We do not receive your name, email address, device identifiers, clipboard contents, files, music history or anything your coding agents do.
3. Data stored on your Mac
The app keeps the following on your Mac only. None of it is uploaded anywhere.
Clipboard history
Text, links, code and images you copy are saved so you can paste them again. By default the app keeps the most recent 50 items with no time limit; Settings → Clipboard sets how many it keeps and for how long, and you can clear the history at any time. The history is stored in the app’s preferences file without encryption.
Anything that password managers and other apps mark as private — concealed, transient or auto-generated content, following the nspasteboard.org conventions — is never recorded. Text you copy from an app that does not mark it is recorded like anything else.
Files shelf
Files you drop on the notch are not copied or uploaded. The app stores a reference to each one (a security-scoped bookmark), its name and a thumbnail so it can show them on the shelf. Text you drop on the shelf is saved as a note in macOS’s temporary folder.
Coding agent activity
When you connect Claude Code, Codex or ZCode, they send events to the app while they work: session status, task lists, the questions they ask and the tools they want to run, including the commands and file paths in those requests. These events arrive over a Unix socket that only your user account can open, are held in memory to show on the island, and are not written to disk or sent anywhere. To label sessions the app may read session names from an agent’s own local files, such as Codex’s session index; it does not change them.
Settings
Your preferences are stored in the app’s preferences file. The app keeps no usage statistics and writes no crash reports of its own.
4. Network requests
These are the only requests the app makes. None contains anything about you, your clipboard, your files or your agents.
| Purpose | What is sent | Sent to | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lyrics | Song title and artist | LRCLIB (lrclib.net), an open lyrics database | For each new track while lyrics are switched on. This is the first source tried. |
| Lyrics (fallback) | Song title and artist, then the matching song ID | neteasecloudmusicapi.vercel.app, a community-hosted API for NetEase Cloud Music. It is not operated by Ascidean or by NetEase. | Only if LRCLIB has no match, or if you choose NetEase as the lyrics source. |
| Album artwork | Song title and artist | Apple’s iTunes Search API, then Apple’s image servers for the artwork | Only when the playing app supplies no artwork of its own. |
Like any internet request, these reveal your IP address to the server that receives them, and that server’s own privacy policy applies. Lyrics for Apple Music tracks are read from the Music app on your Mac without any network request. To stop these lookups, switch lyrics off or choose a single source in Settings → Media.
5. Connecting coding agents
Connecting an agent edits that agent’s own configuration file on your Mac to add the island’s hook, after saving a backup of the file the first time. Disconnecting removes only the island’s entries. When you answer a question or a permission request on the island, your answer goes back to Claude Code on your Mac, exactly as if you had answered in the terminal.
Your agents themselves talk to their providers — Anthropic, OpenAI and others — under those providers’ terms and privacy policies. Mac Dynamic Island does not send anything to them.
6. Permissions
- Accessibility — to fit the island between the menus and the status icons beside the notch, and to tell a full-screen video apart from a window that is merely as large.
- Automation (Apple Events) — to read lyrics from the Music app, paste clipboard items through System Events, and bring an agent’s Terminal or iTerm2 tab to the front.
To show what is playing, the app runs a small helper process that asks macOS for the current now-playing information. The app is not sandboxed because macOS does not allow reading now-playing information or controlling other apps from inside the sandbox.
7. Advertising, tracking and third parties
The app shows no ads, contains no analytics or advertising SDKs, does not track you across apps or websites, and does not sell or share personal data. Apart from the lookups listed in section 4, it uses no third-party services.
8. Children
The app is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, children included.
9. Deleting your data
Clear your clipboard history and shelf from inside the app, and disconnect agents in Settings → Agents before you remove the app, so their configuration files are cleaned up. To remove everything the app has stored, quit it, move it to the Trash and delete:
~/Library/Preferences/com.macdynamicisland.app.plist | Settings and clipboard history |
|---|---|
~/Library/Application Support/Mac灵动岛/ | Files shelf |
~/Library/Application Support/com.macdynamicisland.app/ | Agent hook helper and its socket |
~/.claude/settings.json.mac-island-backup (and the same for Codex and ZCode) | Backups of agent configuration files, made the first time you connect an agent |
10. Verifying these claims
Mac Dynamic Island is open source. Every statement in this policy can be checked against the code on GitHub.
11. Changes to this policy
If the app’s handling of data changes, we will update this page and the date at the top before releasing that version.
12. Contact
Questions about this policy can go to raytracingon@icloud.com, or you can open an issue on GitHub.