The short version
The application sends nothing about your Mac anywhere, and makes exactly one network request, only when you ask it to. The website measures its own traffic with self-hosted, cookieless analytics that do not retain IP addresses. Nothing on either side identifies you.
The application
Searoom has no account system, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no remote configuration. Preferences live in UserDefaults and bounded trend history is written to ~/Library/Application Support/Searoom/history.plist. Neither leaves the Mac, and Settings can delete the history without touching anything else.
There is one exception, and it exists only because you press it. Choosing Check for Updates requests searoom.app/latest.json, a small file naming the current version. Searoom compares that with the version you are running and offers to open the releases page in your browser. It sends nothing describing your Mac, downloads nothing, installs nothing, and never checks on a schedule of its own.
Making any web request reveals your address to the server answering it, the same way visiting a page does. That is the whole of what the update check discloses, and it happens only on the occasions you choose.
This website
searoom.app uses Umami, self-hosted rather than a third-party advertising product. It sets no cookies, does not track you across sites, and does not retain IP addresses. It records that a page was viewed and roughly where the visit came from:
- The page visited, and the referring page if there was one
- Browser, operating system, and device type
- Approximate country
- Screen size
The purpose is narrow: knowing which pages people actually read, so the ones worth expanding can be identified. The data is not sold, not shared, and not used for advertising or profiling.
A distinction worth keeping straight
Searoom's documentation says it collects no analytics. That claim is about the application, which remains true: it gathers nothing and transmits nothing. The website counting its own page views is a separate thing, disclosed here, and does not make that claim less true. The two are never written as one.
Services that see a request
Three parties necessarily observe traffic, because they carry it:
- Cloudflare serves searoom.app and handles the requests reaching it, including the update-check manifest.
- GitHub hosts the source and serves release downloads. Downloading Searoom or visiting the repository is a visit to GitHub, under their terms.
- Umami, described above, running on infrastructure operated for this site.
Searoom itself integrates no advertising network, no tag manager, and no social tracking pixels.
Using this site
The application is published under the MIT Licence, which carries its own warranty disclaimer. The measurements and metric definitions here are informational. Sensor availability varies by Mac model and macOS release, and a figure recorded on one machine is not a guarantee about another. Where a reading is unavailable, Searoom and this site say so rather than substituting a zero.
Contact
Questions about any of this, including requests concerning data held about you, go to hello@emaitchess.com.
This page describes real data flows rather than reproducing legal boilerplate. It is not legal advice. If it ever disagrees with what the software actually does, the software is the fact and this page is the error; write to the address above and it will be corrected.