Never captured
- The text you type or the keys you press
- Screenshots or screen recordings
- The contents of documents, messages or emails
- Passwords, or anything you enter into a field
- What you do in private or incognito windows
The privacy promise
What you see, and what you control.
Most "monitoring" tools are built to watch people. Focal Map is built to help you understand your own day. These aren't settings you have to tighten — they're limits designed into the product.
What it records
- Which application is in front, and for how long
- Window titles and website domains
- A count of activity — enough to tell focus from idle
- The labels you choose to apply
Where it lives
On your computer, unless you say otherwise.
Stored locally
Your day is kept in a database on your own computer. You can see everything that's been recorded, pause at any time, or delete the last few minutes from the tray (Windows) or menu bar (Mac). Keys that protect it are held by Windows (DPAPI) or in your Mac's Keychain.
Opt-in beyond that
Nothing leaves your computer until you turn a cloud feature on. Cloud sync sends only pseudonymised, fixed-vocabulary patterns — never window titles, file paths or web addresses — and you can preview exactly what would be sent.
Your devices only
Your phone and computer talk end-to-end encrypted. The Focal Map service passes the data between them but holds no key, so it can't read it.
Everything held in the cloud for a device can be exported or deleted at any time.
On a Mac
The two permissions macOS asks for.
Accessibility
Lets Focal Map read the title of the window you're working in — the document or page name — so time can be labelled and matched to clients and tickets. It reads the title only, never the window's contents.
Input Monitoring
Lets Focal Map count key presses and clicks, to tell active work from idle time. Each key is counted and forgotten: which key it was is never stored, and no sequence of keys exists anywhere.
Either can be withdrawn in System Settings → Privacy & Security; Focal Map then records less (no titles, or no activity counts) rather than stopping.
Browser extension
The Focal Map browser extension.
What it shares, and with whom
After you choose Allow on its welcome page, the Focal Map Browser Context extension (Chrome and Edge) tells the Focal Map app installed on the same computer which website your active tab is on: the domain and a cleaned-up address with search terms, query strings, fragments and identifier-like parts removed inside the browser (the one exception is the ticket number on a Kaseya BMS ticket page, kept so your time can be matched to the ticket; it stays on your computer). It hands this directly to the app on your computer (browser "native messaging"). The extension itself never sends anything over the internet.
What it never touches
Page content, what you type, passwords, cookies, your browsing history, background tabs and private/incognito windows (it cannot run in them). Nothing is sold, shared with third parties or used for advertising. The data is used only to attribute your browser time in your own Focal Map timeline. You can pause it or withdraw consent from its options page, or remove it at any time.
Without the extension (optional, off by default)
Where the extension isn't installed — a Terminal Services session, say — you can switch on "Read the website from the address bar" in the Focal Map dashboard on that computer. Focal Map then reads the address shown in Edge or Chrome's address bar while the browser is in front, only in a browser where the extension isn't reporting. It reads the address bar and nothing else, skips while you're typing in it, and cleans the address by the same rules as the extension before keeping it on your computer. Switching it on or off is recorded in the app's local audit log.
Privacy you can check for yourself.
Install it, open the diagnostics window, and see exactly what's recorded.
Download for Windows