Privacy policy
Effective 28 October 2026. Applies to Kept for macOS and to the website kept.sidstack.in.
Kept is a clipboard manager made by Siddhartha Chauhan, an individual developer in India. This policy is written to be read, and every statement in it can be checked: Apple’s notarisation checks each release for malware, and the script that fails a build if networking code is linked is published on the website so you can run it on the app you installed.
The short version
Kept does not collect, transmit or share any data. Kept contains no networking code. It never opens a connection. Every release build is checked by a script that fails if networking code is linked, and the script is published on the website. Kept runs without Apple’s App Sandbox because the sandbox forbids the Accessibility permission that pasting for you needs. A firewall such as LuLu or Little Snitch will never see a connection from Kept. There are no accounts, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers and no third-party SDKs that phone home. Everything Kept stores stays in one folder on your Mac, which you can open, copy or delete at any time.
What Kept stores, and where
When you copy something, Kept records it in a local database so you can find and paste it later. For each item it keeps: the content (text, rich text, a link, file paths or an image), a hash used to detect duplicates, the name and bundle identifier of the app you copied from, the time you copied it, the time you last pasted it, and whether you pinned it.
All of this lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Kept/ on your Mac: a SQLite file
(kept.sqlite) and an images/ folder for pictures and screenshots. The folder is created with
permissions that allow only your macOS user account to read it. It is not placed in iCloud Drive,
Documents or any synced location by Kept. Your own backups (Time Machine, or a sync tool you
point at that folder) are under your control; Kept does not exclude itself from them.
Settings, such as your shortcut, limits and the list of ignored apps, are stored in the standard macOS preferences file for the app, also only on your Mac.
Kept 1.0 kept the same folder inside its sandbox container
(~/Library/Containers/in.sidstack.kept/). Kept 1.1 moves it to the location above the first
time it starts, on your Mac, and carries your settings over the same way.
The kept command-line tool that comes inside the app reads the same database, read-only, when
you run it in Terminal. It writes nothing, except that kept copy puts an item on the clipboard.
What Kept deliberately does not record
- Anything another app marks as concealed or transient on the pasteboard
(
org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType,org.nspasteboard.TransientType,org.nspasteboard.AutoGeneratedType). Password managers such as 1Password, Bitwarden and Apple’s Passwords use these marks; Kept honours them always, with no setting to turn that off. - Anything copied while an app on your ignore list is frontmost (Settings › Privacy).
- Anything at all while capturing is paused from the menu bar.
- Images larger than the limit you set (50 MB by default) and text beyond 256 KB of rich-text data (the plain text is still kept).
Deleting your data
- Delete one item with ⌫ in the panel.
- Delete everything with Settings › History › Clear history. This removes every row and every image file, including pinned items.
- Set automatic limits (a number of items, an age, or both) in Settings › History; Kept enforces them on launch and once an hour.
- Remove all trace by quitting Kept, deleting the app, and deleting
~/Library/Application Support/Kept/and~/Library/Preferences/in.sidstack.kept.plist(and, if you used Kept 1.0,~/Library/Containers/in.sidstack.kept/).
Permissions
Kept asks for one permission, and only if you turn on Paste directly in Settings › General: Accessibility. macOS requires it for an app to press keys in another app, which is how Kept pastes the item you chose with Return. Kept uses it for that ⌘V keystroke, to find where the text cursor is so the Quick paste card opens beside it, and, unless you turn the mouse shortcut off in Settings › General, to notice the ⌥-right-click (or middle click) that opens Quick paste. It does not read the screen, what you type, or the text in other apps. Without the permission Kept still works: Return copies the item and you paste it yourself.
Reading the clipboard needs no permission on macOS. Kept reads it only to record what you copy, and only from your own user session.
Software updates
Kept does not check for updates. A later version may offer an optional update check using the open-source Sparkle framework. If and when that ships: it is off until you turn it on, it fetches a small text file from kept.sidstack.in listing the latest version, and system profiling (Sparkle’s option to report your macOS version and hardware) is disabled in the build. This policy will be updated before that feature is released.
The website
kept.sidstack.in is a static site served by Cloudflare. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts. Cloudflare, as the host, processes standard server logs (IP address, user agent, requested page) under its own privacy policy to serve the site and protect it from abuse; the site’s author does not receive or keep per-visitor logs. Fonts are served by the site itself; no third party receives any request when you read it. The download button goes through kept.sidstack.in/dl, which adds one to a download counter (the file name and the number one; no IP address, user agent or cookie is recorded) and then serves the disk image from the same site.
Children
Kept is a general utility and is not directed at children. It collects no personal data from anyone.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be published at kept.sidstack.in/privacy with a new effective date, and the change will be noted in the app’s release notes. The policy will never be changed to permit collecting or transmitting your clipboard history.
Contact
Siddhartha Chauhan · siddharthachauhan304@gmail.com · kept.sidstack.in