Privacy

Eskele has zero telemetry. It collects nothing about you or how you use it, and sends nothing anywhere. There are no analytics, no crash reports, no usage statistics, no identifiers and no “anonymous” counts. There is no Eskele server for any of it to go to.

This is not a setting you have to find and switch off. The telemetry code isn’t hidden or turned off by default; it was never written.

What Eskele does not do

• No analytics or tracking library. The only third-party code in the app is Sparkle, the updater described below.
• No crash reporter. When something goes wrong, Eskele writes a line to your Mac’s own log, which you can read in Console, and nowhere else.
• No identifier. Nothing that could tell your Mac from anyone else’s is created, stored or sent.
• No account, no sign-in, no licence check, no cloud sync.
• No diagnostics upload. --diagnose and its siblings write plain text files on your Mac. You read them yourself, and share them only if you choose to.

What stays on your Mac

Everything Eskele keeps — settings, pinned items, badge and progress commands, custom icons and the Dock backup — lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Eskele/ (see Files and configuration), and the update choice lives in Eskele’s own defaults. Export Settings writes a file where you tell it to, and nowhere else.

Everything Eskele sees while it runs — which apps are open, window titles, processor and memory use, window previews, the track playing in Music, Spotify or VLC — is used to draw the bar and never leaves your Mac. The permissions it asks for exist to read that on your Mac, not to send it anywhere.

The one time it goes online

Eskele connects to the internet for one thing only: to look for an update.

Out of the box, it does that only when you ask — Check Now in Settings ▸ General, or Check for Updates… in the menu-bar menu. Choose Install Automatically or Ask Before Installing and it looks once a day instead.

A check downloads a single file, the release feed (appcast.xml), from Eskele’s GitHub releases. If you take an update, it then downloads that update from the same place. Here is everything those requests carry:

Your Eskele version	Not sent. The request calls itself Sparkle, the same on every copy. Your Mac compares its own version with the feed.
Your language	Not sent. The request asks for any language (*) rather than passing on your preferred ones, which macOS would otherwise add to every request.
Your Mac — macOS version, model, processor, memory	Not sent. Sparkle can attach an “anonymous system profile” to each check. It is off in Eskele, and Eskele allows it no fields, so it would send nothing even if it were switched on.
An identifier	None exists to send.
Your IP address	Seen by GitHub, as it is by any server you connect to. It is the one thing a request cannot leave out.

Every copy of Eskele sends the same request, so apart from your IP address nothing in it could tell your copy from anyone else’s. GitHub counts how many times each release file is downloaded, so the feed’s count goes up by one with every check anyone makes. That total is all the project ever gets to see.

Never online at all

Leave updates on Only When I Check, which is the default, and don’t press Check Now. Eskele then never opens a network connection. A copy you build from source has no update feed at all, so it never goes online whatever you choose.

Things you add yourself

Badge and progress commands you write run as you, through /bin/sh. They reach the network only if you write them to, and Eskele sends nothing through them.

Don’t take our word for it

Eskele is open source, so every claim on this page can be checked:

• The dependencies. Package.swift lists one: Sparkle. UpdateService.swift is the only file that uses it.

• The update settings. Resources/Info.plist turns scheduled checks and the system profile off, and a test fails if either is ever turned back on.

• A running copy. Ask macOS which network connections Eskele has open:

  lsof -nP -i -a -p "$(pgrep -x Eskele)"

  With the default settings this prints nothing, because Eskele has none open. A firewall such as LuLu or Little Snitch shows the same thing live.

This website

These pages are plain static files hosted on GitHub Pages. They have no analytics, no cookies and no third-party scripts or fonts, and the search runs entirely in your browser. GitHub, which hosts the site, sees visitors’ IP addresses as any web host does.