> PRIVACY_POLICY

1 BIT DATA

last_updated: 2026-05-28

// THE SHORT VERSION

1 Bit Data does not send your usage data anywhere. It does not have user accounts, telemetry, analytics, crash reporting, ads, or any kind of remote server it talks to about you. Everything it records about your traffic lives on your Mac, in your home folder, and only you can read it.

// WHAT THE APP STORES, AND WHERE

All data the app collects is stored locally on your Mac, in your home directory:

~/.data_monitor.db — SQLite database with per-app and per-destination traffic samples, DNS hostnames, GeoIP cache, and speed-test history.
~/.data_monitor*.json — settings, daily counters, network aliases, quota config, and notification state.

Nothing in these files is uploaded, synced, or shared by the app. To wipe everything, quit the app and delete these files; deleting the app itself does not remove its data so you can keep history across updates.

// WHAT THE APP CAPTURES

Per-process traffic — via the macOS built-in nettop command. The app records process name, bytes in/out, and the remote IP address that each process talked to.
DNS hostnames — periodically, the app does a reverse DNS lookup for IPs it has seen, so reports can show example.com instead of 93.184.216.34. These lookups use your system DNS resolver.
Network fingerprint — the gateway IP of the network you're connected to, used as a stable identifier for Wi-Fi networks and hotspots. (macOS Sequoia and later redact the actual SSID, so this is the only reliable way to tell networks apart.)
Speed-test results — when you press "Start Test", download / upload / latency / responsiveness values returned by Apple's built-in networkQuality tool.

// THE TWO EXTERNAL REQUESTS

The app makes only two kinds of network requests on your behalf, both of them about IP addresses, never about you:

DNS reverse lookups — standard PTR queries via your system resolver, for IPs the app has already seen. Identical to what your browser does. No user identifier is attached.
GeoIP enrichment via ip-api.com — to label IPs with country, ISP, and city in reports. The app sends only the IP addresses it wants to look up (batched, no API key, free tier). It does not send your IP, your hostname, your username, or any traffic data. This is the only third-party service the app contacts about your data, and it only sees the destination IPs — never the fact that they are destinations of yours specifically.

If you wish to disable GeoIP enrichment entirely, the app works fine without it — reports will show IPs and hostnames without country/ISP labels. (A toggle for this is on the roadmap.)

// WHAT THE APP DOES NOT DO

No user account. No login. No identifier of any kind.
No telemetry. No analytics. No crash reporting.
No advertising. No third-party SDKs beyond the ip-api.com endpoint above.
No cloud sync. No iCloud, no Dropbox, no anything. Your traffic history lives on one Mac.
No reading of packet contents. The app only knows which process talked to which IP for how many bytes — not what was said.

// SYSTEM PERMISSIONS

On first launch, macOS may prompt for permission to monitor network activity. This is required by nettop, which is the OS-provided mechanism the app uses to see per-process bandwidth. The permission stays local to your Mac.

// OPEN SOURCE

1 Bit Data is open source under the MIT license. You can read the entire source code, audit every network request the app makes, and build your own version from source: github.com/feonder/1bit-data.

// CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

If the privacy behavior of the app meaningfully changes in a future version, this page will be updated with a new "last_updated" date and the change will be noted in the release notes for that version.

// CONTACT

Questions, concerns, or audit findings:

[email protected]