A capture tool has the strongest permission on the machine
Screen Recording permission on macOS is not narrow. Granting it means an app can see every pixel of every window: your password manager while it is open, a private Slack channel, a customer database, the email you are halfway through writing. macOS makes you grant it deliberately and makes you restart the app afterwards, and that friction is appropriate.
So the question worth asking of any capture tool is not "is it good" but "what does it do with what it can see".
Three questions to ask any screenshot app
- Does it require an account? An account means a server-side identity that your captures can be associated with, plus a password reset flow, plus a breach surface. Ask what it is for.
- Does it upload by default? Some tools upload every capture to a cloud library automatically and give you a link. That is a real feature for some teams, and a serious liability for anyone screenshotting production data.
- Does the OCR run locally? Text recognition is the quiet one. Recognition in the cloud means the image goes to a server *and* the extracted text does. If a tool's OCR needs a network connection, that is your answer.
Any of these can be the right trade for a given team. The problem is when the answer is not obvious from using the app.
Where Shotcake stands
The design goal was that the honest answer should be short:
- Captures, annotation and export are local. Nothing is uploaded as part of taking or editing a screenshot.
- Text recognition runs on-device through Apple's Vision framework. It works with the network off, which is the simplest possible proof.
- No analytics, no advertising SDKs, no crash telemetry. The app does not phone home, so there is no data-collection policy to read between the lines of.
- No account. Nothing to sign into, therefore nothing about you to store.
- Share links are the one exception, and they are opt-in per image, anonymous, and deleted after seven days.
The app is sandboxed — a Mac App Store requirement, and a useful one: it cannot reach outside the folders you point it at.
The part that is on you
No app can stop you sending an unredacted screenshot. The habits that actually reduce leaks are unglamorous:
- Capture a window, not the screen. It removes the menu bar, notification banners and everything else on your desktop in one move.
- Redact before you share, not after. Once it is uploaded, editing your local copy changes nothing.
- Use a solid block, not blur, for anything that matters. Blur spreads information around; it does not remove it. The difference is explained here.
- Check the edges of the frame. The leak is almost never the thing you meant to capture.
Our full policy, in plain language, is on the privacy page.