OpenSidecar collects no data. There are no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no ads, and no servers — ours or anyone else's. Your screen content travels directly from your Mac to your device over your USB cable or your local network, and nowhere else. Because the source code is public, every claim on this page is verifiable.
What OpenSidecar does with your screen
OpenSidecar turns an iPhone or iPad into an extra display for your Mac. To do that, the Mac app captures the contents of a virtual display, encodes it as video, and sends it over a single direct connection to the OpenSidecar app on your device:
- Over USB, the video travels through your cable via the
usbmuxdservice built into macOS. It never touches any network. - Over WiFi, the video travels across your own local network directly between the two devices, discovered via Bonjour.
In both cases the connection is peer-to-peer: no relay, no cloud, no third party. Nothing is recorded or stored — frames are decoded, displayed, and discarded. Touch and scroll input travels the same direct path in the other direction.
What the apps store on your devices
Only local settings, only on your own hardware, never transmitted anywhere except as described:
| Data | Where | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Preferences (quality, connection choice, display name) | Mac / device, locally | Remembering your setup between launches |
| A random install identifier (UUID) | Device, locally | Lets your own Mac recognize that the same device is reachable over both USB and WiFi. It is generated on the device, has no relation to your identity or hardware identifiers, and is only ever sent to Macs you connect to. |
| Diagnostic log files | Mac (/tmp) / device (app container), locally |
Debugging. Never uploaded — they leave your device only if you choose to share them. |
Permissions, and why they're needed
| Permission | Why OpenSidecar asks |
|---|---|
| Screen Recording (Mac) | To capture the virtual display it streams to your device. macOS shows the purple capture indicator whenever this is active — by design, you always know. |
| Accessibility (Mac) | To turn taps and scrolls from your device into mouse events on the Mac. |
| Local Network (Mac and device) | For WiFi discovery and streaming on your own network. Not needed in USB mode. |
Every permission is used solely for the function above, on your own machines.
An honest caveat: WiFi transport is not yet encrypted
USB streaming is point-to-point over your cable. WiFi streaming, however, currently travels unencrypted across your local network — someone with access to the same network could in principle observe the video stream. On a trusted home or office network this is rarely a concern, but on shared or public WiFi we recommend USB mode. Encrypted WiFi transport with device pairing is on the roadmap (issue #16). A privacy page that didn't tell you this wouldn't be worth linking to.
This website
This site is a static page hosted on GitHub Pages. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts. GitHub may log standard web-server request data as part of operating the hosting; see the GitHub Privacy Statement.
Verifiability
OpenSidecar is open source under the GPL-3.0 license. The complete source code of both apps — including everything this page describes — is public at github.com/peetzweg/opensidecar. You don't have to take our word for any of this; you can read the code, build the apps yourself, or watch the network with the tools of your choice.
Changes and contact
If the app's behavior ever changes in a way that affects this page, the page will be updated in the same repository — its edit history is public. Questions or concerns are welcome on the issue tracker.