Privacy

The short version: nothing leaves your Mac.

Last updated  ·  May 27, 2026

Blinken is a small, local-only macOS utility. It runs entirely on your computer, talks to no servers, and has no concept of an account, a user, or a session. There is no "us" collecting anything about you, because there is no us. The app just sits in your menu bar and shows you what your own machine is doing.

What Blinken reads

Blinken samples two things from your Mac, both via Apple's standard system APIs:

• Disk activity counters from IOKit (IOBlockStorageDriver statistics), the same cumulative byte counters Activity Monitor reads. These tell Blinken how much data has been read from and written to your physical disks since boot, so the LED can brighten when there's I/O happening.
• Memory state from standard macOS calls (vm.swapusage, host_statistics64, kern.memorystatus_vm_pressure_level), used to render the swap bar and the Memory section of the dropdown.

That's it. Nothing is read from your files, your documents, your network traffic, your keyboard, your clipboard, or any application other than Blinken itself.

What Blinken stores

Your preferences (LED color, glow intensity, swap-bar color, and launch-at-login) are stored locally in your user defaults, the standard macOS preferences store. They never leave your machine. Uninstalling Blinken removes them.

What Blinken sends

Nothing. There is no analytics SDK, no telemetry, no crash reporter, no update checker, no auto-login, no ads, no third-party services of any kind embedded in Blinken. Blinken does not make any network requests.

Contacting us

If you tap Send Feedback in the Preferences pane, your Mac opens its default mail client with a pre-filled message to marc@marchoag.com. Anything you write and send there reaches Marc directly. There's no third-party form service in between.

Children

Blinken does not collect any data from anyone, of any age. It also has nothing to interest children, but they are very welcome to enjoy the blinking light.

Changes

If this policy ever changes (for example, if a future version of Blinken adds an optional crash reporter or update checker), that change would be described in the app's release notes and on this page, with an updated date at the top.

Source code

Blinken is open source under the MIT license. The behavior described above can be verified by reading the code.