Privacy and permissions

Why macOS asks tty7 for permission

Panes are forked from tty7’s own bundled executable, so when a program you run asks macOS for a protected resource, macOS attributes the request to tty7.app — not to the program. If tty7 declared no usage strings, that request would be denied outright with no prompt at all, and the program would look broken for no visible reason. So tty7 declares the matching usage strings, and you get the normal one-time prompt:

Devices

Camera · microphone · Bluetooth · location · motion

Personal data

Contacts · calendars · reminders · photo library

System

Local network · Apple Events · speech recognition · system administration

Declaring a usage string is not the same as holding the permission. tty7.app itself is granted none of these. Every prompt you see belongs to whatever you ran in the pane, and you can revoke it under System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Full Disk Access

Apple defines no usage-string key for it. Reaching ~/Library/Mail, ~/Library/Messages, ~/Library/Safari, or ~/Library/Containers needs a manual grant in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access.

What leaves your machine


Update checks	A request to the GitHub releases API every six hours, plus the download when you accept one. Turn it off with `check_for_updates: false`.
Remote server installs	Downloading a `tty7-server` binary for a machine you connected to — or, for WSL, copying the one already bundled with your install.
The GitHub tab	Only while you use it: requests to `api.github.com` for the issues, pull requests, comments and changed files of the repository the focused pane is in. They go out from this machine, even for a repository in a remote workspace, and carry the GitHub CLI’s token when you are signed in with `gh`.
Everything else	Nothing. There is no telemetry, no analytics, and no account.

All of the above honour http_proxy. Updates → The GitHub tab stores no credential of its own. It asks GH_TOKEN, GITHUB_TOKEN or gh auth token each time it connects, keeps the answer in memory only, and never writes it to disk or to the log. Images in issue and pull request text are fetched only when GitHub hosts them (screenshots pasted into an issue, *.githubusercontent.com); any other image is shown as a link, so opening an issue does not tell a third-party image host that you read it. The GitHub tab →

What is stored, and where


Settings, themes, window state	`~/.config/tty7/` (`%APPDATA%\tty7\` on Windows)
Saved SSH hosts	`<config>/servers.json`, mode `0600` on Unix. Addresses, users and key paths — no secrets.
SSH passwords and key passphrases	The OS keychain — never `config.json` or `servers.json`, never plain text on disk
Pane scrollback tails	`<config>/scrollback/*.bin`, mode `0600` on Unix and behind the config directory’s ACL on Windows. 256 KiB per pane, kept only until something can no longer ask for it: closing a pane deletes its file at once, a restore consumes it, and a periodic pass collects the rest.
Shell history	Your shell’s own file, exactly as before — unless you turned on per-pane history, which merges back into it.

​Why macOS asks tty7 for permission

Devices

Personal data

System

​Full Disk Access

​What leaves your machine

​What is stored, and where

Why macOS asks tty7 for permission

Full Disk Access

What leaves your machine

What is stored, and where