What a desktop pet can see on your Mac
It is a fair thing to be suspicious about. An app that knows when you have stepped away, or that your charger just went in, is by definition watching something — and plenty of software asks for far more than it needs. So here is the whole list of what My Dock Buddies reads, what it refuses to read, and where any of it goes. The short version: five small signals, no permission prompts, and nothing uploaded.
It is off until you switch it on
The feature is called "What your Mac is doing", it lives in Settings, and it starts off. With it off, your buddies wander and play on their own and read nothing at all. Nothing below happens unless you turn it on, and switching it back off stops it immediately.
The five things it reads
Whether the charger is plugged in and whether the Mac is in Low Power Mode. How many seconds since you last touched the keyboard or mouse — the count, not the keys. Whether the screen is locked, asleep or switched to another user. The time of day. That is the complete list, and each one is a number or a yes-or-no, not a record of anything.
What it deliberately cannot do
No screen recording. No keystroke logging. No Accessibility permissions. No reading of other apps’ windows or documents. No camera, no microphone, no location, no browsing history. You will notice the app never asks for any of the permission prompts macOS shows for those things — that is not an oversight, it is the design. A buddy that needs a screen recording permission to look busy is asking for far too much.
AI mode, and the one folder it reads
If you also use a coding agent, you can let your buddies take a cue from it: they get to work when it is working, and wave when it is waiting on you. To do that the app looks at the session files the agent already writes — their modification times, and the last few kilobytes of the newest ones, enough to tell "working" from "waiting for you". It never writes to those folders, never installs anything in them, and in the App Store version it cannot even see them until you pick the folder yourself.
None of it leaves your Mac
There is no analytics in the app. Nothing about what you were doing, which activity a buddy picked, or what an agent was working on is sent anywhere — not to us, not to anyone else. The app does talk to our server, but only about your account: signing in, checking the buddies are yours, and downloading them. Those calls carry your account and your computer’s identifier, and nothing else.
What we do hold, and why
Your email address, because it is your account. An identifier for your Mac, because a buddy is licensed to one computer at a time. And the list of buddies you own. That is what makes the thing work; there is nothing else, and no third party gets any of it.
If you would rather it read nothing
Leave the feature off. Your buddies still walk, work, nap, play their stories and answer your clicks — they simply do it on their own schedule rather than yours. Most of what makes them good company does not depend on knowing anything about you.