Privacy policy

Last updated: October 15, 2026.

This policy covers the Collie app for iPhone and Apple Watch, its notification extension and widgets, and collied, the daemon you run on your own Mac or Linux machine.

In short

collie has no server and no account. The developer does not receive your data.
The app talks to your own machines over your own tailnet, end to end encrypted.
The app contains no analytics, advertising or tracking code. Apart from its own connection to your machines, the only component that talks to the network is the embedded Tailscale client.
The services involved are Tailscale, to connect your devices; Apple's push notification service, if you turn on notifications; and, from your machine and with your own credentials, GitHub through gh and OpenAI through Codex, for the features described below.

What stays on your devices

On your machine, collied keeps in its data folder:

its configuration and its Tailscale node keys;
the paired phones, and each phone's push notification token and notification key;
the audit log, and its service log (the user journal on Linux);
recorded plan usage;
starred agents, and the pull requests you watch, with their URLs;
attachments you sent from the phone, deleted after 24 hours.

Your agents' transcripts and your files stay where the agents keep them; collied reads them only to answer the phone.

On your iPhone, the app keeps:

its Tailscale node keys and the machines you paired, in a state folder excluded from iCloud and Finder backups;
its signing keys and per-machine notification keys, in the iPhone's Keychain, available on this device only and not synced. The TLS signing key is generated in the Secure Enclave and cannot be exported;
your settings, saved prompts, key shortcuts and other preferences, and unsent drafts (with their attachments for up to 23 hours). These can be included in your device and iCloud backups.

Deleting the app removes its files, but iOS can keep the app's Keychain items on the device, and the app uses them again if you reinstall it.

On your Apple Watch, the watch app keeps the last approvals, agent list and plan usage that the iPhone sent it.

What goes between your phone and your machine

The phone and collied talk only over your tailnet, inside mutual TLS. This traffic carries what you see and do in the app: the agent list, terminal screens, conversation history while Chat is open, Git diffs, pull request status, plan usage, your prompts, keys and attachments, and approval decisions. The phone also gives collied its push notification token and a notification key it generated, so the machine can send it encrypted alerts.

Conversation history and the summary lines shown in the Inbox are never written to logs or put in notifications by collied.

Tailscale

Both the app and collied embed a Tailscale client. You sign in to your own Tailscale account, and Tailscale's coordination service learns about these devices as it does for any device on your tailnet. Traffic between your devices is encrypted with WireGuard and may pass through Tailscale's relay servers when a direct connection is not possible; the relays cannot read it. Log upload to Tailscale is turned off in both embedded clients. Tailscale's handling of your account and device data is covered by Tailscale's privacy policy.

Push notifications

If you set up notifications, collied on your machine sends them through Apple Push Notification service. Apple can see:

the agent and workspace names shown in the alert, and opaque identifiers;
pull request numbers and what happened to them, in alerts such as "Woke" with "CI failed on #123", or "Archived" with "PR #123 merged";
when alerts are sent, how often, and the size of the encrypted part;
for agents you choose to follow in a Live Activity, their status changes and the time of each.

The pending command or question is encrypted with a key generated on your phone, and only the phone can read it. Apple's handling of this data is covered by Apple's privacy policy.

GitHub and Codex, from your machine

collied runs these tools on your machine, as you, with the credentials you already gave them. collie has no credentials of its own.

GitHub CLI (gh): while the app is connected, or when you turned on archiving merged pull requests, collied asks GitHub about the pull request of each agent's branch, about every 2 minutes. It also polls the pull requests you watch, at the interval you chose, with or without the app. When you ask, it clones repositories, fetches pull request branches and runs gh poi to clean up merged branches.
Codex: collied asks the local Codex app-server for your account's usage limits every five minutes, which Codex reads from OpenAI.

GitHub's and OpenAI's handling of these requests is covered by their own policies.

Device features

Camera: used only to scan the pairing QR code. Images are not stored or sent.
Microphone and speech: dictation uses Apple's on-device speech recognition. Audio never leaves the phone. iOS may download the speech model for your language from Apple.
Face ID or passcode: handled by iOS. The app only learns whether you passed.
Photos and files: only the ones you attach are read, and they go only to the machine you send them to.

Diagnostics

The app writes connection diagnostics to the iPhone's own system log. They stay on the device unless you share them, for example in a sysdiagnose. If you opt in to sharing analytics with app developers in iOS, or use a TestFlight build, Apple may share crash reports, and any feedback you choose to send, with the developer under Apple's terms.

Your agents

The coding agents you run (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI) talk to their own services under their own terms, whether or not you use collie. What you send them from the phone, such as prompts, attachments and answers, reaches them as if you had typed it on the machine. For example, answering a Claude Code tip's feedback question from the phone makes Claude Code send Anthropic the same feedback signal it would send if you answered on the machine.

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