Technology
How Failshot works.
An overview of what runs on your Mac, what reaches our service, and how your photos stay yours. For the full detail of what we keep and for how long, read the Privacy Policy.
Design principles
- Your Mac first. Photos and video are taken and kept on your Mac. Turn on email alerts or the web vault, and only what you didn’t confirm as yours leaves it.
- Off by default. Email alerts, location, sound and the web vault are off until you turn them on.
- We keep as little as we can. Our service passes alerts through to you and keeps no copy.
On your Mac
Failshot is a menu bar app for macOS 14 or later. While it’s on, it listens for macOS telling it the screen was unlocked. When that happens, it takes a photo with the Mac’s camera, shows its window, and records a 5-second video. Video is on by default and yours to switch off. With the built-in camera, the green camera light comes on, as macOS requires.
The owner check uses Touch ID through macOS, or a Failshot PIN and answer that you set. Your Mac password is never one of the ways to switch Failshot off. Failshot’s own settings and account details are kept in the macOS Keychain.
You choose the files, folders and apps Failshot watches. When one is opened from Finder or the Dock, Failshot records the item’s name for your alert, never what’s inside it.
Alerts
Turn on email alerts, and each unlock you don’t confirm as yours is sent from your Mac to our service over an encrypted connection, then on to our email provider for delivery to you. Our service handles it in memory and keeps no copy. Our email provider keeps sent emails for 30 days, and your copy stays in your inbox until you delete it.
Notices to your other Macs travel through Apple’s push notification service, to devices signed in with the same email.
The web vault
Turn on the web vault and it keeps an encrypted copy of the photos and video from unlocks you don’t confirm as yours, so you can see them from any browser if your Mac is lost or taken. Everything is encrypted on your Mac before it’s uploaded, with a key only your vault opens. Our service stores only the encrypted copy and can’t open it.
You open the vault in your browser with your vault password and a second factor: a passkey, or a code from an authenticator app. The photos are decrypted in your browser, never on our servers. A recovery key covers a lost password. Only your vault password or your recovery key opens the vault; we never can, so keep the key somewhere safe.
Photos in the vault are kept for 30 days, or 7 or 90 if you choose, then deleted.
Accounts and sign-in
Failshot accounts have no password of their own. You sign in with Apple, Google, or a link we email you. Signing out everywhere ends every session on every device at once.
Updates and code signing
Failshot for Mac is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple, which means Apple’s automated service has scanned it for known malicious software. Updates are signed too, and Failshot checks each update’s signature before it installs it, so only an update signed by us ever installs.
Organisations
A Mac that joins an organisation shares its alerts with the organisation’s security team, encrypted so that only the organisation’s vault opens them, for as long as it stays joined. Failshot for organisations.
Reporting a security issue
If you think you’ve found a security problem in Failshot, email support@failshot.app. Our security.txt has the details.