Your Mac stays yours.
Effective 4 October 2026
- Deskway collects no data. We have no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking.
- We run no servers. Your iPhone, iPad or Mac connects straight to your own Mac, on your network or over your VPN.
- What you see, type, copy and transfer travels only between your devices, encrypted, and never reaches us.
This policy covers the Deskway app for iPhone, iPad and Mac (the "app") and Deskway Server, the free companion app that runs on the Mac you control (the "server"). Both are made by Dragos Panoiu ("we").
What we collect
Nothing. Neither the app nor the server sends any information to us or to anyone else. They contain no analytics or crash-reporting SDKs, no advertising, and no third-party code that phones home. They make no network connections except the ones you start between your own devices.
How your devices talk to each other
When you connect, the app opens a direct connection to the address of your Mac. Nothing goes through a relay or a cloud service of ours, because we don't have one. Every connection is encrypted (QUIC, with your Mac's key pinned at pairing), and there is no unencrypted mode. Only devices you've paired can connect. Pairing codes work once and expire after three minutes.
Depending on what you open, these travel over that connection, between your devices only:
- Control: your Mac's screen, its pointer, and the keys, clicks and gestures you send.
- Clipboard: text, rich text, links and images you copy on either side. Items that password managers mark as secret are never sent.
- File Transfer: the folders you browse and the files you copy, move, rename or delete.
- Terminal: what you type and the shell's output.
What stays on your devices
To work, the apps keep a little information locally, in their own storage. It's never sent to us.
| Where | What, and why |
|---|---|
| The app | The Macs you've saved (the name, address and port you paired with), the keys that prove this device was paired, and your settings. Used to reconnect. |
| The server | The devices you've paired (their name, platform, when they were paired and last seen), the keys used to verify them, its own host key, your settings, and any agent tokens you create. Used to decide who may connect. |
| The server's activity log | Recent connections, refusals and file changes, so you can see what paired devices did. It's kept in memory only, limited to the latest 500 lines, and cleared when the server quits. |
Remove a saved Mac in the app, or a paired device on the server, and its entry and keys are deleted. Deleting either app removes everything it stored.
Permissions
- Camera (app): only to scan the pairing QR code your Mac shows. No image is saved or sent.
- Photos (app): to show your photos so you can pick ones to copy to your Mac, and to save photos and videos you copy from it. Only what you choose is read or added.
- Local Network (app): to reach your Mac on your network.
- Screen Recording and Accessibility (server): to show the screen and accept input from devices you've paired. Nothing is captured, and the recording indicator stays off, until a paired device asks to see the screen. File Transfer and Terminal never capture it.
- Full Disk Access (server, optional): so File Transfer can reach folders macOS protects.
AI agents
The server can optionally let an AI agent, such as Claude Code, use your Mac. It's off by default and only reachable on the Mac itself or over SSH, never from the network. If you turn it on, the agent sees the screen and uses the mouse and keyboard on its own display, and what it does with that is governed by the agent provider's terms and privacy policy, not ours. Each agent has its own token, which you can revoke at any time.
Apple
The app is distributed through the App Store. Apple may share anonymous crash reports and usage statistics with developers if you've chosen to in your device's settings (Privacy & Security ▸ Analytics & Improvements). That is covered by Apple's Privacy Policy. We don't add anything to it.
Children
Deskway isn't directed at children and collects no information from anyone, children included.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date. If we ever wanted to collect data, we'd ask you first in the app. We have no plans to.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Write to [email protected].