Built to be taken apart
PinVari sees your screen and hears your voice, so it has to earn trust the hard way — in the design, not the marketing. Here is exactly how it works, written for the person who wants to poke holes in it. Everything below is enforced in the app, not promised in a policy.
Nothing is captured unless you start it
PinVari has no always-on recording. The screen is read only while you hold the capture hotkey (⌥⌘A), and there is no tool an AI agent can call to grab your screen on its own — the request is refused by design. When your agent needs to see something, it asks you to point, and you decide.
Workflow recording is the same deal: it runs only after you start it, and a red REC indicator stays on screen the whole time. There is no hidden mode.
Your words and screen stay on your Mac
Speech is turned into text on-device with Apple's engine and a bundled offline model. Text recognition on images runs on-device too. There is no account, no sign-in, and no API key. Nothing is uploaded — the only time anything leaves your Mac is the moment you hand one capture to your own AI agent, and that is your action, not ours.
Cloud transcription is off unless you deliberately add your own provider key in Settings — then it is your key, your provider, your cost.
Workflow recordings are encrypted, and never keep what you type
When you record a workflow, PinVari saves it as a sequence of named actions — "clicked the Export button", "typed into the Search field" — so your agent can follow the steps even after windows move. Two hard rules keep that safe:
- Keystroke content is never stored. PinVari records only that keys were typed into a named field and how many — never the characters, never the key codes. You cannot reconstruct a password, a message, or anything you typed from a recording. It is not a keylogger and could not become one without a visible code change.
- Password fields are skipped automatically. When macOS enters secure-input mode — which every password field triggers — recording pauses itself, and the file honestly marks that a span was redacted. The field's name isn't even stored.
Encrypted at rest
Each recording is sealed with AES-256-GCM. The key is generated on your Mac and stored in the login Keychain (WhenUnlocked, ThisDeviceOnly) — it is never written into a file, never synced to iCloud, and unreadable while your Mac is locked. A recording file copied off your machine without your Keychain is ciphertext and nothing else.
The connection to your agent is local
PinVari talks to your AI agent over a server that binds to 127.0.0.1 only. Nothing on your network — or the internet — can reach it. The agent reads the captures you made; it cannot make PinVari capture on its own.
Signed, and honest about the edges
The app is a notarized, Developer-ID build checked by Apple. Two honest notes, because a security page that only lists strengths isn't one:
- PinVari needs Screen Recording and Accessibility permission to do its job — reading the element you point at requires it. macOS asks you for both, and you can revoke them any time in System Settings.
- Workflow recording is exclusive to the direct download. The Mac App Store edition runs in Apple's sandbox, which cannot support this feature — so it is compiled out of that build entirely. We don't claim a capability the sandbox can't back.
Found a flaw?
We want to hear it. Email [email protected] with anything that looks wrong and we'll act on it. This page is a standing invitation to prove us wrong.