Terminal has no account, and it connects only to the hosts you choose. Panes go straight from your device to your Mac, over Tailscale or SSH. Here’s the rest.
On your devices
SSH credentials, pairing keys and trusted fingerprints are in the app’s Keychain. Saved hosts and unsent drafts stay on the device. Mac discovery and encrypted pairing grants use iCloud Keychain, and each device keeps its own pairing key. Settings, including dictation, may sync through iCloud Keychain if you choose; SSH credentials don’t.
Notifications
Notifications are optional, and use a relay and Apple’s push service. Screen text, Mac names, labels, questions, options and replies are encrypted before they leave your Mac or device, so the relay can’t read them.
The relay does see what it needs to deliver them: opaque install and consent IDs, key versions, event, epoch and sequence IDs, issue and expiry times, Live Activity timing, attention hints, push tokens, instance IDs, the subscriptions you selected, the environment, type and version, and dismissal and end events. Its infrastructure sees IP addresses and timing.
Encrypted alerts expire at their signed deadline, and Live Activity frames after 90 seconds. Delivery history expires after seven days. Authentication and revocation records have their own lifetimes.
Once decrypted, a notification or Live Activity may show private text on your Lock Screen. Previews are yours to control in system settings.
Dictation
Apple dictation is the default, and it runs on the device. Saving a Groq key doesn’t select Groq. If you choose Groq, your audio goes to it under your own API key, along with pane project and agent names and a fixed vocabulary. Screen context adds names from terminal output, drafts and queued messages, and Polish also sends the transcript. These switches are in Dictation settings.
Diagnostics
Diagnostics start off. Switched on, they send only fixed failure codes to Sentry: a crash, a failed push registration, a stuck pane, sends dropped after a reconnect, a lost dictated take or a notification failure, each at most once an hour. Terminal sends no terminal output, hostnames, credentials, notification contents, raw errors, URLs, screenshots, crash attachments or memory dumps. The diagnostic service sees the request’s IP address. Apple may separately receive system diagnostics under your device’s sharing settings.
This website
Signing up for launch news stores your email address and the time you signed up, and nothing else. It’s kept for the launch announcement. The site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Cloudflare hosts the site and the list, and sees visitors’ IP addresses.
Last updated 4 November 2026.