This creepy Mac app can record every moment of your life

This creepy Mac app can record every moment of your online life

A new app for your Mac claims it can record every moment of your online life and store it for retrieval. We’re talking about every moment, from your emails to your chats to your FaceTime and Zoom calls.

Rewind is a work in progress from Brett Bejcek and Dan Siroker, two American entrepreneurs who between them have worked with Spotify and Optimizely. They claim Rewind is like a search engine for your life.

The Rewind app on an iMac with a pink background, showing a grid of faces from a Zoom call — image: Rewind

“We record anything you’ve seen, said, or heard,” the Rewind website explains. “And we make it searchable.”

Rewind will record your Zoom calls and make them easily searchable. The app will also create a transcript of everything said in the call. Although Rewind only works with Zoom right now, the company is working on adding other services, such as FaceTime and Teams.

The site goes on to explain that the information is stored locally on your Mac for privacy protection, and only you have access to it. The app compresses this data up to 3,750 times, which should be small enough to fit on Apple’s notoriously stingy hard drive sizes.

Rewind uses Apple’s native APIs and sets itself up automatically when you install it, so there are no IT skills required. Because the data gets stored locally on your Mac, there’s no need to set up cloud backups or Google integrations. It just works.

“No need to integrate with cloud services like Gmail, Dropbox, or Slack,” the website says. “Rewind starts capturing these apps right away, with no IT required.”

Becjek and Siroker said they won’t sell user data or introduce any advertising with their product, meaning it will be fully funded by users. While the app is free to use for now, they plan to introduce a subscription model in the future.

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