Privacy and security

• Local. perch listens on 127.0.0.1 only. There’s no account and no cloud service in between.
• Locked to you. Every page and request needs a key that only your own perch window has.
  • The Mac app reads it from a file only you can read.
  • A browser signs in through the one-time link npm start prints.
  • Other programs and other users on the Mac get nothing.
• Reads:
  • the status record Claude Code keeps for each running session, and for Codex, which sessions its own background service has open;
  • the end of each running session’s transcript (for its title, branch, conversation and your last request);
  • your commands and skills (for the / menu), and the helper agents you’ve set up;
  • each folder’s git remote;
  • your pull requests, through gh.
• Never reads login, key or credential files.
• Changes nothing unless you ask. Outside its own folder it only writes what you ask for: the permission hook, the tasks note in each account’s CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md, a permission rule you add, or a file you save with ⌘O. It keeps a copy of a settings file before its first change, and turning a switch off takes its change out.
• Open source, MIT licensed. To report a problem privately, see SECURITY.md in the repo.

Files it keeps

Everything lives in ~/.perch, readable only by you:

File	What it is
config.json	Your settings
names.json	Names you gave sessions
open-sessions.json	Which sessions were open, to offer reopening them after a restart (kept two weeks)
uploads/	Screenshots you attached (deleted after 30 days)
tasks/	Your tasks, one Markdown file each
phones.json, the Mac’s keys	For pairing
session-key, hook-token	The keys described above
terminal-log.txt	When a phone opened or closed a terminal