ChatGPT's Computer History tracks your Mac

OpenAI is rolling out Computer History, a ChatGPT desktop feature for macOS that turns your clicks, keystrokes, keyboard shortcuts, and app switches into a searchable activity timeline. The feature reads interaction events through macOS’s accessibility system rather than capturing screenshots, screen recordings, or audio, then periodically converts the raw events into plain-text Markdown memory summaries that ChatGPT and Codex can reference later, for example to help you resume unfinished work or locate a file you were using earlier.

It’s off by default. Turning it on requires going to Settings > Integrations, and users choose exactly which apps and websites are allowed to contribute, with a menu-bar shortcut to pause collection at any time and options to delete history at different time granularities. The interaction events themselves live locally on the Mac for up to 48 hours before OpenAI’s processing deletes the temporary files, though the generated memory files persist unencrypted on disk. The feature is available to ChatGPT Pro users on an opt-in basis and to Business and Enterprise plans if an admin turns it on, but it isn’t available with API-key or Amazon Bedrock access, and OpenAI has excluded the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK entirely.

What it means for you

If you or anyone on your team runs the ChatGPT desktop app on a Mac, treat this as worth a deliberate decision rather than something to leave on autopilot: the unencrypted local memory files are readable by other programs running as the same user, which matters if your Mac is shared or your threat model includes local malware. The EEA/UK/Switzerland exclusion is also a tell, OpenAI is drawing the same line GDPR-adjacent regulators have already pushed other AI products toward for behavioral data collection, which is worth watching if you operate in jurisdictions not yet excluded.