Privacy
Network Quality Monitor collects nothing about you. There is no account, no analytics, and no server of ours for anything to be sent to.
This matters more than usual here, because people who install a network monitor are exactly the people who can see what an app connects to. So here is everything, including the one thing that does leave your machine.
The one lookup that leaves your Mac
To show your public address and country, the app asks Cloudflare — at
cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace — what address you appear to come
from. Answering that question requires telling them, which is unavoidable: it is
the same as asking someone what your handwriting looks like.
It is optional. There is a switch in Settings called “Look up my public IP and country”. Turn it off and the app never contacts Cloudflare; everything else keeps working. No account is involved, nothing is stored on their side on our behalf, and we never see the answer — it goes straight from Cloudflare to your Mac.
The measurements themselves
The app sends ICMP echo requests — pings — to your own router and to the
addresses you list, by default Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 and Google’s
8.8.8.8. These are ordinary network probes containing no
information about you. They are what the ping command has sent since
1983.
What stays on your Mac
The history of measurements, the record of interruptions, your data totals and your settings. They are kept in the app’s own folder in your Library. They never leave the machine and we never see them. Deleting the app deletes them.
Permissions the app may ask for
- Location. Only to display the name of the Wi-Fi network you are on. macOS treats a network name as location data, because knowing which Wi-Fi you are connected to is close to knowing where you are. Nothing about your location is collected, stored or sent — the app asks the system for the name and shows it. Everything else about the Wi-Fi (signal, speed, generation, band, channel) works without this permission, and the app only asks if you press the button that asks.
- Notifications. Only if you turn alerts on. They are off by default.
- Local network. Measuring your own router means talking to your own network. Nothing is sent anywhere.
The per-app breakdown
The list of which programs are using the network comes from
nettop, a tool that ships with macOS. It is read while the window is
open and shown to you. It is not stored and not transmitted.
Children
The app is rated 4+ and collects nothing from anyone, of any age.
Changes
If this ever changes, this page changes with it, and the change will be described in the app’s release notes rather than quietly.
Contact
Questions about any of this: supportlap478@gmail.com