One page, two jobs. What offline time tracking actually means in the TimePrivate Mac app, and the whole privacy policy underneath it in plain language.
TimePrivate is offline time tracking in the strict sense: the TimePrivate Mac app makes no network requests at all, so there is no online mode for a dropped connection to interrupt. Most products that rank for this term mean something narrower. They keep a local queue while the wifi is down and upload it to the vendor's servers when it comes back. TimePrivate has no servers to upload to.
The rest of this page is the TimePrivate privacy policy in full. An offline claim and the policy behind it belong in the same place, which is why they are both here.
Search the term and you get two different products wearing the same label. The difference is not a feature, it is where your hours sit once the day is over.
The tracker keeps recording while the network is down and flushes the queue to the vendor's servers when it returns. Useful on a train. Read the feature lists on the pages that rank for offline time tracking and you also find offline GPS, live location, screenshot capture and selfie clock in advertised as offline features, because those tools are sold to employers watching staff. For a named example of how the storage question plays out, the TimePrivate comparison with Toggl Track scores both products row by row.
The TimePrivate Mac app has no account, no server and no queue. Nothing is held back for later upload because there is no later upload. That is a smaller promise than "works when the wifi drops" and a much harder one to walk back, since adding a sync-to-us feature later would mean rewriting this policy in public.
Ask any offline time tracking tool one thing: after the sync finishes, who else can open the record? If the answer names an administrator, a workspace owner or a support team, you bought delayed uploading, not offline tracking. TimePrivate's answer is that no sync to us exists, so nobody at TimePrivate can open anything.
Four reasons come up again and again on this search. TimePrivate answers three of them well and the fourth not at all, which is worth knowing before you join the TimePrivate waitlist.
Trains, planes, basements, building sites, hotel wifi that wants a fresh login every ninety minutes. A cloud tracker turns each of those into a gap you patch by hand the next morning. Offline time tracking in TimePrivate never has that gap, because the TimePrivate Mac app makes no network requests at all and writes each block of work straight to the local database on your own disk.
Legal, clinical, security research, anything under an NDA: the document names and client names inside your day are themselves the sensitive part. TimePrivate records app names and browser domains only, never full URLs and never document contents, and none of it leaves the Mac. If you bill that work, the TimePrivate freelance time tracking page covers turning those blocks into an invoice.
This is the complaint sitting under a lot of offline tracker searches, and a better looking stopwatch is not the fix. TimePrivate tracks without a timer. It watches which app is in front of you, maps that to a project using rules you wrote once, and drafts the day each evening for you to approve, edit or bin. Nothing books itself into your week.
A good share of the offline trackers on this search use the word to mean GPS breadcrumbs, geofences and clock in photos that upload once signal returns. TimePrivate has no GPS, no map view, no screenshot capture and no manager seat. If proof of presence is the job you are hiring for, TimePrivate is the wrong tool and the attendance category will serve you better.
Most pages ranking for this term describe an offline mode that queues entries and uploads them later. The TimePrivate sequence has no upload step in it, so here it is end to end.
TimePrivate asks for no email, no password and no workspace, because there is no server to register with. You spend the first few minutes writing rules instead, the kind that say this app and this domain belong to that client. If you are moving from another tracker, TimePrivate imports a CSV export of your history and calendar .ics files, so the old hours arrive before the first tracked day does.
TimePrivate notes which application is in front of you and which domain the browser is on, and it matches that against your rules on the machine itself. Walk away and it notices only the length of time since your last input, never the input itself, then offers the idle stretch back when you return. No packet leaves the Mac during any of this.
TimePrivate assembles what it saw into a draft timesheet and stops there. Accept it, edit it, or throw the whole day away. That approval step is what makes the offline record a timesheet you stand behind rather than a raw activity log, and it is the difference between TimePrivate and a surveillance tool that reports whatever it captured.
The approved hours sit in a local database file on your Mac, with CSV export whenever an accountant or a client asks. Optional sync is the single feature that writes outside the TimePrivate app, and it writes end-to-end encrypted files into a folder you choose, such as your own cloud drive. TimePrivate holds no key and runs no server, so we cannot read them.
An offline time tracking claim is only worth something if the list of what gets written down is short and specific. Here is TimePrivate's, in both directions.
TimePrivate notices which application is in front of you and which domain the browser is on, then maps that to a project using rules you wrote. Domains, not URLs. It is enough to rebuild a day and not enough to reconstruct what you read.
Each evening TimePrivate drafts the timesheet from what it saw and waits for you. Accept it, edit it, or throw it away. Nothing books itself into your week, so the offline record is the one you signed off on rather than a raw activity feed.
The TimePrivate app takes no screenshots, logs no keystrokes, reads no GPS and has no webcam access and no manager view. Those are the four features the offline tracker category advertises most loudly, and they are the ones TimePrivate has chosen not to build.
Every hour TimePrivate tracks lands in a database file on your own disk, with CSV export whenever you want it. That is what makes the offline claim checkable rather than a slogan: there is a file, it is yours, and you can open it.
Every tracker on this search says offline somewhere. Four checks separate the ones that mean it from the ones that mean delayed upload, and TimePrivate publishes them because the same checks apply to TimePrivate.
Turn the network off in the morning and track a real day, then turn it back on and watch what the tracker does in the next few minutes. If entries appear in a web dashboard shortly afterwards, you had a queue, not offline time tracking. The TimePrivate Mac app has no dashboard for them to appear in.
An offline tracker should be able to name a path on your own disk. If support answers with a workspace or an account instead, the record is theirs. TimePrivate's answer is a local database file on your Mac, which is why the offline claim on this page is checkable rather than a slogan.
Run the export in the first week, while you still like the product, and look at what comes out. Export that only exists on a higher tier, or that drops your tags and billable flags, is a lock in you will meet a year later. TimePrivate exports everything to CSV, and the database file is already yours before any export runs.
An app store listing has to declare what it collects, and that declaration outranks any landing page. Walking through one takes about a minute: the TimePrivate guide to reading a store privacy label shows what to look for. TimePrivate is not released, so there is no TimePrivate listing to read yet, and this policy is what you have to hold us to instead.
None of these four checks needs a support ticket or a trial extension, and all four work on a product you already pay for. Run them on TimePrivate the week it opens. If TimePrivate ever fails one of them, the policy below is the thing that had to change first, and rewriting it in public is a much louder act than quietly adding a server.
This is the whole policy, in plain language. It has two halves, because the TimePrivate app and the timeprivate.com website behave differently and blurring them would be dishonest. This page is the disclosure half; the contract half, covering the waitlist, the planned subscription and who owns the hours you track, sits in the TimePrivate terms of use.
TimePrivate the application makes no network requests. It has no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no account system. Your tracked time lives in a local database on your computer. If you enable sync, the app writes end-to-end encrypted files into a folder you choose; we never see them and could not read them if we did. There is no manager view, no screenshot capture and no location tracking to switch on, which is the practical reason the offline behaviour described above cannot quietly change on you.
If you join the waitlist we store the email address you enter, the time you submitted it, and your browser's user-agent string, so we can tell you when TimePrivate launches. This site also uses Google Analytics, PostHog and Microsoft Clarity to count visits and see which pages people read, which sets cookies in your browser. No advertising pixels. None of this touches the app, which stays offline and silent as described above. Want your email removed? Reply to any email we send and say so.
A website that measures its own traffic sitting in front of an app that collects nothing is the honest description of TimePrivate, and it is the line you should expect any offline time tracking tool to draw as plainly. The tools named above run on timeprivate.com pages you are reading right now. They do not run inside the Mac app, they have no way to reach it, and nothing you track in the app is visible to them. If a competing offline tracker cannot tell you which side of that line each claim sits on, treat the claim as marketing.
Last updated August 2026.
TimePrivate's offline design rules out entire categories of work, and it is cheaper for everyone if you find that out here rather than in week two.
You need to see other people's hours in one dashboard, approve their timesheets or run payroll from them: TimePrivate has none of that, and the offline architecture is exactly why. You need GPS, live location or proof-of-presence photos for a field crew: TimePrivate does not record location at all, and the offline trackers built for that job will serve you better. You are on Windows or Linux today: the TimePrivate app ships on Apple Silicon Macs first, though the free browser tools here work anywhere, including the TimePrivate work hours calculator and the TimePrivate timesheet template. And the honest limit on the privacy claim itself: TimePrivate cannot stop other software your employer installs on your Mac from watching you. It simply is not one of those programs. The full list of what TimePrivate deliberately leaves out is on the home page.
What people ask about offline time tracking, answered for TimePrivate specifically, including the cases where the answer is no.
In TimePrivate, yes, because there is no online mode to fall back from. The app makes no network requests, so tracking on a plane, in a basement or on a client site with a locked down guest network behaves exactly like tracking at your desk. Nothing is queued for upload, because there is nowhere for it to upload to.
No. That is the difference between TimePrivate and an offline mode bolted onto a cloud tracker. A cloud tracker keeps a local queue while the network is down and flushes it to the vendor's servers when the network returns, which makes the offline period a delay rather than a boundary. TimePrivate has no server, no account and no queue, so there is nothing to flush.
Yes, dozens of them, and the trade is usually the same one: the tracker is free because your hours live in the vendor's account, where an administrator or a future owner of the company can read them. TimePrivate splits it differently. The free part is the TimePrivate work hours calculator, a free page on this site that totals a week of shifts in your browser and asks for no email and no sign up. The TimePrivate Mac app is not free: planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only.
There is no single answer, so use a test instead. Ask where the hours are written, whether you can export them to CSV on day one, and whether anyone other than you can open the account. A personal tracker that is free because the record sits in a workspace your employer or your client pays for is not really personal. TimePrivate does not compete on free: the app is planned at $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only, and the free thing TimePrivate offers is the browser calculator on this site.
Not from TimePrivate today. The TimePrivate Mac app is not released, so this site carries no download link and the waitlist is the whole offer. What TimePrivate publishes free is browser based with nothing to install: the TimePrivate work hours calculator and the TimePrivate weekly timesheet template both run in the tab and ask for no email. Free downloads for this search certainly exist, mostly Windows and cloud apps, and the thing to settle before installing one is whether the hours land on your own disk or in somebody's account.
Not with TimePrivate yet. The TimePrivate app ships on Apple Silicon Macs first, Windows is on the roadmap and no Linux build is planned. That matters on this particular search, because a lot of what ranks for offline time tracking is Windows software, including free listings in the Microsoft Store. If you are on a PC, the free TimePrivate browser tools work today on any machine, and the TimePrivate waitlist is only worth your email if a Mac is somewhere in your future.
Not TimePrivate. The TimePrivate app has no GPS, no live location and no map view, and adding them would contradict the policy on this page. Several products that rank for offline time tracking do advertise offline GPS and live location, because they are sold to employers who want to know where staff are. If that is your requirement, TimePrivate is the wrong tool and you should shop that category instead.
It depends on who the record is for. If a manager approves your hours, the best tool is whatever your employer already runs, because your copy will not be the one that counts. If the hours are yours to defend on an invoice, in a review or in a dispute, the useful question is where the file lives. TimePrivate is built for that second case: a local database on your Mac, CSV export, no manager view and no approval queue.
The database and any CSV files you exported stay on your Mac, because they were never anywhere else. TimePrivate is planned as a subscription, so a lapsed subscription is a question about the app rather than about your records: the hours are already sitting in a file on your own disk instead of in an account somebody else can close.
No. There is nothing to download and nothing to buy today. The TimePrivate waitlist is the whole offer: one email on the day it opens. Planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only, on Apple Silicon Macs first with Windows on the roadmap.
The TimePrivate policy above is short on purpose, because a long one is usually hiding something. When the TimePrivate Mac app opens, the waitlist gets one email and nothing else.
Not released yet. Leave your email and we will write to you the day it opens.