Every claim here was verified against the source, not assumed. The commands that verify each one are listed under "How to check this yourself".

No telemetry. There is no analytics, crash reporting, usage counter or phone-home of any kind, and no code path that would emit one.

No network calls. The source contains no urllib, requests, http.client, urlopen, httpx, ftplib or smtplib. It opens no connection, resolves no name and sends no packet. The tool is fully functional with the machine offline.

There is exactly one use of the socket module in the codebase: socket.gethostname() in macverify/sysinfo.py, which reads the machine's configured hostname. That is a local gethostname(3) syscall — no resolver, no network traffic. It is named here so that a grep for socket does not look like an undisclosed exception.

No data leaves the machine. Reports are written to ~/.macverify/reports (or --out) and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded, and no report is transmitted anywhere by this tool. Sharing a report is entirely your action.

No elevation. sudo, su, doas, sudoedit, security and systemsetup are refused by the command runner in macverify/shell.py before execution. Suggested fixes — including any that would need sudo — are strings printed for you to review and run yourself. macverify never runs them.

No shell. Every subprocess call goes through a single subprocess.run() in macverify/shell.py with a list argument vector and no shell. There is no shell=True, os.system or os.popen anywhere, and no caller builds a command by string interpolation, so there is no command-injection surface.

No dynamic execution. No eval, exec, pickle, marshal or yaml.load is used on command output, file contents or any other external input.

No modification of system state. The tool reads. The only files it writes are its own reports.

No secret values captured. The secrets domain records where credential-shaped values live — file, line number, variable name, detector label — and a masked four-character prefix. The value itself is never written to the JSON, the HTML, the markdown, or a log. This is tested by running the collector against planted credentials and asserting that neither the full value nor a fragment of its body appears in any output.

No AI session transcripts read. The openai_codex domain records the file count, byte total and timestamps of ~/.codex/sessions. It never opens a transcript.

No third-party dependencies. Standard library only, at install time and at runtime. pip show macverify lists an empty Requires:.

A generated report is sensitive even though it contains no secret values. An audit_*.json names your host and user, and lists installed applications, SSH key paths, privacy grants, listening ports, and the file and line of anything credential-shaped.

macverify therefore creates ~/.macverify/reports mode 0700 and writes every report mode 0600, so reports are readable only by the account that produced them. reports/, audit_*.json and audit_*.html are gitignored. Read a report before you send it anywhere.

Every claim above is also an automated test. The suite parses each module with ast and asserts these properties against the code itself, so a change that breaks one fails CI rather than quietly shipping:

/usr/bin/python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -t .

tests/test_guarantees.py covers the imports, calls and constants; tests/test_redaction.py plants credentials in a temporary $HOME and asserts none of them reach any output; tests/test_degradation.py runs every collector against an empty home and asserts none raise.

To check by hand instead, run these in a checkout. Each should produce the stated result. They are scoped to macverify/, the shipped package; the test suite names these same constructs in order to assert their absence, so an unscoped grep matches the tests that enforce the claim.

grep -rn "shell=True\|os\.system\|os\.popen\|check_output" --include='*.py' macverify/
grep -rnE "\b(eval|exec)[[:space:]]*\(|pickle|marshal\.loads|yaml\.load" --include='*.py' macverify/
grep -rn "urllib\|requests\.\|http\.client\|urlopen\|httpx\|ftplib\|smtplib" --include='*.py' macverify/

All three return nothing.

grep -rn "socket\." --include='*.py' macverify/

Returns exactly one line: socket.gethostname() in macverify/sysinfo.py.

grep -rn "subprocess" --include='*.py' macverify/shell.py

Shows the single subprocess.run() call, with a list argument vector.

You can also confirm the offline claim empirically by disabling networking and running macverify — the output is identical.

Report privately, not in a public issue. Use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting on this repository: Security → Report a vulnerability.

Please include the macverify version (macverify --version), your macOS version, and the steps to reproduce. If the report involves a generated report file, review it for host and account details before attaching it, or describe the relevant fields instead of attaching the file.

This is a personal project with no paid support and no guaranteed response time. Reports are handled on a best-effort basis.