Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-07-20

WhatCable is a small macOS menu bar app that tells you what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do. This page explains what data the app handles.

WhatCable is published by Bitmoor Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17133695, with its registered office at Unit A478, 4-6 Greatorex Street, London, United Kingdom, E1 5NF. Bitmoor Ltd is the data controller for the limited personal data described below. If you buy WhatCable Pro, the terms and conditions also apply.

What WhatCable reads

WhatCable reads USB-C port state, USB-PD Discover Identity messages, power source data, and Thunderbolt switch information from your Mac through Apple's IOKit framework. All of this stays on your Mac. It is used only to render the popover you see in the menu bar.

What WhatCable sends

WhatCable checks the public GitHub Releases API once every six hours to see if a newer version is available. That request includes a User-Agent header naming the app and your installed version (for example, WhatCable/1.3.0). It does not include any personal information, and no analytics, telemetry, or identifiers are sent.

If you click "Report this cable", WhatCable opens GitHub in your default browser with the cable's public e-marker fields pre-filled in a new issue. You review the contents and decide whether to submit it. Nothing is sent automatically.

Contributing diagnostic data (opt-in)

WhatCable has an optional "Contribute Diagnostic Data" feature, in Settings and the right-click menu. It is off by default and never runs on its own. When you choose to run it, a consent screen explains what will be sent before anything leaves your Mac.

If you proceed, WhatCable runs a set of read-only IOKit probes and sends the results to a WhatCable server to help improve cable, port, and display detection. The submission contains:

• Raw IOKit registry properties for your USB-C and Thunderbolt ports, power delivery state, Thunderbolt topology, and any connected accessories.
• The model and capabilities of any connected display, read from its EDID.
• Battery and power-adapter readings from your Mac's own power reporting, including what the attached charger advertises, and per-port statistics from any connected USB hub.
• Your macOS version and Mac chip type.
• A one-way SHA-256 hash of your Mac's hardware UUID, used only to group submissions from the same machine. The original UUID is never sent and cannot be recovered from the hash.

No names, accounts, your Mac's serial number, or personal data are included. It is the same kind of data visible in System Information. Decline at the consent screen and nothing is sent.

How contributed data is used. If you choose to contribute, you grant Bitmoor Ltd a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use the submitted data to develop, test and improve WhatCable and related products, including in aggregated or derived form. In practice that means using it to work out how different Macs, cables, docks and displays actually behave, and turning that into better detection and clearer explanations in the app. Because submissions contain no personal data, we cannot link one back to you in order to remove it individually. Contributed diagnostic data is used for research and product development. It is not published, and it is not what feeds the public cable database, which is built from cable reports people choose to open publicly on GitHub. The same wording appears in section 16 of the terms and conditions.

WhatCable Pro (purchase and licensing)

WhatCable Pro is an optional paid upgrade. Buying it and keeping it activated involves some personal data that the free app never touches.

• Purchase. Payment is handled by Stripe. Your card details and email address are processed by Stripe under Stripe's privacy policy. WhatCable never sees or stores your card details.
• Licence delivery. Your licence key is emailed to the address you bought it with.
• Activation and validation. When you activate a key, and once each time the app launches afterwards, WhatCable sends your licence key and your Mac's hardware UUID to WhatCable's licensing server to confirm the licence and enforce the two-Mac limit. If the server can't be reached, Pro keeps working offline for up to 30 days.
• What the licence server stores. Your licence key, the email you bought it with, and the hardware UUID of each Mac the key has been activated on (up to two), so one key can't be used on more machines than allowed.
• Support. If you use the support form on the website, it collects the email address and the licence key or Stripe transaction ID you enter, so we can find your purchase and reply.

Deactivating a licence (in the app, or with whatcable --deactivate) removes the stored key from that Mac. The free app makes none of these calls.

What WhatCable stores

WhatCable stores your in-app preferences (display mode, hidden ports, notification toggles, font size) in the standard macOS user defaults system, on your Mac. With WhatCable Pro, your licence key is also stored on your Mac so it doesn't have to be re-entered.

What WhatCable does not do

Outside the opt-in diagnostic feature and the Pro purchase and licensing described above, WhatCable does not collect, store, or transmit:

• Personal information (name, email, address, phone number).
• Account or device identifiers.
• Browsing or app usage analytics.
• Information about other apps or files on your Mac.
• Anything about devices connected to ports WhatCable does not need to read.

Contact

Bug reports and questions go through the public GitHub repository at github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable.

For privacy questions, or to ask what data we hold about a Pro purchase and have it corrected or deleted, email [email protected] or write to Bitmoor Ltd, Unit A478, 4-6 Greatorex Street, London, United Kingdom, E1 5NF. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.