Privacy

Privacy & installation

Last updated October 17, 2026

Short version: what you browse never leaves your Mac. There’s no account, no analytics, and no tracking in Cedar itself. Cedar talks to its own servers for exactly two things — the trial and license check, and the update check — and both are below in full.

On your Mac

Your tabs, history, bookmarks, reading list, site settings and preferences live in ~/Library/Application Support/Cedar and Cedar’s preferences. Website data (cookies, caches, site storage) lives in WebKit’s store for Cedar. Saved passwords live in your Mac’s keychain, and Cedar shows one only after Touch ID or your Mac’s password. None of it is synced or uploaded.

Pages you visit

Pages load straight from the sites you visit, through WebKit. Searches from the address field go to the search engine you choose in Settings. Site icons are fetched from the site itself. The built-in ad blocker runs on your Mac with a list that ships inside the app; nothing is looked up remotely.

Trial and license check

To start the free week, Cedar sends a SHA-256 hash of your Mac’s hardware UUID to the Cedar license service. The raw UUID is never sent. The service remembers when that hash started a trial, so a trial runs once per Mac.

When you activate, Cedar sends your license key and the same hash. About once a day it renews its signed license with that license and hash. The service confirms your purchase with Whop and stores the hash next to your order in Cloudflare Workers KV, so one key stays on one Mac. Between checks, the license is verified on your Mac, offline. These requests carry nothing about your browsing.

Your license key and the signed license and trial tokens are kept in ~/Library/Application Support/Cedar/License, readable only by your user account.

Updates

Cedar fetches a small signed version file from this site about once an hour. When there’s a newer version, it downloads it, checks its checksum and signature, and puts it in place for the next launch. Update requests carry no identifier. Turn off automatic installs in Settings › About.

Extensions and plugins

Extensions you install from the Chrome Web Store, and plugins you add, run with the permissions they ask for and you grant. What they do with data is up to them.

Purchase and email

Checkout runs on Whop. Whop handles payment and your customer account under its own privacy policy; Cedar never sees your card. After purchase, the license service reads your order from Whop to show your key and send you one welcome email with it. To make lost-key emails possible, it stores a one-way hash of your email address, not the address itself. You won’t get marketing email.

Website

This site is served by Cloudflare, which processes connection details such as your IP address to deliver and protect it. The site uses no cookies and no analytics.

What the installer does

The Terminal command downloads install.sh, which:

• downloads the release manifest and app over HTTPS from this site,
• checks the download against the manifest’s SHA-256 checksum,
• checks that the app’s code signature is intact, comes from Cedar’s release certificate, and that its bundle ID and version match,
• removes the macOS quarantine flag from that verified copy only, and
• moves it into ~/Applications and opens it.

It doesn’t need your password and doesn’t change any Gatekeeper setting. To be clear about the trade-off: Cedar is signed with its own certificate, not an Apple Developer ID, and isn’t notarized. The signature proves the app wasn’t altered after it was built and that every update comes from the same maker, but it doesn’t identify the developer to Apple. Read the script before you run it if you like; it’s short.

Questions

Email kartik@kartikkabadi.com. See also the license terms.