ChatGPT can now remember what you did on your Mac — without screenshots
The New Stack Frederic Lardinois ● Covered by 3 sources
ChatGPT on Mac can now track your work across apps and sites, if you let it. OpenAI says it uses activity events, not screenshots — but that still sounds like a lot of memory.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Frederic Lardinois — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI is adding a new Mac feature for ChatGPT Work and Codex called Computer History, and it’s trying to sell it as useful rather than creepy. The idea is simple: let ChatGPT watch what you do across apps and websites, turn that into a local timeline, and use it later to answer questions like what you were debugging or where you left off on a pull request.
The pitch is that you won’t need to rebuild context every time you return to a task. If you read something in Google Docs, Slack, or a browser tab and can’t remember where, ChatGPT should be able to find it again from your history. OpenAI says the feature is optional and aimed at Pro, Business, and Enterprise users.
The company is also trying hard to distance this from the kind of screen-grab surveillance that tends to make people flinch. Dominik Kundel says Computer History does not use screen or audio capture. Instead, it records interaction events such as clicking, typing, and app switches. That puts it in a different bucket from OpenAI’s earlier Chronicle experiment, which used screenshots and OCR, and from Record & Replay, which was about demonstrating a workflow so it could be reused as a skill.
Control is the other big selling point. Users can exclude specific apps and websites through a macOS menu bar entry or in the ChatGPT desktop app, pause the feature from the menu bar, and delete the local data it stores. Even so, the summaries still go to the model, and that may be the part that worries users and employers most. OpenAI says the rollout starts now for Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, with the EEA, UK, and Switzerland getting access in the coming weeks.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is exactly the kind of feature that sounds helpful right up until a manager asks for the timeline. Local storage and no screenshots are nice, but “the model gets the summaries” is doing a lot of work there. AI companies keep calling this memory; ordinary people tend to call it surveillance with better branding.
Read more about this at: The New Stack
