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Comment by ivm | Hacker News Reader

This article is a nice reminder that RescueTime keeps all your computer usage history (including site URLs) on their servers and can access it at any time.

But there are Selfspy[0], ManicTime[1] (Windows), and Qbserve[2] (Mac, my app) for private productivity tracking.

[0] https://github.com/selfspy/selfspy

[1] https://www.manictime.com/

[2] https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/

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I'm always skeeved out by reports like this. I know they're PR bits for the companies, but to me they're just another constant reminder that I'm just a data-point for any app that collects my data and all my data is theirs forever to use to build their product.

It's a weird constant feeling that no matter what I do on my computer or my phone that someone else knows what it is, is watching, recording, analyzing my activity. No stopping it now, but it takes away from the magic.

I used to have a paid subscription with some IPTV service which is kinda popular in this region of the world. Of course I knew that with internet-based video streams, they could track what and when I watch, but I naively assumed they wouldn't really do much like that... I'm a paying customer already after all...?

At some point, I think it was after the last big football event, they sent a marketing email. In it they listed which games I had watched, with minute-accurate viewing time information. They probably thought it'd be a neat surprise which customers would enjoy reading. I was repelled to see they keep this information in such detail. The marketing e-mail had quite the opposite effect on me.

A while after this, I cancelled my subscription with them. I was happy with their service otherwise - but I paid them to watch things, not to be watched myself.

This is why I don't use 99% of online products. The thought of a chunk of my life becoming someone else's data just makes me feel icky. Last time I tried to go back to stock Android I lasted about a month before the convenience of Google Play Services and everything relying on it was outweighed by the creepy feeling that my phone was watching me.

Just to add to your list, I recently came across Thyme (probably in some HN thread) and it's pretty neat https://github.com/sourcegraph/thyme

This looks great, thanks!

Thanks a lot for this

Thanks for the links.

Qbserve looks awesome! I'm having a problem though, since I'm using a work Mac and a home Mac, I won't be able to sync. As far as I read from the website:

> For the same reason, there is no sync. Sorry, multiple Mac owners! We wish we could do that some day, but it's a tricky task because Qbserve doesn't use any server at all.

And I wanted to ask, is this feature planned?

I use Qbserve, can vouch for it being a very nice tracking system. Can't vouch about its privacy guarantees, but only because I haven't double-checked them. (I use Qbserve only on my work computer on which I don't plan on doing anything I wouldn't my employer to know). It does have some kind of database in which URLs/programs have a crowdsourced taxonomy. For example, I think news.ycombinator.com is by default flagged as "Distracting" activity. For sites/programs that haven't been classified as "Productive" or "Distracting", things are put into a "Neutral/Uncategorized" bucket. And you can go into the details panel and manually classify the content for yourself.

When doing the classification, there is a checkbox for "Send to developers to improve Qbserve": https://imgur.com/a/Rei0e

I have no reason to assume that that checkbox is obeyed, or that info isn't leaked in other ways -- but just saying I haven't tried to verify it FWIW.

There was a front-page Show HN from Qbserve 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778077

Yes and no – I doubt that we will have enough resources to build a real sync because it's really hard to implement but only a small number of people will use it. It could be possible by making a "team edition" and recovering costs by selling the app to companies but I really don't like the idea of managers spying on their teams by using Qbserve.

But I was contemplating an idea of merging scheduled exports from multiple Macs with a simple web app.

Maybe make a multi-computer db selector? That way you don't have to merge databases with a sync algo, just give a drop-down to view your other computers dbs in a read only fashion from some dropbox drive or similar.

According to the feedback we've got, the usual goal is to see combined stats from multiple sources. I also have a suspicion that having a DB with multiple connections in a cloud storage wouldn't end well.

It depends if those cloud sync folders do atomic swaps of the files once they do a sync update or if they update in place as your reading the file. The key is making the 'other computers' dbs readonly from the perspective of the client view rendering app.

Shameless plug for my own tracker, in case anyone is interested: I built https://agh.io/about for productivity/time tracking. The advantage is that it's completely passive, but still can accurately classify time spent away from your computer (e.g. driving), zoning out in a puddle of drool with emacs open, talking to a coworker about a project while leaving your browser on HN. Things that most time trackers fail at.

And if you'd rather run things yourself to avoid giving me your data, it's open source, too: https://github.com/johnswanson/tictag

arbtt on Linux: http://arbtt.nomeata.de/. Highly configurable. Data collection decoupled from data analysis. Very much recommended!

FYI: "Buy now" leads me to a 500 Internal Error.

Oh, the reseller's (FastSpring) server is down. But it's $40 one-time fee.

I was just looking for apps similar to RescueTime this morning for this very reason. Yours looks excellent.

Unfortunately, selfspy's UX is subpar and it doesn't look like it's in active development anymore.

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