OpenAI just shipped a feature that watches what you do on your Mac and turns it into training data about you. It’s called Computer History, it lives in the ChatGPT desktop app on macOS, and it builds a running timeline of your activity that both ChatGPT and Codex can pull from when you ask them for something.
The pitch is that it learns how you work. It suggests automations. It picks up tasks you left half done.
The other way to describe it: your clicks and keystrokes become a queryable record.
The Windows Recall comparison is unavoidable
Microsoft‘s Recall took a beating for a reason, and the reason was screenshots. Recall leaned heavily on capturing your screen, which meant a rolling visual archive of everything you looked at sitting on your machine.
Computer History doesn’t do that. OpenAI says it doesn’t capture images, video or audio at all, and instead records what it calls “events.”
That’s a meaningful difference. It’s also not the same thing as not tracking you. An event log of what you clicked, typed and opened is still a detailed account of your day, just stored in a format that’s cheaper to search and harder to screenshot for a privacy outrage cycle.
What the controls actually give you
Here’s the part that matters most, and OpenAI got it right: Computer History is opt in, not opt out. You have to go turn it on.
You can also exclude specific apps and websites from being recorded, and you can delete individual entries if you want tighter control than a blanket app-level block.
Ari Weinstein, Product and Engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that Computer History will automatically ignore content in incognito or private browser tabs. So the browsing you already flagged as private stays out of the timeline without you having to build an exclusion list for it.
The demo shows the appeal, and the exposure
Dominik Kundel, a member of the Developer Experiences team at OpenAI, ran through a short demo of what this looks like in practice. The app finds the last document he edited, checks whether it was shared with anyone over Slack, then hands back a recap of how he spent his morning.
Useful? Genuinely, if you’ve ever lost 20 minutes reconstructing what you were doing before a meeting derailed you.
But look at what the assistant had to know to pull that off. It knew which file you touched last, it knew what happened in your Slack, and it knew enough about your morning to summarize it. That’s the trade. The recap is only as good as the surveillance underneath it.
Where this leaves you
If you’re already deep in ChatGPT and Codex for daily work, the exclusion list is the setting to configure before you do anything else, not after. Block your password manager, your banking sites and anything work-confidential on day one, because a delete-after-the-fact workflow means the entry existed first.
And if you skipped Recall on principle, nothing here should change your mind. Dropping the screenshots removes the creepiest part of the pitch. It doesn’t remove the premise.
