Where this concern comes from, and why it's fair
Screenshots are inherently sensitive — a password field, a bank balance, a confidential work document can show up on screen at any moment. Any tool that claims to "intelligently process" your screenshots owes you a first answer: where does that processing happen, and does it touch the network? Dodging the question, or answering it vaguely, is itself a signal worth noticing. That's especially true for anything that runs in the background on your Mac all the time — asking "what does this actually do" before installing is a habit worth having, not excessive caution.
What permissions it asks for — and what it doesn't
Shotbox captures with a one-click region-selection hotkey, which requires macOS's Screen Recording permission — a system-level requirement that any screenshot tool doing region capture has to ask for, including Apple's own. It has nothing to do with whether that particular tool is trustworthy. It never asks for, and doesn't need, Full Disk Access or anything beyond that — it doesn't scan other files on your drive.
Where the text recognition actually happens
Reading the text inside a screenshot runs on Apple's Vision framework, entirely on your own Mac, works without an internet connection, and never sends the image or its recognized text to any server. That's different from how some cloud OCR services work, which typically upload the image to a remote server for processing. Shotbox chose the on-device path instead — the tradeoff being that recognition quality depends on your Mac's own processing power and the ceiling of what Vision itself can do, and accuracy drops on complex layouts, which is covered in more detail in the OCR search piece.
Anonymous usage stats are a separate matter, and deserve the same clarity
The app does send anonymous usage stats — a randomly generated device ID plus a handful of "which features got used" events, never screenshots or any content. This is on by default, and switchable off in Settings. Spelling this out matters because "we don't upload your content" and "we send zero data at all" are two different claims, and you're entitled to know the difference and decide for yourself whether to turn it off.
Verify it yourself — don't just take our word for it
If you want to check, the Network tab in macOS's built-in Activity Monitor lets you watch for unexpected network activity while Shotbox captures and recognizes a screenshot, or you can run the same check with any third-party network monitor. A tool that genuinely keeps processing on-device should hold up to that kind of scrutiny, not rest on a promise alone — worth weighing alongside built-in macOS screenshots vs. a screenshot tool that organizes itself for the broader tradeoffs.
