Blackbar is a tool for not leaking secrets. It would be absurd if the tool itself leaked them — so here is exactly how it handles your data, and how to verify what you download.
Everything — OCR, detection, and redaction — runs locally on your machine. Blackbar has no account, no sign-in, and sends nothing anywhere.
This is what makes Blackbar easy to approve on sensitive or air-gapped machines: there is no data flow to review.
A black rectangle drawn over a secret still has the secret underneath; a blur can be reversed on short strings; and the file often still carries EXIF/GPS/XMP metadata. Blackbar avoids all three:
Every release is published with a SHA-256 manifest and a GPG signature, so you can confirm your download is intact and really came from us.
Files: SHASUMS256.txt · SHASUMS256.txt.asc · public key
# 1. check the file hash matches the manifest shasum -a 256 -c SHASUMS256.txt # macOS / Linux # 2. verify the manifest was signed by Blackbar gpg --import blackbar-signing-key.asc gpg --verify SHASUMS256.txt.asc SHASUMS256.txt
Expect Good signature from "Blackbar Release Signing". The signing key fingerprint is:
7ABA D5C3 DC9D A715 8635 459C EDAA EF2F C716 4A46
Signing key rotated on 24 August 2026. Releases up to and including the first
1.0.0 build were signed with the retired key
69DF BA36 B149 7CE8 45A0 0091 4779 4781 CF58 7E79.
If you imported that key previously, gpg --verify will now fail — this is expected.
Re-import the current key above and verify again. The old key was retired because its private
half was lost from the release keyring; no revocation certificate had been kept, so it cannot be
revoked, only withdrawn from use. It must not be trusted for any release from this date onward.
dl.getblackbar.com.Blackbar never connects to anything. Instead, each device is activated once in your browser at getblackbar.com/activate: you give it your licence key and the device code Blackbar shows you, and it returns an Ed25519-signed activation code for that device only, which the app verifies offline. The device code is the first 80 bits of a SHA-256 hash of the machine's own identifier; the identifier itself never leaves the machine. We record the purchase, the device codes it activated and when — nothing else. Purchases are handled by Stripe; we never see or store your card details.
Two prompts can appear on macOS. Neither is optional plumbing we could quietly skip, so here is exactly what each covers.
Screen recording. Capture hands off to the system's own region selector — the same one
⇧⌘4 uses. Current versions of macOS attribute that capture to the app that started it,
so Blackbar must hold the Screen Recording permission for the selector to run at all. macOS words
the prompt “record this screen and audio” because it is one combined permission class:
Blackbar captures no audio and records no video. It reads the still region you drag, nothing
else, and only while you are actively taking a shot. macOS re-asks on its own schedule — that is
Apple's behaviour, not ours.
Keychain — no longer used at all. Blackbar used to keep exactly one keychain item: the date your trial started. There is no trial any more — the app is free to open, detect and redact, and a licence unlocks export — so there is nothing to anchor and Blackbar stores nothing in your keychain. It never asks for keychain access, which also removes the prompt that used to appear after upgrading across a change of signing certificate.
Upgrading from an older build? Blackbar deletes the old item on first launch rather than leaving it behind. If you would like to confirm it is gone, or clear it from a machine you no longer run Blackbar on:
# should report: could not be found security find-generic-password -s com.blackbar.app -a bb-anchor-7f3c # remove it by hand, if it is somehow still there security delete-generic-password -s com.blackbar.app -a bb-anchor-7f3c
Your licence is an ordinary file in Application Support, and always was — it was never in the keychain.
Neither permission grants network access. The macOS binary still ships with no network client entitlement, and a test in CI fails the build if that ever changes.
Found a security issue? Please email support@getblackbar.com — see our security.txt. We aim to acknowledge within 72 hours and will credit reporters who want it. Please don't disclose publicly until we've had a chance to fix and ship.