ChatGPT can now log your Mac activity in Europe, if you let it

On August 15 we looked at Computer History, OpenAI's new activity recorder for the Mac. The line that mattered most sat right at the end: it was not available in Europe. That changed on August 20, when OpenAI switched the feature on for the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

What Computer History records

The feature lives in the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS and collects interaction events, meaning clicks, typing and switches between apps, plus text and context that macOS exposes through its accessibility system. Out of that it builds short summaries and a timeline that ChatGPT and the coding agent Codex can draw on later. Screenshots are explicitly not part of it, and neither is microphone or system audio. Private-mode browsing never shows up at all.

Nothing happens on its own

Computer History ships switched off and stays that way until you turn it on. In the Mac app the path runs through Settings, then Integrations, then Computer history. You need a Pro, Business or Enterprise plan and Memories switched on. In Business and Enterprise workspaces an administrator has to grant access first, and even then every user still has to opt in individually. The ChatGPT icon in the macOS menu bar lets you pause collection at any time, and you decide app by app and site by site what may feed the history.

Three things OpenAI flags itself

OpenAI's own documentation carries a blunt warning: the files can contain sensitive information, Computer History does not encrypt them, and other programs running as your macOS user may be able to read them. Temporary event files are deleted after 48 hours. The memories built from them stay on disk as plain text files until you delete them.

The second point is about other people. OpenAI says to turn the feature off during communication with others unless you have their prior express consent. Otherwise chats, mail and video calls end up in the summaries.

The third is prompt injection, meaning hidden instructions inside a website or an app that the AI then follows. Computer History raises that risk, OpenAI writes. We have already seen how that plays out in AI browsers.

What reaches OpenAI

The recording itself happens on the Mac. To build the summaries, though, the app sends the temporary event files to OpenAI. The company says it does not keep them afterwards and does not use them for training. It works differently once a finished memory is used in a later chat, because that chat content can feed model improvement, depending on your ChatGPT data controls.