Where your data lives
What WireLens keeps on your device, how to clear it, and the few things that ever reach our servers.
A debugging proxy records sensitive things: tokens, cookies, personal data in request bodies. WireLens keeps all of it on the device you are debugging, and this page says exactly where.
On the Mac#
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Captures, sessions and bodies | ~/ |
| Rules and settings | ~/ |
| The root certificate and its private key | ~/, readable only by your user account. Time Machine backs it up with the rest of your user folder. |
| Client certificates and keys | The certificates with your settings, the keys in your Keychain |
| Team Workspace sign-in | Your Keychain |
| Crash logs | ~/ |
| Debug log (host names and paths, about 2 MB) | ~/ |
| Decoded bodies being viewed | ~/ |
Settings ▸ Storage shows how much room captures take. Settings ▸ Capture ▸ Body capture limit caps how much of each body is kept.
- Clear the capture: ⇧⌘K, or
wirelens clear. - Delete a session: in the Sessions window.
- Remove everything: Help ▸ Troubleshooting ▸ Factory Reset… restores the system proxy, removes the WireLens certificate, deletes every session, resets rules and settings and wipes the folder above, except the debug log. Your license and Team Workspace sign-in stay in your Keychain. To remove the rest, quit WireLens and delete
debug-log.txtand~/yourself.Library/ Caches/ WireLens
wirelens ships inside the app and is not on your PATH until you link it once.
On iPhone and iPad#
Captures and settings live inside WireLens's own storage on the device. Settings ▸ Capture ▸ Body Capture Limit sets how much of each request and response is kept: 512 KB, 2 MB, 5 MB (the default), 25 MB, 100 MB or 500 MB. Clear captures with the trash button in the Traffic tab, and delete old sessions in Historical Sessions (the Traffic tab's ⋯ menu). Settings ▸ Danger Zone ▸ Clear Captured Traffic deletes every captured flow, body and WebSocket frame and keeps your rules and the certificate.
iCloud and computer backups of the device include captures and settings. The root certificate's private key is left out of them.
Deleting the app deletes captures and settings. Your license key and Team Workspace sign-in are kept in the iOS Keychain, and come back if you reinstall. Removing the WireLens profile in Settings ▸ General ▸ VPN & Device Management removes the certificate.
On Android#
Captures, settings and the root certificate's key live in WireLens's private storage on the device, and Android's backup leaves them out. Bodies are kept in full up to 512 MB each. Clear captures with the clear button in the Traffic tab, and delete sessions in Settings ▸ Sessions. Settings ▸ Danger Zone ▸ Clear Captured Traffic deletes every captured flow, body and finished session and keeps your rules and the certificate.
Uninstalling WireLens deletes all of it. The certificate you installed stays in Android's user credentials until you remove it there, and so does a copy you saved to Downloads. After a purchase, Google backs up an anonymous purchase ID so that Restore Purchases works on a new phone.
What reaches our servers#
Only these, and only for these reasons:
| When | What is sent |
|---|---|
| Checking or activating a Mac license | Your license key, a one-way hash of your Mac's hardware identifier that lets us count devices, and a public key from the Mac's secure hardware that signs every request. Activating also sends the Mac's name. Restoring a license happens in your browser, on pay.wirelens.app. |
| Checking for a Mac update | A request for the update feed, with the WireLens version |
| Unlocking iPhone, iPad or Android with a WireLens key, and each license check after | The key, a random device identifier, the model, system and app versions, and, where the device supports it, a check from its secure hardware that it is a genuine copy of WireLens |
| Signing in to Team Workspace | The email you type on the sign-in page. Each sign-in request also records the country and city it came from and the browser or app that asked, and a Mac sends its name. |
| Activating a Mac with a Team Workspace seat | The Mac's name, model, macOS version and WireLens version, a hash of its hardware and a public key. Each hourly check-in records a hashed network prefix and the country. |
| Sharing to Team Workspace | What you choose to share. Every app removes Authorization, Proxy-Authorization, Cookie and Set-Cookie first by default. Anything can be encrypted end to end, and on Android that is on by default. |
| Report a Bug on the Mac | What you write, an optional email, your WireLens version and build, your macOS version, chip type and language, and, if you tick it, the anonymized debug log |
| The form at /support | What you write, your email, and files you choose to attach |
| Buying in the App Store or Google Play | Handled by Apple or Google. WireLens checks purchases through RevenueCat each time the app starts, including on the free plan. RevenueCat receives an anonymous identifier, your purchases, the device model, system version, language and store country, not your traffic. |
A debug log attached to Report a Bug is anonymized on the Mac first: host names, IP addresses, URLs, email addresses, user and device names, app identifiers and device IDs become placeholders, and credentials are removed. The support service keeps a keyed hash of your IP address for 30 days, attachments for 90 days, and the ticket for 2 years.
Your captured traffic is not among them. The apps contain no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDKs, and the Mac's crash logs stay on your disk.
WireLens's own connections to the license service go straight out, outside your capture. On iPhone and iPad, Team Workspace requests pass through the capture like any other app's.
While capture is on, the device still has to look up host names. On iPhone, iPad and Android those lookups go to your network's DNS servers first, and to Google Public DNS or Cloudflare DNS when those are unknown, slow or failing.
The Privacy Policy covers all of this in full, including what we keep about purchases and accounts, how long, and the companies that help us run the services.
Something here is unclear, or wrong for your setup? Contact support or write to support@wirelens.app.