How privacy filters work

Rules that automatically hide sensitive data (like window titles) before it's ever saved to your computer.

The one thing to understand

A privacy filter is checked before anything gets saved. If a rule throws an event away, that data never touches your disk — not hidden, not encrypted somewhere, never stored at all. Not even TrackFlow itself can show it to you afterwards, because it's gone before it ever exists.

Quick start (2 minutes, no typing required)

Open TrackFlow and go to Settings → Privacy.
Pick one of the three ready-made examples below.
Click inside the empty box on that page, and paste it in exactly as written.
Click Save.

That's it — the rule is active immediately, no restart needed. You can paste more than one rule at once too: just put a comma between them and wrap the whole thing in square brackets, like [ {"…first rule…"}, {"…second rule…"} ].

Copy one of these

1. Hide incognito/private browsing entirely
Any window with "incognito" or "private browsing" in the title disappears completely, as if it never happened.

{
  "enabled": true,
  "bucket_prefix": "aw-watcher-window",
  "field": "title",
  "pattern": "(?i)(private browsing|incognito)",
  "action": "drop"
}

2. Blur out anything mentioning "banking"
The window still shows up on your timeline (so your time is still counted), but the title is replaced with the word REDACTED instead of the real details.

{
  "enabled": true,
  "bucket_prefix": "aw-watcher-window",
  "field": "title",
  "pattern": "(?i).*banking.*",
  "action": "redact",
  "replacement": "REDACTED"
}

3. Hide one specific app completely (e.g. WhatsApp or Signal)
Every window belonging to that app disappears, no matter what its title says.

{
  "enabled": true,
  "bucket_prefix": "aw-watcher-window",
  "field": "app",
  "pattern": "(?i)signal|whatsapp",
  "action": "drop"
}

Want to write your own rule? Here's what each part means

You don't need to memorize this — copy an example above and change the words in quotes. But if you're curious what you're actually editing:

Field	In plain words
`enabled`	Write `true` to turn the rule on, `false` to keep it saved but switched off
`bucket_prefix`	Which tracker this applies to. `"aw-watcher-window"` means "the active window" — leave this line out entirely to apply the rule to everything
`field`	`"title"` to match the window's title text, or `"app"` to match the program's name
`pattern`	The word or phrase to look for. `(?i)` at the front just means "ignore uppercase/lowercase differences" — always safe to keep
`action`	`"drop"` to erase the whole event, or `"redact"` to keep it but hide the details (needs a `replacement` line too)

Turning everything off

Go to Settings → Privacy, delete everything in the box so it's empty (or just []), and click Save.