OpenAI has rolled out a feature that observes your activity on your Mac and converts it into training data about you. Named Computer History, it sits inside the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS and assembles an ongoing timeline of what you do — a timeline that both ChatGPT and Codex can draw on when you ask them for help.
The sales pitch: it learns your working habits. It proposes automations. It resumes tasks you abandoned midway.
Framed differently: every click and keystroke becomes a searchable record.
The Windows Recall comparison is unavoidable
There was a specific reason Microsoft’s Recall got hammered, and that reason was screenshots. Recall depended heavily on capturing your display, leaving a continuously updating visual archive of everything you’d looked at parked on your machine.
Computer History takes a different route. According to OpenAI, it captures no images, video or audio whatsoever, logging what the company describes as “events” instead.
That distinction genuinely matters. But it isn’t the same as not being tracked. A log of every item you clicked, typed and opened remains a granular account of your day — simply held in a format that’s cheaper to query and harder to turn into a screenshot-driven privacy backlash.
What the controls actually give you
This is the detail that counts most, and OpenAI made the right call here: Computer History is opt in rather than opt out. Nothing happens until you switch it on yourself.
Beyond that, particular apps and websites can be excluded from recording, and individual entries can be deleted if you want finer control than blocking an entire app.
Writing on X, Ari Weinstein, Product and Engineering manager at OpenAI, said Computer History will automatically skip anything in incognito or private browser tabs. Browsing you’ve already marked as private therefore never reaches the timeline, no exclusion list required.
The demo shows the appeal, and the exposure
Dominik Kundel, a member of the Developer Experiences team at OpenAI, walked through a brief demo of the feature in action. The app locates the most recent document he edited, verifies whether it was shared with anyone via Slack, and then returns a summary of how his morning went. Is it useful? Absolutely, if you’ve ever burned 20 minutes piecing together what you were working on before a meeting threw you off course.
Consider, though, everything the assistant needed to know to deliver that. It knew the last file you opened, it knew what had gone on in your Slack, and it knew your morning well enough to condense it. That’s the bargain. The quality of the recap depends entirely on the monitoring beneath it.
Where this leaves you
For anyone already relying on ChatGPT and Codex for day-to-day work, the exclusion list is the first setting to configure — before you start, not afterwards. Add your password manager, your banking sites and anything confidential to work on day one, since deleting an entry later means the entry was created in the first place.
And if Recall was something you avoided as a matter of principle, nothing here should sway you. Ditching the screenshots strips out the creepiest element of the pitch. The underlying premise survives.
