A clipboard manager sees everything you copy, so the only honest place to start is with where that data goes. For Pastea the answer is short: it stays on your Mac. Here is what that means in practice, feature by feature.

Local-first, actually

Your clipboard history is stored on your Mac, in Pastea's Application Support data. Copied text, code, images, files, screenshots, and colors are not uploaded to or stored on our servers — there is no account, and no server of ours that ever holds a clip. The full detail lives in the Privacy Policy.

Passwords and concealed items

Password managers mark what you copy as concealed, and Pastea recognizes that signal: concealed items can be hidden in the interface, are never used to generate link previews, and can be excluded from your history entirely.

No automatic system catches everything — a third-party app may fail to mark sensitive content correctly. If you routinely handle credentials or client-confidential material, exclude that app in Settings → Privacy rather than relying on detection alone, or pause capture with ⇧ ⌘ P before you start.

Links are the one exception, and you control it

Copying a link may cause Pastea to contact that site to build a preview — a title, an icon, an image. That is the one case where clipboard content reaches the network, and it comes with two guardrails:

• Previews are never generated for concealed items, or for URLs Pastea recognizes as one-time sign-in, authentication, or password-reset links — fetching one of those could consume it.
• You can switch link previews off entirely in Settings → Privacy.

Text in screenshots is read on your Mac

Pastea reads the text inside images and screenshots so pictures become searchable like anything else you copied. That recognition runs on your Mac — nothing is sent anywhere for it, and the recognized text is stored locally alongside the clip (syncing with it only if you turn on iCloud sync). Because it turns a picture into searchable text, it has its own switch in Settings → Privacy too.

Sync without a middleman

iCloud sync is optional and off by default. When you turn it on, your history syncs through your own private iCloud database — not through servers we operate, and we cannot read it.

When you'd rather not capture at all

• Press ⇧ ⌘ P to pause capture; nothing you copy while paused is recorded. The menu bar icon shows a pause badge while capture is off.
• Ignore specific apps, so nothing copied inside them is captured — the right tool for a password manager or a banking app.
• Ignore whole content types, in the same Settings → Privacy page.

If anything here raises a question the help centre doesn't answer, email us — a person will reply.