Privacy

Every price, price history and playability verdict on WorksOnMac is visible without signing in and without giving us anything. Search, filters and the region switcher run entirely in your browser and touch no account of any kind.

Signing in to write a compatibility report is the only reason WorksOnMac ever holds anything about you, and it stores exactly four things: an account identity, a handle we generate for you, the Mac models you add, and the reports you write.

There are two ways to sign in and neither involves a password you give us. With Google, Google confirms who you are and hands that confirmation to our authentication provider, Supabase; we never see or copy your Google password. With an email link, you give us an address and we ask Supabase to send a one-time link to it. Opening that link proves the address is yours, which is the whole check. Because there is no password in either route, we hold no password for you, we cannot lose one, and there is no reset to go wrong.

Your handle (something like quiet-otter-41) is generated for you from a word list at first sign-in, not derived from your email address, so it never leaks the shape of it. You can change it later from your account.

A Mac model is something you pick from our own catalogue, not something you type, and the machines you add are private to you: nobody else can see your hardware list. A compatibility report carries the resolved facts about the machine you picked (chip, RAM, macOS version), how the game ran, and whatever optional detail you chose to add, such as a setting, a note or a link.

There is no column anywhere in our database whose name contains “email”, and an automated test fails the build if one is ever added.

Your email address, whether Google gives it to us or you type it into the sign-in form, is held only inside Supabase’s own authentication system. We never copy it into our own tables, never display it, and never show it to another signed-in reader, including in a report you write.

We do not log IP addresses anywhere in our database, including when checking the rate limits described below.

A compatibility report you submit is visible on that game’s page immediately, to every visitor, signed in or not.

What it shows: your handle, the Mac model and chip you used, the macOS version, the CrossOver version and settings if the layer was CrossOver, any note or evidence link you added, and the date. Your note renders as plain text and is never turned into a clickable link, so it cannot be used to plant a link on the page. What it never shows: your email, your real name unless you chose it as your handle, or your IP address, because we do not hold any of those against a report in the first place.

The rating you pick when writing a report (five steps, shown as stars) is visible to you on your own reports on your account page. It is never shown publicly as a star, a number or an average; every public surface speaks in one of four tiers (Perfect, Playable, Runs with issues, Broken), so the site keeps one vocabulary rather than two.

We may hide a report, at our discretion, for reasons covered in our Terms. A report we have hidden stays hidden even if the same combination is resubmitted.

WorksOnMac sets one cookie today, and it has nothing to do with your account.

Region. A cookie named mgdb-region remembers which of our six price regions (US, Germany, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa) you last chose, for up to a year. It is written and read entirely in your browser, never by our servers, which is also what keeps every page on this site a plain, cached page whether you have picked a region or not.

Signed-in session. Once you sign in, your session is held by your browser rather than written to a cookie our servers ever read. No page you visit becomes personalised on our server because of it; the signed-in parts of the interface, like your account menu, appear once the page has already loaded, from data your own browser already holds.

An in-progress report. If you start writing a compatibility report and leave to finish signing in, whether to Google or to your inbox, we hold your unfinished answers in your browser’s own session storage until you return, so you do not lose them. That storage clears itself when you close the tab and is never sent to us unless you submit the report.

We run no advertising and no third-party tracking script of any kind, so nothing on this site follows you to another site.

Three outside services see part of what WorksOnMac holds, and each sees only what its job requires.

Google acts purely as an identity check at sign-in, and only if you choose it. It confirms who you are and returns a basic profile to our authentication provider; we do not use it for anything else. If you sign in with an email link instead, Google is never involved and learns nothing.

Supabase hosts our database, in the eu-west-1 (Ireland) region, and runs the authentication system both sign-in routes end at. It holds your identity, your session, your handle, your machines and your reports, and it is what sends a sign-in link when you ask for one.

Cloudflare hosts the site itself and serves every page you read.

Separately, our prices and game listings come from Steam, GOG and the Mac App Store, and our CrossOver compatibility curation cites CodeWeavers’ public compatibility database and other public sources. We are not affiliated with CodeWeavers, Valve, GOG or Apple.

We run no advertising today. Affiliate links are reserved for a future update; if we ever add one, we will say so plainly on this page and on the pages it affects rather than changing anything quietly.

You can download everything we hold about you, or remove it outright, from your account at any time, and both take effect immediately.

Exporting gives you one file with your profile, your machines and your reports.

Deleting your account removes your identity, your handle, your machines and every report you wrote, in full: we delete reports rather than anonymise them, so a game’s community verdict can genuinely move if enough people who reported on it leave. The verdict itself, our own computed synthesis of whatever reports remain, is our own derived work and is not part of what deletion removes from anyone else’s view.

Writing a report requires confirming you are 16 or older, by checkbox, at sign-up. See our Terms for the full statement.

If what we actually do changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.

Questions, corrections or a request about your data: contact@worksonmac.com. We read this address weekly.