We can see whether the app is healthy — never what anyone said. That means we can genuinely help without ever touching your family’s private world.
Alpha support is answered by the people building Nightlight, usually within a day. Safety-alert delivery problems jump the queue.
macOS updates sometimes revoke the Full Disk Access permission Nightlight needs. Open Nightlight from the menu bar → “Run permission check” and it will walk you through re-granting it. This is the single most common issue, and the fix takes under a minute.
Nightlight must be installed in the Applications folder and granted Full Disk Access under the macOS user account your child actually messages from. The setup wizard checks both live and won’t let you proceed until they’re green.
Menu bar → Settings. Changes take effect from the next digest.
Menu bar → “Pause monitoring” stops everything until you resume. Uninstall (also in the menu) removes the app, the local AI, and every trace of the data — nothing exists anywhere else to clean up.
No — structurally no. The messages never leave your Mac, and our systems have no way to receive them. If you send us a diagnostic bundle, it contains logs with file paths anonymized and message counts only, never text. You can inspect the bundle before sending it.
Your macOS version, what you expected, what happened instead, and — if the app is running — the diagnostic bundle from the menu bar (Settings → “Copy diagnostic info”). It never contains message content.