Open your MacBook in the morning and, before you've typed anything, it has already talked to dozens of servers. Some you'd expect — iCloud, your mail, the browser tab you left open. Many you wouldn't: analytics endpoints, telemetry, ad networks, a handful of companies you've never heard of, in countries you never chose. You can't see any of it. That was the gap I kept coming back to while building NetMute, and 2.1 is the release that finally closes it.
NetMute is a per-app firewall for macOS — you decide which apps reach the internet. But blocking is only half the story. The half that nobody shows you is where your data actually goes. So I built it.
A world map, drawn on your Mac
Open Reports and there's a new card: a world map, with each country shaded by how much data your apps sent there. Tap a country and it expands — now you see which apps are talking to it, ranked by volume. Servers in Ireland? Mostly Apple and Meta. The United States lighting up? Your browser and a stack of analytics companies. It's the kind of thing you can't un-see.
The important part is how it works: the map is built from a country database I assembled myself out of the public regional-registry files (the same data that runs the internet's address allocation). It lives inside the app, around 2.5 MB. There is no third-party geolocation SDK, no online lookup, nothing phoned out to draw it. Looking at where your Mac connects shouldn't itself leak where you are — so it doesn't.
Cryptic hostnames, made readable
The other thing 2.1 fixes: connections used to read like rr4---sn-xyz.googlevideo.com. Now App X-Ray translates that to YouTube, with the server's country flag and exactly how much was sent and received. fbcdn.net becomes Facebook / Instagram, scdn.co becomes Spotify. You finally get a sentence you can read: this app talked to YouTube, in the Netherlands, and pulled 2.3 GB.
What it sees — and what it can't
This is the line I care about most, because a privacy tool that quietly oversteps it is worthless. NetMute sees where a connection goes and how much moved. It does not — and cannot — see what's inside. The encryption happens inside each app before the data ever reaches the filter; what passes through is sealed. So "YouTube, Netherlands, 2.3 GB" is the whole truth. Which video, which page, which search — that stays in the encrypted part, unreadable to NetMute by design.
That's not a limitation to apologise for. It's the promise: it sees the address on the envelope and the postage — never the letter.
Also new in 2.1
- →A Today view in Reports, plus a sent/received split and usage per network — so you can tell your home Wi-Fi apart from your phone's hotspot.
- →Data limits that hold — per app or for the whole Mac, with counting that survives a reboot and an optional hard stop.
- →See for free, act on Pro — the Privacy Dashboard, App X-Ray and Reports now open for everyone. You can see all of it. Blocking trackers system-wide stays Pro.
NetMute is a small, deliberate indie app — no account, no cloud, a one-time price, made by one person. 2.1 is the version where it stops just blocking the noise and starts showing you the shape of it.
