ChatGPT's new Computer History tracks your Mac activity to create a timeline - but should you let it?

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ChatGPT now has a new feature that sounds like a productivity boost but may trigger concerns among privacy-minded users.

On Thursday, OpenAI introduced its new Computer History feature . Now hitting the ChatGPT Mac app, but only for Pro, Business, and Enterprise accounts, Computer History is an opt-in skill that can capture your activities across the apps and websites you use on your Mac. Those activities are then turned into memories and a timeline where you can incorporate them into your conversations and research with ChatGPT and the Codex coding tool.

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The feature is rolling out globally in most regions, but with access in the UK, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area to follow in the next few weeks.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Computer History builds on and replaces the ChatGPT Chronicle feature, which can monitor your screen activity to understand what you're doing while you work. As described by OpenAI , Computer History uses fewer tokens and offers more privacy controls than does Chronicle. Plus, Chronicle takes screenshots to capture your activities, while Computer History records your interactions with apps and websites but doesn't capture your screen, microphone input, or system audio.

By drawing from the generated timeline, you can ask questions about recent work, pick up where you left off with certain activities, understand how you work based on the apps and websites you use, and turn your workflows into new skills. That can be helpful whether you use ChatGPT for requests and research or you use Codex to build and refine code for your projects.

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"Computer History creates an interaction-event stream from allowed apps and websites," OpenAI said on its page describing the new option . "Events can include clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, and context that MacOS exposes through its accessibility system. Computer History periodically turns these events into text summaries and local memory files."

The timeline organizes your activities by day and time. Each captured item displays a title and summary of the activity, the apps or websites you used, a suggested skill for repeatable work, and options to see the memory file in Finder or delete the item entirely.