Desktop app privacy

Available on Entry, Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Advanced plans

The desktop app can send error reports to Mattermost and session attributes to your servers, and connects to the hosts listed in Network access.

Error reporting

From Mattermost Desktop v6.1, the desktop app sends automatic error reports to help identify and fix crashes and stability issues.

• Sent: crash information and stack traces, app version and platform details, and error messages.
• Not sent: message content, credentials or authentication tokens, and server URLs or team names.

Error reporting is enabled by default. Users can turn it off in Settings > Advanced > Send error reports to help improve the app, then restart the app. If you build the app from source, omit the MM_DESKTOP_BUILD_SENTRYDSN environment variable to turn error reporting off at build time.

Session attribute collection

From Mattermost Desktop v6.3, the desktop app can report device and network context, such as hardware and network identifiers, VPN status, and MDM enrollment, to the servers it's connected to, for use in permission policies. See session attributes for every value that can be reported, and platform availability for differences between platforms.

• When: the server tells the app which attributes it needs and how often, based on your configuration. Only those attributes are sent.
• Not sent: message content, credentials or authentication tokens, browsing history, running processes, installed applications, or network traffic. VPN status comes from the types of network interfaces on the device.
• Storage: reported values are held only in the server's in-memory session cache. They aren't written to the database, aren't included in compliance exports, and are discarded when the session ends.

Session attribute reporting is enabled by default. Users can turn it off by clearing Settings > Advanced > Enable session attributes. While it's on, a table under the setting shows each attribute the app can collect on that device and its current value. This table is a good first place to look when a user is unexpectedly denied access.

!Important

If a user turns off session attributes, they're denied any permission, like file upload or file download, governed by a policy that depends on a client-reported session attribute. Values the app already reported can stay in use until their time to live (TTL) and grace period expire, so the denial can be delayed. You may want to let users know this before you roll out those policies.

Network access

The desktop app connects to the following hosts. This list isn't exhaustive: embedded content, such as images in messages, and integrations can require additional hosts.

Host	Used for
Your Mattermost servers	All Mattermost content.
releases.mattermost.com	Update checks, unless the EnableAutoUpdater policy is disabled.
Mattermost's Sentry endpoint	Error reporting, when it's enabled.
Chromium's dictionary CDN	Spell checker dictionaries on Windows and Linux, unless you use custom dictionaries.