Littlebird: friendly advisor or big brother?

By Brian Clegg

I haven’t as yet been a significant user of AI. I do employ it to get suggestions for sources or concepts to look at or scientists to contact, but I’ve never used it to write anything for me, or to provide any guidance on how to make my writing ‘better’.

However, I was intrigued by the look of Littlebird, an app (currently Mac only) that watches what you are doing, stores information away and makes use of it to help with anything from productivity to meeting plans.

We’ll come onto the potential benefits in a moment, but we have first to address the Bigelephant (sorry) in the room: privacy.

To keep on top of my working life, Littlebird watches everything I do on my computer. The company is aware that this raises privacy issues, and has a big section on its website emphasising everything it does to keep the user’s data safe. It’s all held in a secure fashion, it doesn’t watch password apps and can’t see credit card details typed into a secure website. It doesn’t collect information when you are using private browsing. And you can manually pause collection entirely or exclude specific apps and websites.

I discussed the issue with Alex Green, the company’s CPTO. He said:

However, as a fairly privacy oriented person myself, I personally don’t worry about this.  Your data is encrypted, no one can see it.   Of course, in theory, we could be hacked, but it’s quite unlikely, and we are continuously hardening our security.    Data in the cloud is not inherently less safe than it is on your machine, in fact, I would argue it’s more safe. So I think it really comes down to the issue of, “Do you trust us?”  which is arguably harder to address than any technical concern! 

It’s that last line that is particularly important. Unless there is some way to have external verification of security claims from a trusted third party, we are at the mercy of a software company telling the truth. We know that some of them have collected information about us without us realising. It’s why I prefer Apple smart speakers to Amazon’s, or Safari to Chrome for browsing. But again, this depends on my trusting Apple, and on revelations about other companies’ data collection that have been made public. Littlebird could be spying on everything I do, but with a little care for very specific requirements I do feel relatively safe.

What do I get out of it? I enjoy the daily journal emails that give me a summary of what I did the day before, but more concrete benefits come from the ability to pull together information from notes I’ve made, emails I’ve sent and received and things I’ve looked at online. A trivial example, but a good one reflects a piece of information I struggle to find when doing book reviews. Quite often, a publisher will send me a book without including the press release. And I get sent a lot of books.

When I’ve written a review, I always email the publicist to let them know. But without that press release, I have no clue who sent the book to me. I can do a search on the author in my emails, but if they have a common name, or one that’s a word that often occurs in emails, it can be a nightmarish process. I’ve just reviewed a book by Peter Dear – there are an awful lot of emails with ‘Dear’ in them. But I asked Littlebird ‘Who have I had an email from about a book by Peter Dear’ and got this reply (actual name withheld):

You received an email about Peter Dear’s book from X Y, the Publicity Manager at Princeton University Press.

She emailed you on November 17, 2025, with a press release for the book The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science. She mentioned it was being published on January 6, 2026, and offered to send you a copy or arrange an interview with the author.

This is really helpful. And I suspect there are many pieces of information Littlebird can provide, sometimes collected from many different apps that will prove helpful. Similarly, I have a meeting tonight and asked Littebird what would be useful for today’s activities. Not only did it tell me the weather (‘It will likely be raining and windy this evening (gusts up to 14 mph). Temperatures around 8°C (46°F), but feeling colder due to the wind. You might want a coat with a hood for the walk to/from the car.’), but also pointed out the items in the agenda where I had actions, and highlighted a couple of agenda items I hadn’t really noticed, pointing out something useful.

I’m continuing with Littlebird. I’m prepared to accept it peering over my shoulder (if necessary occasionally doing more privacy-oriented activities like banking on my phone). This is because I genuinely appreciate the information I’m getting from the app, and I think it might be able to do a lot more in the future. It is yet to reach version 1 and features are being added regularly – they’ve just added taking meeting notes, for example, which I’ll be trying out soon.

There is a perfectly effective free version of Littlebird, available from the website, which is what I’m using at the moment, though I suspect I’ll move to the paid version soon. If you decide to go for the paid version, the referral code 3PFBK5FZ will give you (and me) two months free.

Incidentally, to enable the app to keep an eye on everything, Littlebird uses the ‘allow the app to control your computer’ toggle in the Mac’s Privacy and Security section. I was slightly unnerved to discover that both Dropbox and Google Drive also had this switched on, giving them far more access to my computer than feels necessary. I have disabled them.

Image from Littlebird journal preview email

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.

Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/01/littlebird-friendly-advisor-or-big.html