Tidy My Mac
Protection · Secure Connection
Encrypt your Mac's traffic on public and untrusted Wi-Fi
Secure Connection encrypts everything your Mac sends and receives on a café, hotel or airport network, so whoever runs the network, or anyone else on it, sees only encrypted traffic. It turns itself on when you join a Wi-Fi you haven't trusted, and stays out of the way at home and at work. It is included in Tidy My Mac.
macOS 26 Tahoe or later · No credit card · Everything runs on your Mac
Why public Wi-Fi needs it
On a network you don't control, the people who run it can see which sites your Mac connects to, and an open network without a password lets anyone nearby do the same. A badly run or fake hotspot can also tamper with what you download over an unencrypted connection.
Secure Connection sends all of your Mac's traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a Tidy My Mac server, and only from there out to the internet. The Wi-Fi network carries the tunnel and nothing it can read. Websites see the server's address instead of yours.
On by itself on untrusted Wi-Fi
- With Turn on automatically, joining any Wi-Fi that isn't trusted turns Secure Connection on, even while Tidy My Mac is closed, and a notification tells you it did.
- With it off, joining an untrusted Wi-Fi shows a notification with Turn On and Trust This Network, so it is one click either way.
- Add your home and office Wi-Fi under Trusted networks, and Secure Connection leaves them alone. Wired and tethered connections are left as they are.
macOS shows the Wi-Fi's name to an app only with Location Services, so Tidy My Mac asks for it to tell trusted networks from the rest. It reads no location, and the names you trust stay on your Mac. Without it, every Wi-Fi counts as untrusted.
No servers to pick
There is no country list and nothing to set up. In Europe, North America, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Tidy My Mac measures its servers in Germany and Finland and uses whichever answers faster. Elsewhere it uses one of the servers nearest to you. The page shows which country your traffic goes through.
Fair use: slower, never cut off
| Full speed each day | After that | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | 5 GB of downloads | Slower until midnight, still encrypted |
| Free trial | 1 GB of downloads | Slower until midnight, still encrypted |
Only downloads count; uploads don't. The page shows how much of today's allowance is used. Some security apps that include a connection like this stop it after a few hundred megabytes a day; Secure Connection keeps protecting you, just more slowly.
Turning it on
Open Secure Connection in the Protection group and click Turn On. macOS asks you to allow Tidy My Mac's extension in System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions → Network Extensions, if you haven't already for the Firewall or Web Protection, and then to add a VPN configuration: macOS lists Secure Connection under VPN in System Settings.
Our servers don't log the sites you visit or the contents of your traffic. To set up the connection, the app sends our server a proof from Apple that it runs on a genuine Mac, your license, and this month's traffic totals. The Privacy Policy lists all of it, and the Terms describe fair use.
Questions about Secure Connection
It works like one, and macOS lists it under VPN in System Settings. It is built for one job: keeping your traffic private on networks you don't trust. There are no countries to choose from, and it isn't meant for watching another country's streaming catalog.
Our servers don't log the sites you visit, your DNS lookups or the contents of your traffic. Sites that use HTTPS, which is almost all of them, stay encrypted end to end, so the server couldn't read them anyway. The Privacy Policy lists what is kept.
Secure Connection stays on and keeps encrypting your traffic, at a slower speed, until midnight. Then the full-speed allowance starts again. It is never cut off for using too much.
Yes. All three run in the same Tidy My Mac extension, and Web Protection keeps blocking bad sites while Secure Connection is on.
No. It is part of Tidy My Mac, in the free trial and the subscription, like every other feature. See pricing.
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