Privacy Policy

The short version: NoteOwl is a private, on-device app. Your voice, recordings, transcripts, notes, and the memory it builds never leave your Mac. There is no cloud processing and no tracking, and the AI runs entirely on your machine. We do not see, collect, store, or transmit your content — ever. Using NoteOwl for free needs no account at all; buying Pro or starting a trial uses an email address to hold your licence, and nothing you record goes with it.

This website is separate from the app. noteowl.ai collects a little information to run the site, its free web tools and our ads; section 2 lists exactly what. Nothing the website collects is connected to the app or to anything you record.

1. What NoteOwl does with your content

Everything you capture — dictations, meeting recordings, transcripts, summaries, and the memory NoteOwl builds from them — is created and stored locally on your Mac, in your own vault (a folder in your user Library). NoteOwl has no backend that receives your content, and it is never uploaded, synced to a cloud, or shared with us or any third party.

2. What we collect

Nothing from your library. NoteOwl has no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting that transmits your data, and no advertising. We do not build a profile of you, and we have no way to see what you record or say.

If you buy Pro or start a trial, the licensing service holds the records a licence needs. This includes, because “an email address and a device id” understated it:

• Your email address, and whether it is verified.
• Your purchases: what you bought, when, the amount and currency, and the payment provider's reference for it. We never receive or store your card details.
• Each Mac you activate: an identifier derived from a key created on that Mac (not a hardware serial), the name you have given the Mac, and when it was activated or replaced.
• Trial records, and whether a trial has already been used on an account or a Mac.
• Each licence and which Mac it is activated on, including records of any Mac replacement, so the complimentary replacement allowance can be applied.
• A salted digest of your email address. This is what lets us find your purchase again if you delete your account and later sign in with the same address.
• Records of requests we must be able to repeat safely — for example, that a particular deletion or purchase request has already been carried out — so a retry after a dropped connection does not do the same thing twice.
• Offer eligibility and redemptions, if you use one.
• For company purchases: the organisation, which licences are assigned, and the employee email each one is assigned to.
• Any optional feedback you choose to send after a trial.

None of this is derived from your library. No recording, transcript, summary, title, filename, contact, prompt, search query, or measure of how you use the app reaches the licensing service — there is no field for it.

When you delete your account we remove your email address, any feedback you sent us, and the employee email on a company assignment, and we sign you out everywhere. We keep a restricted set of records — your purchase, your licences, and salted digests recording that a trial or replacement was used — because otherwise deleting an account would reset those limits and your purchase could not be restored. Your licence keeps working on the Mac it is activated on; deleting an account is not a refund.

This website. noteowl.ai counts page views and clicks on the download button so we know which pages people find useful and how many people download NoteOwl. Our own counting sets no cookies and builds no profile of you. To measure our ads on X, the website also loads X's advertising pixel for visitors outside the UK, the EU, the EEA and Switzerland: it tells X when someone visits the site or clicks Download, and X may set cookies to do that. You can turn off ad personalisation in your X settings or block it with your browser's tracking protection. The website also shows MacNative's “Listed on MacNative” badge, which your browser loads from macnative.io, so MacNative receives your IP address and browser details, as with any image loaded from another site. It sets no cookies. This is part of the website only. The app does not report anything, and nothing here is connected to anything you record.

Free web tools on noteowl.ai (the website only, not the NoteOwl app). This paragraph and the next apply only to the free tools on our website. They change nothing about the NoteOwl app: the app transcribes and processes everything on your Mac and never sends your recordings, transcripts or notes to us or to anyone else (sections 1, 3 and 4).

Most of the website's free tools run entirely in your browser, so nothing you drop, record or paste into them leaves your device. The website's transcription, translation and summary tools are the exception: audio to text, video to text, meeting recording to text, the subtitle generator, the audio, video and subtitle translators, the video, YouTube, lecture, podcast and text summarizers, and the meeting minutes builder when you ask it to write minutes from a transcript. When you choose a recording in one of them, your browser cuts its sound into short pieces (a video's picture is never sent) and sends each piece over a secure connection to our server, which passes it to an AI transcription service (Groq, with Cloudflare Workers AI as a backup) and sends the text back to your browser. To translate, your browser sends the text to be translated, either the transcript it has just made or the text of the subtitle file you chose, to our server in the same way, which passes it to an AI translation service (Groq or Cloudflare Workers AI) and sends the translation back. To summarize, your browser sends the text to be summarized, either the transcript it has just made or the text you pasted or opened, to our server in the same way, which passes it to an AI service (Groq or Cloudflare Workers AI) that writes the summary and sends it back. We don't store your audio, your transcript, your subtitles, your translation, the text you summarize or its summary: they exist only in the open page until you close it. Groq keeps no audio or text by default, apart from request logs it may hold for up to 30 days to keep its service reliable and to investigate abuse; Cloudflare doesn't use it to train or improve any service. Before anything is sent, Vercel BotID, our hosting provider's bot check, looks at technical signals from your browser to tell people from automated scripts. To apply the daily limits, our hosting provider's firewall counts requests per IP address, and we count each visitor's files, minutes and characters for up to two days under a one-way hash of the IP address, never the address itself.

3. On-device AI

Speech-to-text, summarization, and search all run on your Mac using on-device AI models from leading providers. These models execute locally; your content is processed on your device and is never sent to those companies or to us.

4. When NoteOwl uses the internet

NoteOwl is built to work offline. It connects in a few narrow cases, listed below, and none of them sends your content:

• One-time model download. On first setup, NoteOwl downloads the on-device AI models from their providers' distribution servers. This is an inbound download of model files only.
• App updates. NoteOwl checks a version feed for new releases. It sends no personal data or content.
• Licence activation. If you buy Pro or start a trial, the app contacts NoteOwl to verify your email and register this Mac. This transmits your email address and an identifier for this Mac — never your recordings, transcripts, notes, or anything else from your library.

If you have activated Pro, the app also checks with the licensing service at most once a week, when a connection is already available, to learn whether the licence has been revoked. It sends only the certificate identifier. A failed or skipped check never disables a licence.

After the initial model download, and apart from the licensing traffic above, you can use NoteOwl fully offline.

5. Permissions and why NoteOwl asks

• Microphone — to transcribe your speech on-device.
• Accessibility — to type dictated text into the app you're working in.
• Input Monitoring — to start and stop dictation from anywhere with the fn key.
• Screen Recording — to capture meeting audio locally (no bot joins your call).
• Calendar and Contacts (optional) — read locally to prepare meetings and match names to voices. This data is not uploaded.

You can grant or revoke any of these at any time in System Settings; NoteOwl simply loses that capability without them.

6. Your data and your controls

• Location: your content lives in a local vault on your Mac.
• Export: any export is a plain file written to a folder you choose — NoteOwl never creates a web link or uploads your data to deliver it.
• Deletion: delete individual items, or wipe everything in Settings → “Delete all my data”. Removing the app and its vault folder deletes all your content.

7. Purchases

If you buy a licence, the purchase is handled by our payment provider. They process your payment details and issue your receipt; we do not receive or store your card details. We receive your email address and a payment reference so we can register your licence and provide support.

8. Your privacy rights (EU, UK and elsewhere)

This section covers the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar laws. It keeps the same split as the rest of this policy: the app, your licence, and the website.

Who is responsible. 1070 AI Labs is responsible for the personal data described in this policy. Contact us at support@noteowl.ai.

The app gives us nothing to hold. Your recordings, transcripts, notes and memory exist only on your Mac (section 1). We never receive them, so we cannot see, copy, correct or delete them for you. You can export or delete them yourself at any time (section 6).

What we do hold, why, and on what legal basis:

• Your licence, only if you buy Pro or start a trial: the records listed in section 2, including your email address for sign-in codes. We use them to provide your licence, restore your purchase and apply its limits. Basis: our contract with you. We keep them while your account exists, and after you delete it only the restricted set section 2 describes.
• Website visits: page views and Download clicks, counted without cookies. Basis: our legitimate interest in knowing which pages people find useful.
• The X advertising pixel loads only for visitors outside the UK, the EU, the EEA and Switzerland, so it never runs for you if you are there.
• The free web tools: the audio or text you choose to send, used only to return your result and never stored by us; a one-way hash of your IP address for up to two days, to apply the daily limits; and the bot check. Basis: providing the tool you asked for, and our legitimate interest in keeping the tools free and protected from abuse.
• The MacNative badge: your IP address and browser details reach MacNative when your browser loads the badge. Basis: our legitimate interest in showing where NoteOwl is listed.
• Emails you send us: kept so we can answer you. Basis: our legitimate interest in providing support.

Who handles it for us. Vercel hosts the website and the licensing service. Supabase stores the licence records. Resend sends sign-in emails. Our email provider stores the emails you send us. Our payment provider handles purchases (section 7). Groq and Cloudflare run the free web tools' transcription, translation and summaries. X receives pixel events from visitors outside the regions above. Some of these companies process data outside the EU and the UK, mainly in the United States; those transfers rely on the safeguards in their data protection terms, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

Your rights. You can ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and ask us to correct it, delete it, limit how we use it, or send it to you in a portable format. You can object to any use based on our legitimate interests. To use any of these rights, email support@noteowl.ai from the address your licence uses. If you think we have mishandled your data, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live or work.

9. Children

NoteOwl is a general-purpose productivity tool and is not directed at children under 13.

10. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we'll update the date above and post the revised version. Material changes will be noted in the app or on this site.

11. Contact

Questions about privacy? Contact 1070 AI Labs at support@noteowl.ai.