Privacy in detail

This is the technical companion to the privacy policy. That page is the legal document. This one tells you, setting by setting, what actually goes over the network.

The rule underneath everything: your audio never leaves your Mac unless you deliberately pick a cloud transcription provider. By default, it does not. Two small things do use the network in every setup: the app checks GitHub for updates, and it sends anonymous usage events, which you can turn off in Settings under Share usage data. The table below lists both.

Default setup: your content stays on the Mac

Out of the box, with a local transcription model and no AI model connected:

Thing	Where it goes
Audio	Your disk. Nowhere else.
Transcript	Your disk. Nowhere else.
Your typed notes	Your disk. Nowhere else.
Calendar events (Apple Calendar)	Read on your Mac. Not copied off it.
MCP traffic	Between two processes on your Mac. No port, no socket.
Update check	The app asks GitHub for the latest version.
Anonymous usage events	Sent to PostHog, on by default. They never include audio, transcript text, note content or meeting titles. Turn them off in Settings under Share usage data.

You can check the last one yourself: the MCP server talks over stdio, so there is nothing listening on any port to connect to.

What each choice changes

A local AI model (LM Studio or Ollama)

Your meeting text stays on the Mac. Ghosty Notes talks to a server running on your own machine, over localhost.

A hosted AI model with your own key

The meeting text goes to the provider you chose, so it can write a summary or answer a question. Your audio does not. You are billed by that provider directly.

Providers on offer: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral, OpenRouter, Cloudflare Workers AI, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, and a Custom option for any compatible endpoint. See AI models for notes.

A cloud transcription provider

This is the one that sends audio. If you choose Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI or any other cloud transcription service in Settings, AI, Transcription, your recorded audio is uploaded to that company for transcription.

We list these because some people need them, most often for a language the local models do not cover. But be clear that this is you opting out of local transcription. The local-first promise applies to the local models, which are the default. See transcription models.

If you are weighing this against a cloud service, here is what each one actually does with the audio, with the figures read off their published pricing pages:

• Otter AI pricing: Otter uploads to its own cloud. The free tier is 300 minutes a month with a 30-minute cap per call, so one long meeting uses a seventh of the allowance.
• Granola pricing: uploads to Granola’s cloud. Free keeps 30 days of meeting history, then drops it.
• Fathom pricing: uploads to Fathom’s cloud. Its free tier is the most generous of the major tools and genuinely unlimited for transcription.
• Fireflies pricing: uploads, then deletes under a zero-retention policy. Note that zero-retention still means the audio transits their infrastructure first, which is a different guarantee from never leaving your machine.

We are not claiming they are careless with your data. The point is narrower: none of them can promise the audio never left the machine, because on their default settings it does. On the local models here it does not, on any plan.

Google or Outlook calendar (Pro)

Connecting one authorises us to read your calendar events through that provider, so your meetings can be matched to recordings. This is calendar data only. Not your notes, not your transcripts, not your audio.

Apple Calendar does the same job with nothing leaving the device, and on a Mac it usually already covers your Google and Outlook accounts.

Signing in

An account is needed for Pro. It gets us your email address and your subscription state. Your notes are never part of it. There is no upload of your vault, on any plan.

Paying does not move your data

Both plans run on your Mac. Pro unlocks local capabilities such as speaker identification; it does not move work to a server.

Deleting things

Your notes are files. Delete a note in the app and the file goes. Delete the whole vault folder and it is all gone:

~/Library/Application Support/ghosty-notes

There is no server-side copy to also delete, because there was never a server-side copy. That cuts both ways: there is also no backup we can restore for you. Back the folder up yourself. See notes and files.

Checking any of this yourself

• Watch the network while you record. On a local setup you will see no traffic carrying your meeting.
• Read the files. Your notes are Markdown and your transcript is JSON, in a folder you can open.
• Read the audit log. Every write a coding agent makes is recorded in .mcp-audit.log, append-only, with a fingerprint of the file before and after. See the MCP tool reference.