Privacy & retention

This page is the technical inventory. The legal privacy policy for the app and this website is at /privacy.

Abschrift's privacy model is architectural, not a policy promise: there is no Abschrift server to send anything to. This page is the complete inventory of what exists, where, and for how long.

What is stored, and where

• Notes & transcripts — Markdown files under ~/Abschrift/meetings/. Yours; readable in any editor.
• Voice fingerprints — compact numeric embeddings (not audio) in ~/Abschrift/speakers.sqlite, powering cross-meeting speaker recognition.
• Search index — ~/Abschrift/index.sqlite, a local index over your Markdown. Never the only copy of anything.
• Raw audio — only inside meetings/<id>/audio/ during recording/processing, deleted automatically right after successful processing (unless you enable "keep audio", and even then it's purged at the retention horizon).
• Speech models — ~/Abschrift/models/, downloaded once from the public model repository, then used offline.

What can leave your Mac

• Never: audio, voice fingerprints, your files, telemetry (there is none), crash reports (none), analytics (none).
• Only if you configure a cloud notes provider: the meeting's transcript text, sent directly from your Mac to the provider you chose with your key. Each meeting records an explicit egress note ("notes via anthropic") in its frontmatter and shows the amber badge in the app.
• Local-only mode (Settings) makes cloud egress impossible at the provider layer — code-enforced, not just hidden UI.
• Update checks fetch a version manifest from the public releases repo; they carry no meeting data and can be turned off in Settings.
• Pro license activation sends your license key plus an anonymous machine fingerprint (a hash, never the hardware ID) to Polar to enforce the 3-Mac limit.

Retention — forgetting on schedule

• Transcripts auto-delete after a configurable number of days (default 30). Notes are kept indefinitely.
• Whole meetings can optionally expire too ("delete entire meetings after N days") — folder, notes, index, and app-created export copies, gone.
• The sweep runs on launch and periodically; meetings currently recording or processing are never touched.

Deleting everything

Quit Abschrift and delete ~/Abschrift plus the app. That's the entire footprint (aside from standard macOS permission records). There is no account to close because there is no account.