Local first is a fact about the architecture, not a line in a policy

Every meeting tool has a privacy policy, and most of them are reassuring. We do not train on your data. We delete recordings after thirty days. Access is strictly controlled. All of those are promises about behaviour, and behaviour can change with a new owner, a new investor or a subpoena.

Noats is built so that the promise is not needed. Recording, transcription, speaker separation and the written-up note all happen on your Mac. There is no Noats server that receives your meetings, because there is no Noats server at all. The speaker separation architecture distinguishes voices without storing voiceprints.

What stays on your Mac

Your audio, transcripts, speaker labels, notes, folders and chat history are written to a SQLite database and plain audio files in your own Application Support folder. Deleting a note removes it from disk. Any note exports as markdown with a keystroke, and the database itself is a file you can copy, back up or move.

The app contains no analytics and no telemetry. We do not know how often you open it, how many notes you have, or whether you used it today.

What leaves your Mac, and when

Three things, and you control all three.

1. An update check. The app asks updates.noats.ai whether a newer version exists. It sends your app version and, as any request does, your IP address. Nothing about your notes. You can switch it off in Settings under About.
2. A one-time model download. On first run the speech and speaker-separation models are fetched, around 930 MB in total. After that, transcription and speaker separation work with the network off.
3. A cloud AI, only if you connect one. By default your notes are written up by a model running on your Mac. If you connect Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter with your own key, point Noats at an OpenAI-compatible server, or use your ChatGPT plan, the note and transcript content that request needs goes to that provider under its own terms. Nothing routes through us.

API keys you enter are encrypted with macOS's own secure storage, backed by your Keychain. If you use a ChatGPT plan, you sign in to OpenAI in your terminal through their Codex CLI, so that login never passes through Noats at all.

Why architecture beats policy

A policy describes what a company intends to do with your data. An architecture describes what is possible. When the meeting never leaves the machine that recorded it, there is nothing for a policy to govern, and nothing for a breach, an acquisition or a court order to reach.

The safest server is the one that never received the file.

The full list, including what this website collects, is on the privacy page. If you have a question it does not answer, hello@noats.ai reaches a person.