Privacy and data
Last updated 20 October 2026
Where your notes, recordings and account details live, what each AI route sends, and every time anything leaves your Mac.
The short version
MindLake is local-first. Your notes, recordings and transcripts are files in your vault, on your own devices and, if you sync it, in your own iCloud Drive. MindLake’s servers receive the notes you choose to publish, the email address of your account, and a licence check from each Mac. AI features send your writing only to the AI service you connect, and not at all if you use a model on your Mac. This page sums up how that works; the Privacy Policy is the full and authoritative version.
What stays on your devices
- Recording and transcription. The Mac and iPhone apps record and transcribe on the device, with on-device speech recognition. Neither ever uses a cloud service for it. Speaker recognition and known voices stay on the Mac too.
- Your vault. Audio, transcripts and notes are written to your vault. If you sync it with iCloud Drive, Apple stores it under your Apple account. None of it is sent to MindLake’s servers, and MindLake can’t access it.
- Outside the vault. Contacts, the search index, clipboard history and the text read from your screenshots are kept on each Mac and never leave it. Clipboard history skips anything an app marks as a password or as temporary, and anything copied from 1Password. See File format for where each lives.
- No tracking. The apps have no advertising or tracking code, and no analytics of any kind.
- Crash reports. If MindLake quits unexpectedly, it writes a report to a folder on your Mac. It’s never uploaded, and Settings ▸ General ▸ Crash reports shows it in Finder.
- Keys and sign-ins. Your AI keys, your account sign-in and your licence are kept in the macOS Keychain, not in your vault.
What each AI route sends
AI features are optional and stay hidden until you turn them on in Settings ▸ AI. Nothing goes to an AI service until you connect one, and MindLake’s servers never see any of it.
| Route | Where your text goes |
|---|---|
| On this Mac (Gemma) | Nowhere. A Gemma model you download runs inside MindLake: the assistant, with the same vault tools, and background jobs such as titles and summaries. |
| Apple Intelligence | Nowhere. Apple’s on-device model writes titles, tags and summaries on macOS 26. It can’t run the assistant. |
| CLI agents | MindLake hands the request to the program on your Mac (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Qwen Code or Auggie), which sends it to its own provider under your account with that provider. |
| API keys | Straight from your Mac to the provider whose key you added: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Groq, Mistral, xAI, DeepSeek or OpenRouter, under its terms. |
With a cloud route, a chat sends your messages, the note, folder, canvas or list in its scope, and what the assistant reads from your vault with its tools. A digest of your open tasks goes with each chat unless you turn off Give it your open tasks, and a snapshot of your Apple Contacts only if you turn on Let it read your contacts (both in Settings ▸ AI ▸ Advanced). Background jobs send the note or transcript they work on; a summary also sends the meeting’s date and, if you have set one in Settings ▸ Brain, your name, so it can date the action items and tell which are yours. With API, cloud background jobs go to the provider in use. With CLI Agents they go through Claude Code on the account it is signed in to, or, with another agent, to Anthropic with the Claude sign-in or key saved in Settings ▸ AI (with none saved, wherever you chose to run them instead). Clean Up and Retag & Link always run through Claude Code. With no local model downloaded, chat uses your cloud connection. The iPhone app has no AI features. See Chats.
When something leaves your Mac
Only in these cases. Like any web request, each one tells the service involved your IP address.
| When | What is sent, and where |
|---|---|
| AI features | Only with a cloud route, as described above. |
| Finding sources on the web | Only when you ask. Searches written from your topic go to the search services you’ve switched on (Wikipedia, OpenAlex, Hacker News and Stack Overflow unless you change them, plus any you add a key for in Settings ▸ AI ▸ Finding sources), and the pages it shortlists are downloaded from their own sites. With an AI connection set up, your topic, the titles of up to five of your notes on it, and the start of each shortlisted page go to that model, which writes the searches and the notes on each result. |
| Web addresses in notes | A picture referenced by web address is fetched when the note shows it. Link icons are fetched once per site, from the site itself or, failing that, DuckDuckGo’s icon service, and pasting a bare link fetches the page’s title; you can turn both off in Settings ▸ Editor ▸ Web links. Pictures kept in your vault never touch the network. |
| The command bar | To convert currencies it fetches the European Central Bank’s reference rates from ecb.europa.eu, at most every 12 hours, sending nothing about you. A quick link such as g or wiki opens the search in your browser. Ask the AI goes to your AI connection. |
| Your licence | MindLake checks in with mindlake.app at launch, when it comes to the front (at most once an hour), every 6 hours while it runs, and when you sign in, sign out or buy. It sends a hash of the Mac’s hardware identifier, the app version and, if you’re signed in, your account’s sign-in. The trial is counted from the same hash, so it needs no account. |
| Publishing | Only when you publish a note. Its title, content, folder names and appearance settings go to MindLake’s servers, which show it at its address and keep it, where MindLake can access it, until you unpublish it. |
| Downloads | Update checks fetch a small file from GitHub. Speech models, the local voice and Gemma models (3.6 to 15.4 GB) download from Hugging Face the first time you choose them; Apple’s speech model comes from Apple. Diagrams and maths load their drawing code from jsDelivr and are drawn on your Mac. None of this carries anything about you or your notes. |
| Other AI apps | An app you connect to the MCP server can read your vault, and what it reads goes to that app’s own AI provider. The server runs only with a valid licence. |
Your account
You don’t need an account to try MindLake. Buying and using a licence, and publishing, use one MindLake account. You sign in from the Mac app with your email address and a one-time code sent to it, and the first sign-in creates an account holding that address, your licence, your publishing plan and a handle for your pages. Each Mac gets its own sign-in token, which MindLake stores only as a hash. Signing out revokes it and takes the licence off that Mac. There’s no password and no browser session. Payments are handled by Paddle.
A password you put on a published note is stored only as a salted, peppered hash, never as plain text, and the note stays hidden until the right password is entered. Unpublishing takes a note off the web immediately and deletes its text from the servers. See Publishing.
Recording other people
Your recordings can capture other people in your meetings. The audio never leaves your device, and a transcript leaves only if you use it with a cloud AI route, so you, not MindLake, are responsible for it: get any consent your local law requires before you record.
The full policy
The Privacy Policy also covers this website’s cookies and analytics, the waitlist, buying MindLake and Publishing, server logs, the companies that process data for MindLake, how long data is kept, and your rights under UK law, such as asking for a copy of your data or for it to be deleted. It also says how to get in touch.