Your library never leaves your Mac.

What we collect

Nothing. VidNotes has no server. There is no account system, no telemetry, no crash reporting sent to us, no usage analytics. You open the app and use it.

Where your data lives

Everything is stored locally on your Mac, inside the app’s sandboxed Application Support directory:

• Notes, transcripts, briefs, quotes, alerts, coverages — SQLite database at ~/Library/Containers/VidNotes/Data/
• Captured frames, live captures — PNG files in the same container
• Transcription model — WhisperKit model downloaded from Hugging Face on first use, cached locally
• License key — stored in macOS Keychain

You can back up the whole library with Time Machine or migrate it to a new Mac by copying the container folder.

Network requests the app makes

VidNotes only connects to the internet when a feature you’ve explicitly used requires it:

• YouTube playback — embedded IFrame player loads from youtube.com. Google’s privacy policy applies to what they see.
• YouTube public-caption fetch — when you click Transcribe on a YouTube video, VidNotes fetches the public caption track directly from youtube.com. No audio is sent anywhere.
• Optional cloud AI providers — when you generate a brief, chat with a video, or run synthesis with a cloud provider configured, VidNotes sends the relevant text directly from your Mac to the API endpoint you configured (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini). Each provider has its own privacy policy. We receive nothing in between. By default, AI runs entirely on your Mac via Apple MLX — no provider call.
• Optional third-party transcript API — if you provide a youtube-transcript.io API key, the YouTube video ID (not the audio) is sent to that service when you choose that fallback. Disabled by default.
• Model downloads — WhisperKit and MLX fetch model weights from Hugging Face on first use. Stored in Application Support and never re-downloaded after that.

API keys

If you enter API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or YouTube, they are stored in the macOS Keychain and used only for requests originating from your Mac. Keys are never transmitted to us — we have no servers to transmit them to.

Content you capture

Transcripts, quotes, captures, and briefs are derived from content you load or monitor. You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to process and retain that content — especially copyrighted broadcasts, if you use the live-monitoring features for professional journalism. VidNotes never uploads or shares your captured content.

Third-party services

This website (vidnotes.org) uses:

• Cloudflare for hosting and DNS. Cloudflare logs IP addresses for DDoS protection per their policy.
• Privacy-first analytics (e.g. Plausible) to track aggregate visits without cookies or personal identifiers. If we enable this we’ll list the provider here.

Children

VidNotes is a general productivity tool. We don’t knowingly process data from children under 13. There’s no way for us to collect such data given the app sends us nothing.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or requests: email team@vidnotes.org.

This policy may change as the product evolves. Any material change will be noted with an updated date at the top of this page and summarized in the changelog.