What stays on your Mac, and the only ways anything leaves

Recording, transcription, speaker separation and the summary all run on your Mac. Out of the box, no part of a meeting is sent anywhere, and there is no Recordstead account to sign into and nothing to sync.

Audio is not sent to model providers, assistants or Recordstead. You can export it with Export Audio, or move encrypted recordings to a storage destination you configure. Moves can be manual or automatic under your chosen rule; Destinations explains both.

Connections

Model downloads

When a needed model is missing, Recordstead fetches it from Hugging Face and its content delivery network. The active transcription model may download at launch; a processing hold may defer it. Other models download when their features need them; the Live Transcript model downloads only after you click Download when Recordstead asks. The request is anonymous: no token, no account, no identifier. It carries no meeting content, and the download is checked against a pinned checksum before it is used.

Trial and license access

Recordstead checks processing access with its licensing service. It sends a per-installation public key and signed requests. It also sends a product-specific hash derived from the Mac's platform UUID, used to recognize a trial already started on that Mac. The raw UUID is not sent. When you activate a license, the request includes the key you entered; the service stores its hash.

These requests contain no meeting content. The app sends no buyer email or payment details to Licensing; checkout happens on the separate website.

Updates

At launch and periodically while it runs, Recordstead asks whether a newer build exists. That request carries nothing of yours; the service sees your IP address, as any website you open does.

When it then downloads an update, it sends three things and no more: the same anonymous per-installation key as above, the time of the request, and a signature proving the request came from that installation. The service answers only if it already knows the installation. The installer on the download page needs none of this: your browser fetches it like any other file.

It sends no meeting content, no file names, no list of what is installed on your Mac and no report of how you use the app. Nothing is checked or downloaded while you are recording, and both halves can be switched off; see Keep Recordstead up to date.

Google Calendar, if you connect it

Sign-in opens Google in your browser. Recordstead then reads events from each connected account's main calendar directly from Google on this Mac. Access is read-only; it does not send your recordings or transcripts to Google.

The connection token is kept in your Mac's Keychain. Fetched events stay in memory while the app runs. Matching an event to a recording saves only its event identifier with that meeting in your encrypted archive; event titles and guests are not saved there.

Connect Google Calendar explains setup; disconnect a calendar explains local removal and revoking Google access.

A model provider you point at yourself

You can send summaries to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint instead of the built-in model. Then transcript text goes to the address you typed, under your own agreement with whoever runs it. Audio still does not.

This is off until you confirm it, and the confirmation names one exact destination, so agreeing to one address does not agree to another. A remote address must be HTTPS.

A web address you set up

A webhook integration sends each meeting's text to the address you set: the title, date, workspace, app, speaker names and the parts you chose. It goes directly to that address, under the terms of whoever runs it; Recordstead does not receive it. Audio never goes.

This is off until you add one, and the first send to an address outside this Mac waits until you agree to that address and what it gets. A remote address must be HTTPS, and a redirect to another address is never followed.

An assistant tool already installed on your Mac

Instead of an address, you can have the summary written by a copy of Claude Code or Codex that is already installed here. Recordstead runs that copy and hands it the transcript; the tool then reaches Anthropic or OpenAI on your own account, under your agreement with them. There is no address to type and Recordstead holds no account of yours.

Each tool is confirmed on its own, so agreeing to one never agrees to the other. Audio is not sent on either.

Because those tools are assistants rather than plain model endpoints, the copy Recordstead runs is narrowed while it works: it starts in an empty folder, your own extensions and instruction files are switched off, and it is told not to keep the conversation in its own history. Without that, your transcript could reach places this page does not list.

Use the Claude Code or Codex you already have covers setting one up.

An AI assistant you connect

If you connect an assistant, it can read meeting metadata, summaries, your notes on a meeting, bounded stretches of transcript, your tasks, your Dictionary terms and your summary templates, only in the workspaces you turn on for it. Every workspace starts off. Recordings and audio paths stay out of reach.

The agreement you confirm says the part that matters plainly: I understand that what an assistant reads may leave this Mac. Recordstead cannot follow that text to the assistant's own service, and cannot take it back.

A storage destination you configure

When you move recordings to a configured destination, only encrypted audio is moved. Transcripts, summaries and saved voices stay on your Mac, as does the encryption key. Destination credentials are kept in your Mac's Keychain; Recordstead is not the storage destination and does not receive those credentials.

Automatic moves are off by default. You can enable a retention rule or move individual recordings yourself. S3-compatible storage uses HTTPS; SFTP uses SSH. A folder destination can be a directly attached drive or a mounted network share, so whether it uses the network depends on the folder you choose. Your storage provider or server controls that destination.

Connection tests write, read and delete their own test object. Reconnecting an archive reads files to verify that they match existing meetings. External audio survives local cleanup, meeting deletion and disconnection. See Move recordings to an external destination for setup, access and temporary local downloads.

What never happens

No analytics. No telemetry. No crash reporting. No Recordstead account. No meeting-library sync. Recordstead services do not receive recordings, transcripts or saved voices. Automatic recording moves run in the background only after you enable them and choose your own storage destination.

That is the app. The website, documentation and download service are separate. Optional website and documentation analytics, and download totals, are described in the Privacy Policy.

What sits on the disk, and in what state

The archive is encrypted. Your meetings, transcripts and summaries live in an encrypted database, and each stored recording is an encrypted, tamper-evident file rather than a playable one. The key is held in your Mac's keychain and is tied to your macOS account, so copying the folder to another Mac is not enough to read it: that copy asks for a transfer code, which you get from the Mac the meetings came from.

Three things are deliberately not encrypted:

A recording in progress. While a meeting is being recorded, audio is written to a staging area in the clear and is encrypted when the finished recording is filed. There is no way to encrypt a stream that is still being written and still be able to recover it if the Mac loses power.
The operational log: the queue, the timings and the record of what the app did. It holds no meeting content: meetings appear there under an opaque handle, never by title. It stays readable on purpose, because it is what lets Recordstead tell you why it cannot open your meetings when something is wrong with the key.
The technical log in your Mac's logs folder. It records app steps, timings, errors and audio-device details for troubleshooting, but no meeting content. It is sent to Recordstead only if you export and send it yourself.

Exports, and the notes and files an integration writes, are ordinary files in the folder you chose. A folder that syncs, such as an Obsidian vault in iCloud Drive, carries them wherever that service syncs.

A shortcut or a command you set up as an integration gets the meeting on this Mac. Recordstead opens no connection for it; whatever your shortcut or command sends, and where, is up to it.

Result

You can say, connection by connection, what Recordstead sends and what it never sends.