Privacy policy.

The short version

Silo Systems receives nothing from Silo Transcribe. None.

No analytics. No telemetry. No account. No personal data. No usage metrics. No error beacons. No advertising IDs. No fingerprinting. No crash reports. Silo Systems receives nothing from Silo Transcribe about you, your device, or your recordings. The app sends your recordings and transcripts off your Mac only if you turn on the optional own-account mode described below.

This policy covers Silo Transcribe on Mac, iPhone and iPad. On the Mac, recording, transcription, speaker labels, summaries, lecture practice questions and search run on your Mac by default, using a bundled local engine and open-weights models you download once. On iPhone and iPad, transcription uses Apple's on-device speech recognition, and summaries use Apple Intelligence on devices that support it. Silo Systems operates no server, and there is no Silo Transcribe account. The one exception is the optional own-account mode on the Mac, described below, which is off until you enable it and sends content only to the provider or server you choose.

What we don't have, and therefore never see

Because Silo Transcribe has no server-side component, the following do not exist anywhere in our infrastructure (and our infrastructure consists of: nothing):

• Your name, email, phone, or address.
• Your IP address, device identifier, MAC address, or any other hardware fingerprint.
• The audio you record or import, the transcripts Silo Transcribe produces, the summaries, study notes and practice questions it generates, your Custom Vocabulary, or any file you export.
• The contents of your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, or any other folder.
• Session timing, feature usage, button clicks, or any other behavioural data.
• Crash reports. Silo Transcribe does not implement a crash-reporting SDK.

We never see any of this because none of it is ever sent to us. The app never contacts Silo Systems.

The local engine is not a network service

On the Mac, Silo Transcribe runs a small local engine process for transcription, summaries and study notes. The app talks to it over a Unix domain socket inside the app's own sandbox container, not over a network port. The engine listens on no network address, so nothing on your network or the internet can connect to it, and the app does not hold the macOS network-server entitlement. On iPhone and iPad the engine runs inside the app itself.

Outbound traffic you initiate

Three classes of outbound network traffic can originate from your device while Silo Transcribe is running with its default settings. None of them go to Silo Systems. A fourth class, own-account requests on the Mac, which do include your recordings or transcripts, exists only if you enable it, and is described in the next section:

1. Model downloads. On the Mac, models download only when you approve a download yourself. Silo Transcribe then fetches its speech model (about 870 MB, pinned to an exact revision) and the language model used for summaries and study notes; choosing the local speech model for dictation fetches only the speech model. Both come from Hugging Face. The optional whole-recording speaker pass downloads its own model the same way, only after you turn it on. These downloads are anonymous; no token, account, or registration is required. Once the models are on disk, transcription and summaries work without a connection. On iPhone and iPad, the system downloads Apple's on-device speech model once from Apple.
2. App Store updates. When a Silo Transcribe update ships, the App Store delivers it. This traffic is between your device and Apple's servers, governed by Apple's privacy policy. Silo Transcribe is not involved.
3. Links you click. If you click an external link inside the app (for example, opening this privacy policy), your default browser handles the request. Silo Transcribe is not involved.

Optional own-account mode (Mac only, off by default)

This is the one path by which your content can leave your Mac, and it stays closed until you open it. In Settings you can connect your own account with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or OpenRouter, or enter the address of an OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible server. There are two separate switches, and both start off:

• Cloud transcription (OpenAI or an OpenAI-compatible server) sends the audio of the recordings and imported files you transcribe that way, as short audio chunks, along with any language you set and the terms in your custom vocabulary.
• Cloud summaries sends the transcript text of the sessions you summarize that way.

Anything sent this way goes over the internet directly to the provider you selected, under your own account, unless the server address you entered is on this Mac itself, and is then subject to that provider's privacy policy and data-retention practices, not ours. Speaker labelling, lecture practice questions and dictation are never handed to a provider: they always run on your Mac.

Turning it on requires an explicit in-app confirmation, and while a cloud provider is switched on, the transcript and summary views show a Cloud badge naming it. You can return to on-device processing at any time. Nothing is ever sent to Silo Systems. We never see your content or your key, and we run no server, proxy, or relay in this path; traffic goes directly from your Mac to the provider or server you configured. Your key is stored only in the macOS Keychain on this Mac. A server on this Mac itself, such as Ollama or another local model server, keeps everything on the Mac and needs no cloud confirmation; an address on any other machine, including one on your own network, is treated as off-device and needs it.

Permissions we request, and why

Silo Transcribe asks only for what recording and importing need, and none of these permissions sends anything to us. What they capture is transcribed on your device unless you have switched transcription to your own provider in Settings on the Mac:

• Microphone (Mac, iPhone, iPad). To record your voice and others in the room through your input device.
• Screen & System Audio Recording (Mac). macOS routes system audio capture through ScreenCaptureKit, which is gated behind this permission. Silo Transcribe uses it to capture the audio playing on your Mac, such as a lecture stream or the other side of a call. It does not record, store, or transmit your screen.
• Folders you choose (Mac). Silo Transcribe reads and writes only the files and folders you pick in the macOS file dialog, for example to import a recording or save an export.
• Speech Recognition (iPhone, iPad). To transcribe your recordings with Apple's on-device speech model.
• Camera and Photos (iPhone, iPad). Only if you choose to import a media file through the system picker. The app never records video for transcription.

On-device data you create

On the Mac, the audio you record, the transcripts, summaries and study notes Silo Transcribe produces, and your local preferences live on your disk under ~/Library/Containers/com.silosystems.silotranscribe/Data/Library/Application Support/SiloTranscribe/ (plus any folder you explicitly choose to export to). On iPhone and iPad they live in the app's private storage. Transcripts are indexed in a local database on the same device so you can search them. They are yours. We do not have access to them. Deleting Silo Transcribe removes the app; on the Mac, your work remains under its container until you delete it manually.

Children's privacy

Silo Transcribe is rated 4+ on the App Store. Because Silo Systems collects no personal data from any user, no special treatment is required for users under 13. Same policy applies regardless of age: Silo Systems collects nothing.

Third-party services

Silo Transcribe relies on these components and public services. None of them receive your recordings or transcripts from Silo Transcribe unless you turn on the own-account mode described above:

• Open-weights speech and language models on the Mac, which run locally.
• Apple's on-device frameworks for speech recognition and, where available, Apple Intelligence summaries.
• Hugging Face Hub, contacted only when you approve a model download on the Mac. The requests ask only for the model files and, like any HTTPS request, expose your IP address.
• The provider or server you configure, contacted only if you switch on the own-account mode.

Changes

If we ever materially change how Silo Transcribe handles data, for example if a future version of the app ever begins to collect anything at all, we will publish an updated version of this page, announce the change prominently in the release notes, and require explicit consent in-app before any new collection begins. The effective date at the top of this document reflects the current policy.

The current policy is: Silo Systems collects nothing.

Contact

Questions about this policy: admin@ohmslaw.net