Your dots stay yours.
Stilou only works if you let it hold the whole day — everything you say, write and see. That is a lot to ask. So the answer to “where does it go?” has to be something you can check, not something you have to believe.
The app keeps a running count of what left your Mac. On a Private-mode day it reads zero, and you can look at it whenever you like.
In-appegress ledger
Not a policy. A design.
Privacy written into a document can be revised. Privacy written into where the computation happens is harder to walk back — so that is where we put it.
The brain is a folder on your Mac.
Your index, your embeddings, your Voiceprint, your captures — all of it sits in your own library. Searching your memory is a local operation. There is no copy of your brain on a server for us to lose.
You always know which one you are in.
Private keeps everything on the machine. Connected reaches a frontier model when you want the extra depth. The line between them is visible in the interface, not buried in a settings page.
You can watch the door.
Every request that leaves is counted and shown. Not a reassurance in a footer — a number in the app that goes up when something goes out, and stays at zero when nothing does.
Two modes. One is completely offline.
Most tools give you a privacy setting that narrows what gets collected. This is a different thing: a mode where the network is not part of the answer at all.
Nothing leaves. Nothing at all.
A model that runs on your Mac, reading an index that also lives on your Mac.
- Transcription, search and matching all happen on your Mac
- A local model answers, using your local index
- Works with no network at all — on a plane, offline, anywhere
- The egress line stays at zero because there is nothing to send
The best model, on the smallest slice.
For the moments where you want more than a laptop can give you.
- A frontier model handles the request for speed and depth
- Only the passage in question is sent, never your whole library
- Providers are contractually barred from training on it
- You can see the switch, and flip it back, at any moment
What happens to each thing.
The whole product, one row at a time. If a row here ever stops matching what the app does, the row is the bug.
Five things Stilou will never do.
A privacy page that only lists what a product does is half a page. These are the doors we closed on purpose, and the reasons we closed them.
Record your screen in the background.Stilou captures what you point it at. There is no always-on recorder, and there never will be — that was somebody else's product, and it is not the promise we are making.
Train a model on your work.Not on your dictations, your notes, your emails or your meetings. Your material is yours; the value comes from connecting it, not from harvesting it.
Sell, broker or rent your data.We charge for software. That is the whole business model, and it is deliberately the boring one.
Quietly widen what we collect.A new source is a thing you switch on, once, knowingly. Nothing gets added to the pile because an update shipped.
Make privacy a paid upgrade.Private mode is in the free tier. Charging for the floor would mean the floor was never really there.
Nothing connects itself.
The dots connect themselves — the sources never do. Slack, Gmail and Read.ai each get switched on by you, one at a time, and each one can be switched off again without touching the others.
One source at a time.
Connecting Gmail says nothing about Slack. Each source is its own decision, its own permission, its own off switch.
Disconnect means disconnect.
Revoke a source and the pulling stops immediately. What was already filed stays in your local brain, where you can delete it yourself.
Deleting is a real delete.
Your library is a folder you own. Remove a dot, a project or the lot — no support ticket, no thirty-day grace period, no shadow copy.
And here is what we do collect.
A privacy page that only lists what a company avoids is a page with something missing. This is the complete other side — small, boring, and stated so you can check it against the policy.
The short list of third parties.
Anthropic and OpenAI process Connected-mode requests, under their own terms — API traffic is generally excluded from their training. Sentry receives crash diagnostics, and only if you switched them on. Vercel hosts this website and the relay. A payment processor handles checkout and passes us the order, not your card.
Found a hole? Tell us.
Security reports go to hi@stilou.app and reach the people who write the code, not a queue. Tell us what you found and how you found it; we would much rather hear it from you than read about it later.
What could we hand over, if someone made us?
It is the question worth asking of any company that says the right things about privacy, because policies bend under pressure and architecture mostly doesn’t. So: if a court order landed tomorrow demanding everything we hold about you, what would actually be in the envelope?
Not your brain. We don’t have it. It was never here.
Your captures, your index, your Voiceprint and the connections between them are files on your Mac. There is no server-side mirror to subpoena, no backup of your library in our infrastructure, no export we could produce under duress. That isn’t restraint on our part — it is that the copy does not exist.
What we could hand over is the small stuff on the other list: usage counts if you’re on the included plan, an order record if you bought something, crash diagnostics if you turned them on. That is genuinely the extent of it, and it is the strongest privacy claim any product can make: not that we won’t, but that we couldn’t.
To hold everything, it has to be trusted with everything.
Which is why privacy is the floor, not the featureAnd the legal version.
This page is the plain-English explanation. These are the documents it is accountable to — if the two ever disagree, tell us and we will fix whichever one is wrong.
Something here unclear, or something you think we have got wrong? Write to hi@stilou.app.