What Recall can see, what it stores, and what never leaves your Mac.

Screen only: no microphone, camera, or audio

Recall uses macOS screen-capture permission and nothing else. It never opens the microphone or camera and never records system audio, calls, or video. macOS itself enforces this: the permissions Recall holds are visible and revocable in System Settings.

Verify it: System Settings → Privacy & Security: Recall appears under Screen Recording and Accessibility only, not under Microphone or Camera.

Periodic frames, not continuous video

Recall samples the visible screen periodically (roughly every 15 seconds, less often on lower-power hardware) and skips capture entirely while the screen is locked or you are idle. It does not create a continuous recording.

Screenshots are analyzed in memory and discarded

A captured frame is read by the on-device model just long enough to produce a short text description, then discarded. Screenshots are not written to disk in normal operation. The one exception is opt-in diagnostics mode (described under Network boundary), which retains redacted frames locally for bug reports.

App exclusions

Any app can be excluded in Settings. Excluded apps are never captured, never analyzed, and never included in restore snapshots, enforced at every capture path, not just the screenshot timer.

Sensitive-content filter: always on, not configurable

Moments that look like adult content, dating apps, or similarly private personal matters are discarded automatically at multiple layers: a built-in domain and title filter blocks capture before anything exists, and the on-device model's verdict drops borderline frames and retroactively scrubs related records. There is no toggle to weaken this.

Manual pause

Capture can be paused for 15 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, the rest of the day, or until you resume. While paused, nothing is captured, analyzed, or stored, and the menu bar icon shows the paused state the whole time.

All AI runs on your Mac

Recall downloads its own on-device model, Recall Core v1 (~1.6 GB, a fine-tune of Qwen3.5-VL-2B under the Apache 2.0 licence), to your Mac on first launch and runs every screen analysis, grouping decision, and label locally. Updating from an earlier version downloads it once and removes the old model automatically. There are no cloud AI calls: no screenshot, window title, or description of your work is sent to any AI provider.

Verify it: Watch Recall's traffic with a network monitor (e.g. Little Snitch): after the one-time model download, there are no requests carrying work content: only licence checks and, if enabled, crash reporting. The one exception is a bug report you choose to send with diagnostics sharing on.

Tasks from your chats stay on your Mac

When someone asks you for something in Slack, Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp or Mail, or you reply that you will do it, Recall keeps it as a task in Loops and brings it back on your next Smart Return. Reminders come at most once a day per task, never mid-conversation. Message text never leaves your Mac. The one exception, as for everything on this page, is a bug report you choose to send with diagnostics sharing on, which can include screenshots and any text you add.

No training on your work, except diagnostics you choose to share

Recall does not use your work content to train models, with one opt-in exception: diagnostics you choose to share help us improve Recall Core, our own model. They are never used for anyone else's model, and sharing is off by default. The model on your Mac is a downloaded artifact; without diagnostics sharing, nothing flows back.

No keystroke logging, no clipboard access

Recall registers no keyboard event taps and never reads the clipboard. Idle detection uses the system idle-time counter, which reports seconds since last input without seeing what the input was.

One local folder, plain to inspect

Your entire history lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Recall on your Mac: a SQLite database of short text descriptions, app names, window titles, timings, and work-session structure. No images are stored there in normal operation. You can open and inspect it with any SQLite tool.

Verify it: Open ~/Library/Application Support/Recall and look: it is your data, on your disk, in a standard format.

Disk encryption: FileVault, stated plainly

Recall relies on macOS FileVault full-disk encryption to protect data at rest, on by default on modern Macs. Recall does not add its own encryption layer on top, and we say that plainly: an 'encrypted at rest' claim should name the mechanism doing the encrypting.

Deletion is yours, with no asterisks

You can delete all local history from the app at any time. To remove Recall completely, use Settings → Data: it removes everything cleanly, and if you reinstall later, setup runs again from the start. One honest note: dragging Recall to the Trash on its own leaves the data folder behind, as with most Mac apps. If you removed it that way, delete ~/Library/Application Support/Recall as well. Either way nothing remains, with no server copy to chase.

Work history has no server copy

There is no cloud sync and no server-side store of your work history. What does cross the network: licence and payment processing (Paddle), transactional email (Resend), crash reports that carry no work content and identify the install only by a random ID (Sentry), and, only if you turn on diagnostics sharing, the bug reports you send (Scaleway). The full vendor list, with what each receives, is on the Subprocessors page.

Diagnostics are opt-in and redacted

If, and only if, you enable diagnostics sharing, bug reports can include recent analysis traces, screenshots, and any text you add. We use them to fix the problem you reported and to improve Recall Core, our own on-device model. They are never used for anyone else's model. Frames are redacted on your Mac before upload (on-device OCR plus secret scanning mask emails, keys, and credentials) and stored in EU object storage, then deleted after 30 days.

Signed and notarized builds

Every release is signed with our Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, which scans the binary before it can run on your Mac. Updates are delivered through Sparkle with a cryptographically signed appcast, so an update cannot be silently substituted.

Don't trust us: check

The strongest control is that you can verify the important claims yourself: watch the network, inspect the local folder, check the permissions macOS shows. The Trust Center overview includes a prepared prompt for having an AI of your choice review our architecture claims critically.

Verify it: See the 'Second opinion' section on the Trust Center overview for a ready-made critical-review prompt to send to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, or copy anywhere else.

Security contact

Report vulnerabilities to hello@joinrecall.com. We read every report, respond, and credit reporters who want credit. Reports that a claim on these pages does not match the shipping build are treated as security reports.