The short version
Silo Scribe collects no data, and no patient information ever leaves your Mac.
No analytics. No telemetry. No account. No personal data. No usage metrics. No error beacons. No advertising IDs. No fingerprinting. No crash reports sent over the network. No data of any kind is collected, stored, transmitted, or shared by Silo Scribe about you, your device, your clients, or your sessions.
Everything Silo Scribe does — recording, transcription, speaker diarization, note generation, editing, and export — runs entirely on your Mac, on-device, using Apple's on-device Speech framework and a locally-stored open-weights language model (a Gemma model running through mlx-lm on Apple Silicon). There is no cloud component. There is no server. There is no Silo Scribe account.
A documentation tool, not a medical device
Silo Scribe is a documentation and productivity tool. It is not a medical device, and it does not diagnose, treat, or make clinical recommendations. It drafts a structured note from a session you recorded. The clinician reviews, edits, and marks each note Verified — you author and are responsible for every note. Silo Scribe is a drafting assistant, nothing more.
What we don't have, and therefore never see
Because Silo Scribe 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.
- Any information about your clients or patients.
- Your IP address, device identifier, MAC address, or any other hardware fingerprint.
- The audio you record, the transcripts Silo Scribe produces, the notes it drafts, 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 Scribe does not send crash reports over the network.
We never see any of this because none of it is ever sent. The app does not phone home, ever. Silo Scribe's PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy manifest declares zero tracking and no data collected.
On-device processing
When you record a session, the audio is transcribed on your Mac by Apple's on-device Speech framework, with speaker diarization to separate clinician from client. When you generate a note, a local Gemma language model — running through mlx-lm on your Apple Silicon GPU — drafts the structured note. None of this leaves your machine. There is no cloud inference, no remote transcription service, and no third party in the loop.
The note-generation helper is not a network service
Silo Scribe uses a small local helper process to perform note generation. The app and the helper communicate over a Unix-domain socket — on-device inter-process communication (IPC) confined to your Mac. It is not bound to any network interface, accepts no external connections, and is not reachable from your network or the internet.
Encryption at rest
The notes you create are encrypted at rest with AES-GCM, using an encryption key stored in your Mac's Keychain. Your sessions, transcripts, notes, and preferences live inside the app's App Sandbox container on your disk (plus any folder you explicitly choose to export to). They are yours. We do not have access to them. Deleting Silo Scribe removes the app; your work remains under its container until you delete it manually.
Microphone & Speech permissions
Silo Scribe asks for two macOS permissions, and both are used only for the session you choose to record. Neither sends anything off your Mac:
- Microphone. To record the session through your input device when you start a recording.
- Speech recognition.To run Apple's on-device Speech framework against the audio you recorded so it can be transcribed locally. Transcription happens on your Mac.
Network use
Silo Scribe's only network use is a one-time, consent-gated download of the note-generation model from public open-weights mirrors (for example, Hugging Face). You are asked before it happens, the download is anonymous by default (no token, account, or registration is required), and once the weights are on disk every transcription and note after that is fully offline. No session audio, transcript, or note is ever sent during this download — only model weights come down. Apart from this, the only other traffic your Mac may originate while Silo Scribe runs is Mac App Store updates (between your Mac and Apple) and any external links you click (handled by your browser). None of it goes to Silo Scribe.
Children's privacy & not a medical device
Silo Scribe is a professional documentation tool intended for clinicians and therapists, not for use by children, and it is not a medical or diagnostic device. Because no personal data is collected from any user, no special treatment is required for any age group: the policy is the same regardless of who is using the app — nothing collected, nothing transmitted. Silo Scribe does not diagnose, treat, or make clinical recommendations; the clinician authors and verifies every note.
Third-party services
Silo Scribe uses these components and public services. None of them receive any data about you, your clients, or your sessions from Silo Scribe:
- Apple Speech framework (on-device speech-to-text) — runs locally on your Mac.
- Gemma (open-weights instruction-tuned language model) — runs locally via mlx-lm.
- MLX(Apple's on-device array/ML framework) — runs locally.
- Hugging Face Hub (and equivalent open-weights mirrors) — contacted only once, with your consent, to download the note-generation model weights.
Changes
If we ever materially change how Silo Scribe 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: nothing is collected, and no PHI leaves your Mac.
Contact
Questions about this policy: support@ohmslaw.net