Privacy policy.
The current policy is: nothing is collected.
The short version
Silo Snip collects no data. None.
No analytics. No telemetry. No account. No personal data. No usage metrics. No error beacons. No advertising IDs. No fingerprinting. No crash reports. No data of any kind is collected, stored, transmitted, or shared by Silo Snip about you, your Mac, or anything on your screen.
It has no network access at all
This is stronger than a promise not to transmit. Silo Snip ships with one sandbox entitlement, com.apple.security.app-sandbox, and no networking entitlement. Without com.apple.security.network.client the App Sandbox refuses outbound connections, and without com.apple.security.network.server it cannot listen for inbound ones. There is no bundled runtime, no loopback service, and no model download: recognition uses the Vision framework already present in macOS.
Screen Recording permission, and what it is used for
Reading text off your screen requires macOS Screen Recording permission, which you grant in System Settings and can revoke at any time. It is used for exactly one thing: capturing the rectangle you drag, at the moment you drag it.
Silo Snip does not capture continuously, does not record video, does not observe other applications, and captures nothing except the rectangle of a snip you start.
The capture is never written to disk
The image of the selected region exists in memory only, for as long as Vision takes to recognize the text in it, and is then released. It is not saved to a file, a cache, a database, a recents list, or a history. There is no image to purge afterwards because none was kept.
The recognized text is written to your system clipboard. Silo Snip does not read your clipboard, only writes to it.
What it remembers between snips, and for how long
Two things, both in memory only, neither ever written to disk:
- The text of your last snip, for two minutes. Snip and Append adds a new snip below the previous one. Because Silo Snip never reads your clipboard, it keeps its own copy of the text it last wrote so it has something to add to. Two minutes after your last snip, that copy is dropped.
- Where your last rectangle was. So that pressing Return in the crosshair can read the same area again. This is a position on the screen, not an image of it, and it is forgotten when you quit.
While it runs, Silo Snip also counts successful snips in memory, only so that Apple's rating prompt appears after you have used it a few times rather than at launch. The count is never saved or sent, and it is forgotten when you quit.
On-device data it creates
Only your settings: your two keyboard shortcuts and your recognition language preference. They live in the app sandbox at ~/Library/Containers/com.silosystems.silosnip/Data/, and, if you turn on Start Silo Snip at login, the login item macOS lists under Login Items in System Settings. They describe your preferences, not your content.
Outbound traffic you initiate
There is none from the app. Two things touch the network on your behalf and neither involves Silo Snip:
- App Store updates. When Apple ships an update, the App Store delivers it. That traffic is between your Mac and Apple.
- Links you click. A link opens in your default browser, a separate application.
Third-party components
Apple system frameworks only: ScreenCaptureKit for the capture, Vision for recognition. No third-party SDKs, no analytics libraries, no crash reporters, no bundled or downloaded models.
Children's privacy
Silo Snip is rated 4+. Because no personal data is collected from any user, no special treatment is required for users under 13. The same policy applies regardless of age: nothing collected.
Changes
If we ever materially change how Silo Snip handles data, we will publish an updated version of this page, announce it in the release notes, and require explicit in-app consent before any new collection begins. The current policy is: nothing is collected.
Contact
Questions about this policy: admin@ohmslaw.net