The short version
SiloCast 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 SiloCast about you, your device, or your recordings.
Everything SiloCast does — multi-input recording, local mixdown, transcription, source-preserving transcript review, and supported show-note generation — runs on your Mac with Apple frameworks by default. Silo Systems operates no cloud component, hosted inference service, or SiloCast account. The one exception is the optional Bring Your Own Key mode described below, which is off until you enable it and sends data only to a provider you choose and pay for directly.
What we don't have, and therefore never see
Because SiloCast 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, the isolated tracks SiloCast produces, the transcripts it generates, the show notes and newsletters 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. SiloCast does not implement a crash-reporting SDK.
We never see any of this because none of it is ever sent. The app does not phone home, ever.
Outbound traffic you initiate
A small number of classes of outbound network traffic can originate from your Mac while SiloCast is running. None of them go to SiloCast. All of them are user-initiated:
- Mac App Store updates. When Apple ships a SiloCast update, the Mac App Store delivers it. This traffic is between your Mac and Apple's servers, governed by Apple's privacy policy. SiloCast is not involved.
- Links you click. If you click an external link inside the app (for example, opening this privacy policy), your default browser handles the request. SiloCast is not involved.
- Optional local speech model download. If you choose the Local MLX transcription engine, SiloCast downloads the Qwen3-ASR 0.6B model once (about 1 GB) from a pinned, checksum-verified Hugging Face revision, after showing you the exact source, size, and license and asking for consent. No audio, transcript, or identifier is sent with the request, and the model can be removed in Settings at any time. If you keep the built-in Apple engine, this download never happens.
Optional Bring Your Own Key (off by default)
This is the one path by which your content can leave your Mac, and it stays closed until you open it. If you enable cloud inference in Settings and supply your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, or OpenRouter), the content you process with that feature — your transcripts and episode content — is sent over the internet to the provider you selected, under your own account. What you send is then subject to that provider's privacy policy and data-retention practices, not ours.
Turning it on requires an explicit in-app confirmation, SiloCast shows a persistent cloud badge whenever a cloud provider is active, and 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 you configured. Your key is stored only in the macOS Keychain on this Mac, never in a file, a database, or a log. You can also point SiloCast at Ollama running on your own machine, in which case nothing leaves your network at all.
Permissions we request, and why
SiloCast asks for a single macOS permission, used only to capture audio on your device for local recording, and it never sends anything off your Mac:
- Microphone. macOS gates all audio-input capture behind the Microphone permission. SiloCast uses it to record your hosts and guests through your input devices — each microphone on its own track — and to capture the system audio loopback of a remote call, which macOS presents as an audio input device through Core Audio (AVAudioEngine).
That is the only permission SiloCast requests. It does not ask for Screen Recording, Camera, Contacts, Location, or Full Disk Access. System audio is captured as an input device, not by recording your screen.
On-device data you create
The audio you record, the tracks, transcripts, and marketing assets SiloCast produces, and your local preferences live on your disk under ~/Library/Containers/com.silosystems.silocast/Data/Library/Application Support/SiloCast/ (plus any folder you explicitly choose to export to). They are yours. We do not have access to them. Deleting SiloCast removes the app; your work remains under its container until you delete it manually.
Children's privacy
SiloCast is rated 4+ on the Mac App Store. Because no personal data is collected from any user, no special treatment is required for users under 13. Same policy applies regardless of age: nothing collected.
Third-party services
SiloCast uses these Apple frameworks on-device. They do not receive your episode from SiloCast as a hosted service:
- Apple Speech — on-device transcription.
- Apple Foundation Models — supported local drafting when available.
- Core Audio — local recording and audio handling.
Changes
If we ever materially change how SiloCast 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.
Contact
Questions about this policy: admin@ohmslaw.net
For non-private inquiries you can also open an issue at github.com/flowmar47/SiloCast.