The short version
SiloMem collects no data. None.
One distinction matters more here than for any other app we ship, so we will state it plainly. SiloMem records your screen and your audio for you — on your Mac, into an encrypted archive that only you can open, search, and erase. Recording is not collection. Nothing SiloMem captures is ever transmitted, synced, backed up to a cloud, or seen by us. Nothing leaves the device.
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 SiloMem about you, your device, or your archive.
Everything SiloMem does — screen snapshots, microphone and system-audio capture, OCR, transcription, hybrid search, memory consolidation, and the assistant — runs entirely on your Mac, on-device, using Apple's system frameworks (Vision, Speech, NaturalLanguage, and Foundation Models). There is no cloud component. There is no server. There is no SiloMem account.
What we don't have, and therefore never see
Because SiloMem 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 screen snapshots SiloMem captures, the audio it records, the OCR text and transcripts it extracts, the search queries and assistant conversations you run over your archive, or the consolidated memory notes it compiles.
- The contents of your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, or any other folder.
- Session timing, feature usage, button clicks, or any other behavioural data.
- Crash reports. SiloMem 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.
The local server is not a network service
SiloMem runs a tiny in-process HTTP server to connect its native recall engine to its interface. It binds strictly to the loopback interface (127.0.0.1) on an ephemeral port assigned at launch, never to a public or network-facing address. The SwiftUI host renders the timeline, search, and assistant in a WKWebView loaded from that same loopback origin. This is on-device inter-process communication (IPC) only. It accepts no external connections and is not reachable from your network or the internet.
Because the archive it fronts is your screen history, the surface is additionally token-authenticated per launch: a fresh token is generated every time SiloMem starts, and every API request must present it. No other process on your own Mac — let alone anything off it — can read your history through that port.
Outbound traffic
SiloMem makes no network connections at all. Zero. Unlike apps that fetch model weights on first run, SiloMem downloads nothing — all of its intelligence (OCR, transcription, embeddings, and the assistant) is provided by Apple system frameworks already on your Mac. The only network traffic that can occur around SiloMem is traffic that is not SiloMem's:
- Mac App Store updates.When Apple ships a SiloMem update, the Mac App Store delivers it. This traffic is between your Mac and Apple's servers, governed by Apple's privacy policy. SiloMem 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. SiloMem is not involved.
Permissions we request, and why
SiloMem asks for three macOS permissions, each used only to build your local archive on your device, and it never sends anything off your Mac:
- Screen Recording. macOS gates all screen capture behind this permission. SiloMem uses it to take periodic snapshots of your screen via ScreenCaptureKit — the raw material of your recall archive — and to capture the system-audio loopback.
- Microphone. Used to record your microphone alongside the system audio, so what you said in a meeting is as searchable as what was on screen.
- Speech Recognition.Used to transcribe captured audio with Apple's on-device speech model. Transcription runs locally; the audio is not sent to Apple or anyone else by SiloMem.
Those are the only permissions SiloMem requests. It does not ask for Contacts, Location, Camera, or Full Disk Access.
Safeguards on the archive itself
A recall tool should be hard to abuse even in the worst case. SiloMem ships with the following safeguards on by default:
- Encryption at rest. Every screenshot frame is AES-GCM-encrypted on disk, with the key held in your macOS Keychain. A copied database or frames folder is unreadable without it.
- App exclusion blacklist. Blacklisted apps (for example 1Password or Keychain Access) halt the capture pipeline immediately — nothing from them is ever stored: no frame, no OCR text, no audio. You control the list in Settings.
- Automatic expiry. An hourly sweep deletes raw screenshot files older than your configured window (default 14 days), retaining only lightweight OCR text indices for search.
- One-click erase. Delete any single moment — or erase the entire history (rows, indexes, embeddings, frames) in one click. Storage statistics are always visible, so you always know what exists.
On-device data you create
Your archive — the encrypted snapshot frames, the SQLite database of OCR text, transcripts, embeddings, and consolidated memory notes, and your local preferences — lives on your disk under the app's sandbox container at ~/Library/Containers/com.silosystems.silomem/Data/Library/Application Support/SiloMem/. It is yours. We do not have access to it. Deleting SiloMem removes the app; your archive remains under its container until you delete it manually (or erase it in-app first).
Children's privacy
SiloMem 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 components
SiloMem uses these components. Every one of them runs locally, and none of them receive any data about you from SiloMem:
- Apple Vision (system framework) — on-device OCR of captured frames.
- Apple Speech (system framework) — on-device transcription of captured audio.
- Apple Foundation Models (system framework, when Apple Intelligence is available) — on-device grounded assistant and memory consolidation, with a local extractive fallback.
- NLContextualEmbedding (Apple NaturalLanguage framework) — on-device semantic vectors for hybrid search.
- SQLite / FTS5 (embedded database) — the local store and keyword index.
There are no bundled third-party models and no model downloads — everything above ships with macOS or inside the app.
Changes
If we ever materially change how SiloMem 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/SiloMem.