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Pacenote privacy policy

What the Pacenote Mac app and Cowork skill do with your calls. Short version: audio never leaves your Mac, text goes to the AI provider you set up with your own key or account, and nothing is sent to the author.

Updated
27 October 2026
Audio
stays on your Mac
Telemetry
none
On this page

This policy covers Pacenote: the Mac app, the recorder it runs and the Cowork skill of the same name. The website and the rest of PM Control Tower are covered by the main privacy policy.

Pacenote is a personal open-source project of its author, Bohdan N. (“I”, “me”). It is not a hosted service: there is no account with me, no server of mine and no database of mine. You decide which calls it listens to and where the results go, so for the people on your calls you are the one responsible for their data (in GDPR terms, usually the controller).

What stays on your Mac

  • Audio. Speech is recognised locally with Whisper. Audio buffers live only in memory and are never written to disk or sent anywhere.
  • Transcripts. Recognised phrases are saved as text in your project folder (live/ inside it), with speaker names if you use them.
  • Voice prints. If you turn speakers on, the voice prints that tell people apart are stored only on your Mac. In many countries a voice print is biometric data: tell people, and delete the ones you do not need (Settings > AI > Speakers, the Forget button).
  • Keys and tokens (Claude, Notion and others) are kept in the macOS Keychain.
  • Settings, logs and the spend ledger stay in the app’s folder in your Library. Logs hold technical events, not the transcript.
  • Local AI, when on, runs on your Mac (built in, or Ollama on 127.0.0.1).

What leaves your Mac, and only when you set it up

  • Text to Claude. To make tips, the call picture, answers to what you type, the call preparation, the folder search and the wrap-up, the app sends text (recent lines of the transcript, your preparation, passages from your project files) to Anthropic with your own API key or through your own Claude Code. Anthropic handles it under your agreement with Anthropic. If you point the app to another OpenAI-compatible provider, that provider receives the same text under your agreement with it.
  • Notion. With a Notion token set, the wrap-up and the transcript (as a child page) go to the meeting’s page in your workspace, and the app reads your project pages to keep a local mirror.
  • Links you give for preparation. If your preparation names web pages (for example a public Google Doc or Notion page), the app reads only those pages.
  • One-time downloads. Setup downloads the speech, search and voice models (Hugging Face, GitHub) and Python packages (PyPI). Each model file is checked against its SHA-256. These services see an ordinary download request.
  • Budgets. The call and monthly limits in Settings stop the paid calls when reached.

What is never sent

  • Nothing goes to me. The app and the skill have no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporting and no “phone home”.
  • Nothing is sent to the client or posted anywhere by itself. Drafts and notes are for you.
  • Pacenote does not see your screen, your chats or files outside the project folders you choose.

The people on your calls

Recording or transcribing a call can require the consent of everyone on it, and the rules differ by country, by contract and by the meeting itself. Before you use Pacenote, tell participants that you keep a transcript and use an AI assistant, and get consent where the law or your employer requires it. Do not use it on calls where that is not allowed.

Deleting your data

Everything Pacenote keeps is in places you control: delete transcripts in the project’s live/ folder, voice prints in Settings > AI > Speakers, keys in Settings > Keys, and pages in your Notion. Removing the app and its folder in your Library removes the rest. For data already sent to Anthropic, Notion or another provider, their policies apply.

Your rights and contact

I hold no personal data from Pacenote. If you are in the EU or the UK, the rights to access, correct, delete, restrict and object apply to whoever processes your data (you, your employer, Anthropic, Notion). For any question about this policy or the app, open an issue at github.com/bodco/live-tips/issues.

Changes

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes too, and the history stays in the website’s Git repository.

See also: Pacenote terms of use, how Pacenote works.