Data, privacy, and retention
Free Meeting Transcriber has no account or cloud backend. It records without adding a bot to the call, and the vault on your Mac is the source of truth.
Files in the vault
Section titled “Files in the vault”The app stores notes, transcripts, settings, retained recordings, people, and templates as files in the vault. The default vault is in the app’s data directory. You can change its location under Settings → App → Storage.
You can inspect and edit the vault with other tools. The app watches for external changes and refreshes its in-memory index. If the app is about to overwrite a version it did not write, it first moves that version into the vault’s .trash/ folder.
Downloaded transcription models are also local, but they are managed separately from meeting files.
Remote Intelligence providers
Section titled “Remote Intelligence providers”Transcription runs on your Mac. Meeting content only leaves the app when you ask a remote Intelligence provider to generate a summary or title. That request includes the prompt and the meeting context needed to produce the result.
API keys are stored in the macOS login Keychain. Review a provider’s retention and training policy before using it with sensitive meetings.
For fully local summaries, use LM Studio or Ollama. See Use the app offline.
Audio retention
Section titled “Audio retention”Open Settings → App → Meetings → Audio file retention and choose one of these values:
- Don’t save
- 1 day
- 3 days
- 1 week
- 1 month
- Forever
Removing retained audio does not remove the memo, summary, or transcript. To copy a recording before it expires, open the meeting’s ••• menu and choose Show in Finder.
Telemetry
Section titled “Telemetry”This fork does not send usage analytics or telemetry. The Share usage data control is still visible in Settings, but the analytics plugin is a local no-op in this build.