What Recall can see, what it stores, and what never leaves your Mac.

Recall holds two macOS permissions, Screen Recording and Accessibility, and nothing else. Screen Recording lets the on-device AI look at your screen. Accessibility lets Recall read which app and window are in front, and reopen supported apps where you left them. It never opens the microphone or camera and never records system audio, calls, or video. macOS re-confirms screen access from time to time with a prompt that mentions audio: Recall still never records it. Both permissions are visible and revocable in System Settings.

Verify it: System Settings → Privacy & Security: Recall appears under Screen Recording and Accessibility only, not under Microphone or Camera.

Recall samples the visible screen periodically (roughly every 15 seconds, less often on lower-power hardware) and skips capture entirely while the screen is locked or you are idle. It does not create a continuous recording.

A captured frame is read by the on-device model just long enough to produce a short text description, then discarded. Screenshots are not written to disk in normal operation, with two exceptions. While a request from one of your chats is open, Recall may keep a small picture of that chat, and only while it stays open. Opt-in diagnostics mode (described under Network boundary) retains redacted frames locally for bug reports.

Exclude any app in Settings → Excluded apps. While it is in front, Recall records no activity, takes no snapshot and runs no screen analysis, and a return never reopens it. This is enforced at every capture path, not just the screenshot timer. Recall itself is always on the list: it never looks at itself.

Moments that look like adult content, dating apps, or similarly private personal matters are discarded automatically at multiple layers: a built-in domain and title filter blocks capture before anything exists, and the on-device model's verdict drops borderline frames and retroactively scrubs related records. There is no toggle to weaken this.

Click the Recall is on switch in the menu bar tray to pause for 15 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, the rest of the day, or until you resume. While paused, nothing is captured, analyzed, or stored, and the tray says so the whole time, with the time Recall resumes.

Recall downloads its own on-device model, Recall Core v1.1 (a fine-tune of Qwen3.5-VL-2B under the Apache 2.0 licence; about 1.9 GB together with a small text-embedding model), to your Mac during setup, after asking first, and runs every screen analysis, grouping decision, and label locally. Nothing downloads until you click Start free trial. Updating from an earlier version downloads it once and removes the old model automatically. There are no cloud AI calls: no screenshot, window title, or description of your work is sent to any AI provider.

Verify it: Watch Recall's traffic with a network monitor such as Little Snitch. After the one-time model download you will see licence checks, update checks (at launch and every hour), feedback you send, and pseudonymous usage events and crash reports, which are on by default and turned off by one switch in Settings → Privacy, apart from anonymous setup counts that carry no install ID. None of them carries work content, apart from what you choose to attach to feedback. Settings → Privacy → What's sent lists every event in plain words, with a real sample.

When someone asks you for something in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp or Mail, or you reply that you will do it, Recall keeps it as a task: it shows in Loops, on the tray's Waiting on you line and on your next Smart Return. Reminders are capped: at most once a day per task, never more than one an hour, never for something asked today while you are still in that conversation, and older tasks only every few days. Message text never leaves your Mac. While a task is open, Recall may keep a small picture of the chat on your Mac, and only while it is open. The exception, as everywhere on this page, is what you choose to send us: a bug report sent with diagnostics sharing on can include screenshots and any text you add.

Recall does not use your work content to train models, with one opt-in exception: diagnostics you choose to share help us improve Recall Core, our own model. They are never used for anyone else's model, and sharing is off by default. The model on your Mac is a downloaded artifact; without diagnostics sharing, nothing flows back.

Recall registers no keyboard event taps and never reads the clipboard. Idle detection uses the system idle-time counter, which reports seconds since last input without seeing what the input was.

Your entire history lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Recall on your Mac: a SQLite database of short text descriptions, app names, window titles, timings, your notes and corrections, and the structure of your work sessions. No screenshots are stored there in normal operation. The one picture Recall keeps is a small image of the chat behind an open request, and only while it is open. You can open and inspect the database with any SQLite tool.

Verify it: Open ~/Library/Application Support/Recall and look: it is your data, on your disk, in a standard format.

Recall relies on macOS FileVault full-disk encryption to protect data at rest, on by default on modern Macs. Recall does not add its own encryption layer on top, and we say that plainly: an 'encrypted at rest' claim should name the mechanism doing the encrypting.

Forget history, in Settings → Data, deletes everything Recall captured on this Mac, plus your analytics data and feedback conversations on Recall's servers. Uninstall…, in the same place, removes the app, your data, the AI model and settings, and if you reinstall later, setup runs again from the start. One honest note: dragging Recall to the Trash on its own leaves the data folder behind, as with most Mac apps. If you removed it that way, delete ~/Library/Application Support/Recall as well. Either way no copy of your work history remains, because there is no server copy to chase.

There is no cloud sync and no server-side store of your work history. What does cross the network: licence and payment processing (Paddle), transactional email (Resend), the feedback you send from the app and our replies, crash reports that carry no work content and identify the install only by a random ID (Sentry), pseudonymous usage events (which Recall screens and features are used, with the app version, macOS version and chip, tied to a random install ID and never carrying anything from your screen) and a few milestones such as setup completed or a purchase (with its amount and currency), which go to Google Analytics under a hashed install ID (Google), and, only if you turn on diagnostics sharing, the bug reports you send (Scaleway). On the website, while advertising is allowed, Reddit's pixel and a few conversion messages (a download, a sign-up, a trial or a first purchase after a Reddit ad, identified by Reddit's click and cookie IDs and one-way hashed reference numbers) go to Reddit; advertising is its own choice under Cookie settings, and Do not share my data turns it off. The full vendor list, with what each receives, is on the Subprocessors page.

Crash reports and usage events are on by default and share one switch, Settings → Privacy → Usage analytics & crash reports. With it off, Recall sends one note that you turned it off, and after that only anonymous setup counts with no install ID. What's sent lists every event in plain words, what never leaves your Mac and how long it is kept, with a real sample. Delete my analytics data erases Recall's copy of what we hold, not data Google Analytics already received: your usage events and daily summaries on Recall's servers and your conversations with the team, and it starts a new random install ID. It does not reach data Google Analytics already received.

Send Feedback… opens Report a problem, Suggest a feature and Conversations. Your message is stored on Recall's servers as a conversation, so the team can reply inside the app. A problem report always includes Recall's logs and decisions, the app version, your hardware and the random install ID, never screen content. You can add up to three images. Each is checked on your Mac before upload: card numbers, bank details, keys and seed phrases are blacked out, and an image that can't be checked isn't sent. Names, emails and message text are not removed, so look over an image before you attach it. For a problem you can also include the activity data for the period you pick, with sensitive strings masked: untick it to leave it out. The screenshots Recall analyzed in that period can be included only while diagnostics sharing is on. Feedback is delivered whatever the usage analytics switch says, and Forget history or Delete my analytics data deletes your conversations.

If, and only if, you enable diagnostics sharing, bug reports can include recent analysis traces, screenshots, and any text you add. We use them to fix the problem you reported and to improve Recall Core, our own on-device model. They are never used for anyone else's model. Frames are redacted on your Mac before upload (on-device OCR plus secret scanning mask emails, keys, and credentials) and stored in EU object storage, then deleted after 30 days.

Every release is signed with our Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, which scans the binary before it can run on your Mac. Updates are delivered through Sparkle with a cryptographically signed appcast, so an update cannot be silently substituted. Recall checks for updates at launch and every hour.

Every way back to your work (a tray row, Resume in Loops, Return to session on a thread page, Recall me on a reminder, Open chat on a request) first lists each app, tab, file and chat it is about to reopen, all ticked. Untick anything. Cancel opens nothing and changes nothing. Smart Return shows the same list inside its card, and its panel never takes your keystrokes. An excluded app is never reopened.

The strongest control is that you can verify the important claims yourself: watch the network, inspect the local folder, check the permissions macOS shows. The user guide's Privacy and your data section describes every switch in the app's own words, and the Trust Center overview includes a prepared prompt for having an AI of your choice review our architecture claims critically.

Verify it: See the Second opinion section on the Trust Center overview for a ready-made critical-review prompt to send to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, or copy anywhere else.

Report vulnerabilities to hello@joinrecall.com. We read every report, respond, and credit reporters who want credit. Reports that a claim on these pages does not match the shipping build are treated as security reports.