Privacy

Last updated: August 23, 2026

1. What we never see

• The contents of your notes, reports, dashboards and widgets
• Their filenames, or the shape of your workspace
• Anything fetched from an account you connect
• Your conversations with the agent
• Your AI provider credentials

None of it is uploaded, and there is nowhere on our side for it to go: Noteshell has no sign-in, no user database and no note storage. That isn’t a policy we could quietly change — it’s the shape of the product.

2. What stays on your machine

Notes are plain Markdown files. Reports, widgets and components are plain code files. Everything sits in the workspace folder you picked, readable by any other program you own. Credentials for connected accounts are encrypted with your operating system’s own keychain, and your AI provider credentials live in the agent runtime’s local store. Data pulled from a connector is written into your workspace as ordinary files.

3. The usage heartbeat

Anonymous usage analytics are on by default, disclosed in the app before the first one is ever sent, and switchable off at any time in Settings. Turning it off stops the sending.

Once a day, while the app is running, it sends exactly this:

• A random install identifier minted on your machine. It isn’t derived from your hardware, your email or anything about you, and the app’s own interface is never allowed to read it.
• The app version, your platform, processor architecture and major OS version.
• Counts from the most recent completed day of six things, and only these six: notes edited, chats sent, reports opened, dashboards viewed, artifacts created, missions run. Counts — not names, not contents, not durations.

The list of six is frozen in both the app and the receiving service, so a change in the app alone cannot widen what is collected. Counts older than about a week are dropped from your machine.

4. Crash reports

Crash reporting is off until you say yes. If you do, a crash sends a stack trace that has already been stripped before it leaves your machine: the error message is discarded outright, absolute paths are cut back to app-relative ones, third-party frames collapse into a count, and names that could carry your content — such as a widget file’s name — are replaced with placeholders. The scrubber is allowlist-based: every line that goes out is rebuilt from parts we recognise, and raw input never passes through. At most five crashes a day are sent.

5. Bug reports you send

If you file a bug or a piece of feedback from inside the app, we receive what you typed — the description, the steps, and an email address if you chose to give one — along with your platform and the app version. Nothing is attached that you weren’t shown.

6. The version check

Thirty seconds after the app starts, and every four hours after that, it asks our server whether a newer build exists. The request carries the version you are running and nothing else — no install identifier, no workspace, no account — but like any web request it reveals your IP address and the fact that a copy of Noteshell is running. There is no switch for it in the app today; blocking app.noteshell.io on your network stops it, at the cost of not being told about updates.

7. This website

noteshell.io runs no analytics, no advertising and no tracking cookies. Downloading the beta reaches our server, which sees what any web server sees — the request, a coarse country from the CDN, your browser’s user agent — and posts a note to our internal chat so we know the beta is being downloaded. If you type an email address into the download form, we receive it and use it only to reach you about the beta.

8. AI providers — where your notes do travel

When you ask the agent to do something, Noteshell sends what it needs — your message, the files in context, and its own working notes — to the model provider you configured, such as Anthropic or OpenRouter, authenticated with the credentials you supplied. That request goes from your machine straight to them. It does not pass through us, and we never see it. What happens to it there is governed by that provider’s privacy policy and your account with them, so it’s worth reading theirs.

9. Everything else the app talks to

Beyond your AI provider and the accounts you connect, these are the app’s own outbound calls:

• Voice notes. If you attach an audio file and have added your own Groq key in Settings, that audio is sent to Groq to be transcribed. Without a key, nothing is sent and nothing is transcribed.
• Word lookups. Looking a word up sends that single word to the public dictionary API at api.dictionaryapi.dev. Just the word.
• Web pages you point it at. Ask the agent to read a URL and the app fetches that page itself, then passes the page to your model provider to be turned into notes. The site you fetched sees your IP address, as it would in a browser.

The agent runtime underneath Noteshell also makes its own calls to whichever provider you signed in to. That traffic is between you and them.

10. Accounts you connect

Most connectors use OAuth and ask for read access only: GitHub, for your public profile; Google Drive and Google Calendar read-only, plus your email address so the app can show which account is connected; Linear, read-only; Slack, to list the channels you pick, read their message history, and resolve author IDs to display names. Notion works differently — you paste an internal integration token, and Noteshell can see whatever pages you have shared with that integration. LeetCode needs no account at all; it reads public data.

In every case the credential stays on your machine, the requests run from your machine to the provider, and the results land in your workspace as files. You can disconnect any of them in Settings, and revoke access from the provider’s own security page whenever you like.

Noteshell’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

11. Children

Noteshell isn’t directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect anything from them.

12. Your choices

• Switch the usage heartbeat and crash reporting off in Settings.
• Delete your workspace folder to delete your work. There is no other copy to ask us about.
• Ask us about, or ask us to delete, the little we do hold — an email you gave us, a bug report you filed — by writing to hello@noteshell.io.

13. Changes to this page

We’ll move the date at the top when this changes. This page describes the version of Noteshell shipping today; it is written from the app’s own source, and we would rather correct it than let it drift.