Privacy policy

Listenr is a Mac app that records and transcribes your meetings on your Mac. This page says, for every part of Listenr, what data it handles, where that data goes and who can see it: the Mac app, the Listenr server behind sign-in, sharing and Listenr Cloud, the Listenr browser extension, and this website.

Who is responsible

Write to this address for any question about your data or to exercise your rights.

The Mac app

Recordings and transcripts stay on your Mac

Listenr captures your microphone and the audio of your call on your Mac, and transcribes it there. Meetings, transcripts, notes, chat and participant names are stored in your library, a Listenr folder in your Mac's Application Support directory, readable only by your user account. They stay there until you delete them. Audio is kept only if you choose to keep it (off by default); while a meeting is recorded, a temporary recovery copy is kept and stays only if transcription ran into trouble. Telling voices apart and naming them also runs on your Mac.

The transcription engines Listenr offers run on your Mac: Apple's on-device speech recognition (the default, restricted to on-device), Whisper, Parakeet and SenseVoice. The one exception is a choice you make: if you pick OpenAI transcription with your own OpenAI API key, the audio is sent in short pieces from your Mac to OpenAI, under your OpenAI account and OpenAI's terms.

Speech and helper models are downloaded from Hugging Face. Like any download, Hugging Face sees your IP address; nothing from your meetings is sent.

Meeting apps and calendars

If you allow it in Settings (off by default), Listenr reads Zoom's participant list and chat through macOS Accessibility, on your Mac. For Google Meet, the browser extension does the same; seebelow. Listenr reads no other screen content.

Calendars: with your permission, Listenr reads your Apple Calendar events on your Mac. If you connect Google Calendar, Listenr reads your events (read only) from Google directly on your Mac, with a token kept in your macOS Keychain. If you signed in to Listenr with Google, the Listenr server passes your Mac a short-lived Google access token from our sign-in provider; your calendar events never pass through the Listenr server.

What Listenr does with Google Calendar data: it shows your meetings, reminds you before they start, and fills in a meeting's title and attendees when you record it. Those then live in the meeting on your Mac and go only where that meeting goes: the notes provider you chose, a place you send it to, a share you make. Listenr does not sell this data, use it for advertising, have people at Listenr read it, or use it to train AI models.

Listenr's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to theGoogle API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

AI notes: the provider you choose

Notes are written by the provider set in Settings. What leaves your Mac depends on that choice:

• A local model or Apple Intelligence: nothing. The model runs on your Mac.
• Your own Anthropic or OpenAI API key: the transcript text and the instructions for the notes go from your Mac directly to that provider, under your account and their terms. Your key stays in your macOS Keychain and never reaches us.
• Listenr Cloud (the default provider; it needs the Pro plan): the transcript text and the instructions go to the Listenr server, which passes them to the language model we run on Hetzner's inference service and streams the notes back to your Mac. We do not store the transcript or the notes. We count the tokens each generation uses, per month, for your plan's allowance.

Delivering notes

Obsidian and Apple Notes are written on your Mac. Notion: your Mac sends the notes to Notion directly. Connecting Notion goes through the Listenr server once, because Notion's sign-in needs a secret the app cannot hold: the server exchanges Notion's one-time code for a token and hands it to your Mac, without storing it. The token stays in your macOS Keychain.

Your account and billing

You can use Listenr without an account. Signing in (needed for Pro, sharing and Listenr Cloud) goes through Clerk, our sign-in provider, which holds your email address, your name if you give it, and your Google account's basic profile if you continue with Google. The Listenr server stores your account's identifier, your plan and its billing status.

Payments go through Polar (polar.sh), the merchant of record: Polar collects your payment details, name, email and billing address and handles tax. We receive the state of your subscription, never your card details.

Sharing, only when you share

Nothing is uploaded until you share a meeting. When you share one, as a link or to your team library, the app uploads a copy to the Listenr server: the title, start and end time, language, the transcript with speaker names, the AI notes, your own notes and the participants. A link share can be opened by anyone who has the link; it does not expire. A team share can be read by the members of your team.

Deleting a meeting on your Mac does not delete a copy you shared. Remove it withRemove from Team Library in the app: the copy and every link to it are deleted. Or write to us. If you connect ChatGPT or Claude to Listenr's hosted connector (Pro), they can read the meetings you shared, with the access you grant them at sign-in; meetings that only exist on your Mac are out of their reach.

Updates

The app checks listenr.live/appcast.xml for updates once an hour and downloads updates from GitHub. These requests carry your IP address and the app's and macOS's version; no system profile is sent.

No analytics

The app contains no analytics, tracking, advertising or crash-reporting code. The command line, the terminal interface and the local MCP server talk to the app on your Mac only.

The Listenr browser extension

The Listenr extension for Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge and Safari gives the Listenr app on your Mac what Google Meet shows during a call that Listenr is recording.

• What it reads: only on meet.google.com, only during a call, and only while the Listenr app says it is recording that meeting: the participant names in Meet's People panel, who is muted, which tiles show someone speaking (as changes to the page's structure, never text), the chat lines in the open chat panel (sender, text, time), who joins and leaves, and the meeting code in the page address, so the app can tell meetings apart.
• What it never does: it never reads audio, video or captions, never reads other sites or other page text, and never clicks or types in Meet.
• Where it goes: only to the Listenr app on the same Mac, through the browser's native messaging (Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge) or Safari's app extension. The extension makes no network requests and stores nothing in the browser.
• In the app: the participant names and the chat become part of the meeting's record on your Mac. They leave your Mac only with the meeting, in the ways described above: to the notes provider you chose, or in a copy you share.

The use of information received from the extension adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. It is not sold, not used for advertising or creditworthiness, and not used for anything but naming the speakers and keeping the chat of the meeting you record.

This website

listenr.live is served by Cloudflare, which processes your IP address and request details to deliver the pages and protect the site. The site sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking; its fonts are served from the site itself. If you switch between light and dark, your choice is saved in your browser and never sent anywhere. Buying Pro takes you to Polar's checkout; downloading the app takes you to GitHub.

Who processes data for us

• Hetzner Online GmbH, Germany: the server that runs the Listenr server and its database, in a Hetzner data center in Falkenstein, Germany.
• Hetzner's inference service: the language model behind Listenr Cloud.
• Clerk, Inc., USA: sign-in and accounts.
• Polar Software, Inc.: payments, as the merchant of record.
• Cloudflare, Inc., USA: hosting of this website.

Services you choose to use directly, under their own terms, are not our processors: Google (Calendar, and the Chrome Web Store), Notion, Anthropic and OpenAI with your own key, Hugging Face and GitHub for downloads.

Processing by providers in the USA relies on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR) and/or an adequacy decision under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR) where the provider is certified.

Legal bases

Under the GDPR we process your data to provide what you ask for (Art. 6(1)(b): your account, Pro, Listenr Cloud notes, sharing, connecting Notion), on our legitimate interest in running and protecting the service (Art. 6(1)(f): update checks, delivering this website), and with your consent where you connect a calendar (Art. 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time by disconnecting it.

How long data is kept

• On your Mac: until you delete it.
• Shared copies: until you remove them, or delete your account.
• Your account: until you delete it. Deleting your account deletes your shared meetings and their links, your plan record and your usage counts. Database backups are kept for 14 days.
• Server logs: the Listenr server keeps no access logs; its error logs contain no meeting content.

Your rights

You have the right of access to your personal data (Art. 15 GDPR), to rectification (Art. 16), to erasure (Art. 17), to restriction of processing (Art. 18) and to data portability (Art. 20), and the right to object to processing based on our legitimate interests (Art. 21). Where processing rests on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)). Write tom@theclosedloop.co.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the EU member state of your habitual residence, your place of work or the place of the alleged infringement (Art. 77 GDPR).

Children

Listenr is not directed at children under 16.

Changes

When what Listenr does with data changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top says when.