Privacy
Oatmeal does not collect, transmit, or store any of your data on external servers. Every feature — transcription, summarization, search, entity extraction — runs entirely on your Mac.
What stays on your Mac
- Audio recordings — stored in your Documents folder. Never uploaded.
- Transcripts and summaries — generated locally by on-device AI models. Never sent to any server.
- Your knowledge graph — entities, relationships, and meeting metadata live in a local SQLite database.
- Search indexes — both full-text and semantic vector indexes run locally.
- Settings and preferences — stored locally in Application Support.
No telemetry
Oatmeal does not include any analytics, crash reporting, or usage tracking. We do not know how many people use Oatmeal, how often they use it, or what features they use. This is intentional.
No account required
There is no sign-up, no login, no email collection. You download the app and use it. We have no way to identify you.
No network calls
By default, Oatmeal makes zero network requests. The AI models (Parakeet TDT for transcription, Qwen3-4B for language tasks) are bundled with the app and run on Apple Silicon via CoreML and MLX.
The only exceptions:
- Update checks — Oatmeal checks for app updates via Sparkle, an open-source macOS update framework. This connects to our update server to check for new versions. No user data is sent.
- Optional cloud AI — If you explicitly configure a cloud AI provider (Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, etc.) by entering your own API key, those requests go directly to the provider you chose. Oatmeal never proxies or stores these requests. This feature is off by default.
- Calendar integration — If you grant calendar access, Oatmeal reads your calendar events via macOS EventKit (Apple's local API). No calendar data is sent anywhere.
Your data, your control
All your data lives in standard files and folders on your Mac:
- Audio:
~/Documents/Oatmeal/ - Database:
~/Library/Application Support/Oatmeal/
You can back up, move, or delete these files at any time. Uninstalling Oatmeal and removing these folders deletes everything permanently. There is no cloud copy.
Third parties
Oatmeal does not share data with any third party. There are no advertising SDKs, no analytics services, no data brokers. The app has no server-side component beyond the update feed.
Open source models
The AI models used by Oatmeal are open-source and run locally:
- Speech-to-text: NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B-v3
- Language model: Qwen3-4B (4-bit quantized)
These models do not phone home or send telemetry. They run as local inference on your Apple Silicon GPU and Neural Engine.
Last updated March 2026. If you have questions about Oatmeal's privacy practices, reach out via GitHub.