A privacy policy with almost nothing to disclose.

• Your notes live on your Mac. Notes, captures, attachments, settings, and the search index are stored locally, inside the app's own container. If you switch on iCloud sync, a copy also goes to your own private iCloud, never to us.
• They are yours, not ours. We claim no ownership and no licence over anything you write. There is no account for us to hold it in.
• The app collects nothing. The copy of HushNotes on your Mac sends us no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reports, no advertising identifiers and no profile. There is no server of ours in the path, because there is no server of ours.
• Two kinds of request, and neither carries your notes. An optional check for a newer version, and a licence activation with Dodo Payments when you enter your key. Both are described in full below.
• We hold two things, and both are yours. The email address you bought with, kept with your licence key as the record of your purchase, and any email you choose to send us. That is the entire list.

Everything HushNotes keeps lives in its app container on your Mac: your notes, captured text, images and attachments, your preferences, and the index that makes search fast. The app sends none of it to us. It sends none of it to anyone else either, unless you switch on iCloud sync, described below, which puts a copy in your own iCloud.

Notes you lock are unlocked with Touch ID or your Mac's password, through Apple's local authentication. The lock happens on your machine, and no secret of yours is sent anywhere.

When you capture text from another app, HushNotes also stores where it came from: the name of that app, its identifier, so the app's icon can show beside the capture, and the time. When the capture comes from Safari or a Chrome-based browser, it also asks that browser for the address and title of the page you were on. macOS asks your permission once per browser before HushNotes can do that, and you can decline; you can change your answer later in System Settings, under Privacy & Security, Automation. To stop it keeping the app and the page, switch off "Remember where a capture came from" in Settings, under Note. The time is always kept. All of it stays with the note, on your Mac (and in your iCloud if you turn sync on), like everything else.

HushNotes checks at most once every 24 hours whether a newer version exists. It requests a single small file from our website that lists the newest version and what changed in it. It sends no identifier, no account, no usage information, and nothing about your notes; the request names the app and its version, the way any download does. If there is a newer version, HushNotes shows you what changed and asks. It downloads and installs the update only when you click Install, and checks that the update is signed by us before it replaces anything.

Like any request to any website, it reaches our hosting provider with the IP address and browser-style user agent that the network attaches to it. Those sit in ordinary, short-lived server logs used for security and operations. We do not analyse them, build profiles from them, or connect them to anything.

You can turn it off in Settings, under General. A copy from the Mac App Store, if we ever ship one, would be updated by Apple, so the check would not run there.

When you enter your licence key, HushNotes sends it to Dodo Payments, our reseller, together with your Mac's name as set in System Settings, so the activation can be told apart from your other Macs. Dodo confirms the key and records this Mac against it.

After that, the app confirms the key with Dodo again only when it runs the update check, sending the key and the activation's identifier. If you turn update checks off, these stop too. None of this carries anything about your notes.

HushNotes can expose your notes to coding agents and assistants through an MCP endpoint. It is off until you turn it on. The endpoint binds to your own machine only, at 127.0.0.1, is protected by a token, and is never reachable from the network. Each client is approved by name, and you can revoke any of them.

What a connected agent then does with what it read is governed by that agent's own privacy policy, not this one. Many agents send what they read to their model provider's servers, which is a property of the agent you chose and happens outside HushNotes. Connect agents you trust, and disconnect them at any time. Nothing routes through a service of ours, because none exists.

HushNotes can sync your notes between your Macs through iCloud. It is off unless you switch it on, in Settings, under Sync. Notes then sync through your own private iCloud database, encrypted in transit and at rest by Apple, and never touch a server of ours. Your Mac keeps the original. Sync runs entirely on Apple's infrastructure under Apple's iCloud terms.

To be precise about what that protects: under Apple's standard data protection, Apple holds the keys to your private iCloud database, and only with Advanced Data Protection switched on in your iCloud settings can nobody but your devices read it. Notes you lock in HushNotes are the exception and are stronger by design. They leave your Mac already encrypted and sync as ciphertext, with the key held in your iCloud Keychain. Sealed copies of that key, which only your recovery key can open, sync alongside them. Either way, locked notes are unreadable in iCloud. Your recovery key itself stays in your Mac's Keychain, so you can show it again, and is never sent to us.

What syncs is everything the app keeps: notes, captures and where they came from, images, themes and wallpapers, and where each note window sits on screen. Apple stores it under Apple's own privacy policy, in your iCloud storage. The only thing the app asks Apple directly is whether an iCloud account is signed in, so it can tell you when sync cannot run. Switching sync off stops it on the next launch; it does not delete the copy already in your iCloud, which Apple's iCloud storage settings manage.

This site measures how it is used: which pages are read, where visitors arrive from, and what gets clicked. It runs on PostHog, served through our own domain rather than a third party's, and it carries no advertising pixels and no ad-network tags. None of it reaches the app. The copy of HushNotes on your Mac is covered by everything above and sends us nothing at all. The website and the app are separate things, and the app is the one your notes live in.

Every page serves its own typeface from our own domain, so no font service or content network is involved in rendering this site.

The app is sold as a direct download, not through the Mac App Store, through Dodo Payments, our reseller. Dodo takes the payment and knows what Dodo knows under its own privacy policy. We never see your card details.

We do receive the email address you buy with, and we use it to send your licence key, which is the thing you paid for. We keep that address, together with the key issued to it, as our record of your purchase, for as long as your licence exists and for as long as tax and accounting law makes us keep a record of the sale. We use it only to communicate with you about HushNotes: your key, a welcome note, an occasional word about what has changed, or a request for feedback. Every one of those carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing costs you nothing. Your licence, your updates and your support do not depend on it. We do not sell the address, rent it, or pass it to anyone else; Dodo Payments, who took your payment, already holds it under their own policy, and no one else receives it. It is never used to build a profile of you.

If you email support@hushnotes.app or use the feedback page, we receive your email address and whatever you wrote, held in an ordinary email account. We use it to reply and to improve the app. We do not add it to a marketing list, and we never sell or share it. Ask and we will delete the correspondence.

Privacy laws including the GDPR and the UK GDPR give you rights to access, correct, and delete personal data held about you. Our honest answer to any such request is short: we hold the email address you bought with, kept with your licence key as the record of your purchase, and any email you chose to send us, and nothing else. Your notes are on your Mac, under your control, and deleting the app's data is deleting the data. Write to us and we will confirm what exists and remove what the law lets us remove; a record of a sale has to be kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires.

You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority if you think we have got this wrong.

We do not collect personal information from users of the app, so there are no categories of personal information to disclose, no sources to list, and no business or commercial purpose for collection to describe.

We have never sold or shared personal information, and we never will. There is nothing to opt out of. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose that would require a right to limit it, and we do not knowingly collect or sell the personal information of anyone under 16. The email address you bought with is used only to communicate with you about HushNotes; email you send us is used only to answer you, and is deleted on request.

HushNotes is a notes app for general audiences and is not directed at children. It is not intended for anyone under 13, and where local law sets a higher age for agreeing to digital services on your own, a parent or guardian should agree on your behalf. Since the app collects no data from anyone, it collects none from children either.

If what the app does changes, this page changes first, along with the date at the top. Material changes will also be called out in the release notes.

Questions about this page: support@hushnotes.app. A person reads it.