Privacy & on-device

folo is built so your conversations stay yours. Recording, transcription and speaker recognition run entirely on your Mac by default. This chapter sums up what lives where — and when anything touches the cloud at all.

What stays on your Mac

folo stores audio and transcripts in a local database. Optional selected cloud backends receive only the audio or transcript data described below. Voice profiles for speaker recognition stay local. The calendar is read locally through EventKit — with no calendar account.

Background: private meeting notes — keeping transcripts off other people’s servers.

Audio after transcription

Under “Settings → Privacy” you control “Delete audio after transcription”: by default, the recording is removed once transcribed. If you want to keep a short clip per speaker (to match voices later), enable “Keep a short audio clip per speaker” — that clip is kept even when the recording is deleted. Transcripts and summaries are never affected by the deletion.

When the cloud comes into play

Transcription and summary backends are selected globally in Settings, not per meeting. Apple Intelligence, Ollama and Local MLX process summaries locally. ElevenLabs Scribe uploads meeting audio to ElevenLabs when globally selected and uses your own ElevenLabs API key, which folo stores in the macOS Keychain. “Cloud (Claude Haiku 4.5)” sends transcript text directly to Anthropic using your API key stored in the Keychain. “Claude Code (Anthropic cloud via local CLI)” sends transcript text to Anthropic through the locally installed claude CLI; its authentication is separate and folo stores no Anthropic API key for that mode.

MCP integration for the kveik suite

Under “Settings → MCP” you enable the local kveik MCP integration. Connected tools can search and read meeting metadata (title, time, duration and participants) and project data in the local graph; audio and transcripts are not currently exposed there. They can also invoke actions registered by suite apps and set up Døgn tracking — those tools can change app or project state. How returned data is processed depends on the connected tool’s privacy settings.