Privacy

Last updated 5 October 2026.

That is the whole policy. Here is what it means concretely.

What the app does with your data

• Dictation audio. Transcribed on your Mac's Neural Engine and then discarded. The one exception is a troubleshooting option, off by default, that keeps the newest 20 dictations as audio files until you turn it off.
• Meeting recordings. Transcribed on your Mac's Neural Engine and kept as audio files under ~/Library/Application Support/Hark/recordings. Hark keeps them so you can play back a few seconds of each voice when you say who spoke, and so a meeting can be processed again if transcription fails. They never leave your Mac, and you can delete any of them at any time; the transcript stays.
• Transcripts. Stored in one SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/Hark, along with the embeddings used for search. Deleting that folder deletes everything.
• Voiceprints. To tell the voices in a meeting apart, and to recognize someone you have named when they speak in a later meeting, Hark keeps a voiceprint for each speaker: a short list of numbers describing how they sound. Voiceprints are biometric data. They are computed on your Mac, stored in the same database, and never sent anywhere. A voiceprint is only tied to a name when you type that name yourself, after a meeting or later from the library, and Hark learns a person's voice only from meetings where you confirmed it. Forgetting a person in Settings > People erases their voiceprints and takes their name off every transcript.
• No servers of ours. There is no backend. Hark has no account system, no sync, no analytics, no crash reporting and no update check that reports anything about you.

What can leave your Mac

Two things, both only when you set them up and both to services you control.

• The cleanup endpoint. If you turn on transcript cleanup, the text of each dictation (never the audio) is sent to the OpenAI-compatible endpoint you configure. That can be a local server such as LM Studio or Ollama, in which case nothing leaves the machine, or a cloud provider, in which case that provider's policy applies. Cleanup is off by default.
• The Ask feature. Asking a question over your knowledge base sends the question and the matching transcript passages to the same endpoint. Same rules.

Model downloads

On first use Hark fetches the speech, diarization and embedding models from their publishers (FluidInference on Hugging Face, and the fastembed model host). Those are ordinary file downloads; they carry no information about you beyond your IP address, as any download does.

The MCP server

hark-mcp lets AI coding tools on your Mac read your transcripts. It runs locally over standard input and output, opens the database read-only, and exposes nothing to the network. What those tools do with the text they read is governed by their own policies; Hark does not send anything to them on its own.

Retention and deletion

We hold no data, so there is nothing to retain and nothing to request deletion of. Uninstalling Hark and removing its Application Support folder removes everything it ever stored.

Contact

Questions: open an issue.