Privacy

Hark collects nothing.

Last updated 8 September 2026.

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

What the app does with your data

  • Audio. Microphone and meeting audio is transcribed on your Mac's Neural Engine and then discarded. A meeting recording is kept on disk only if transcription fails, so you can retry it; you can delete it at any time.
  • Transcripts. Stored in one SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/Hark, along with the embeddings used for search and the speaker profiles used to tell voices apart. Deleting that folder deletes everything.
  • 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.