What leaves your Mac

Short version: with a fresh install, nothing of yours. Every choice that changes that is one you make yourself, and here is the complete list.

Always on your Mac

• Audio recordings. They are written to your disk and never uploaded anywhere by anything, ever. No exceptions, no telemetry, no accounts.
• Transcription, by default: the Whisper model runs on your machine and works with the network cable unplugged.
• Meetings, transcripts, insights, reports: a local database in the app's own container.
• Your API keys, if you add any: stored in the macOS Keychain, not in files. When you press Check key during setup, the key goes only to its own service (Anthropic or Deepgram), once, to see that it works.
• Your documents: read, split up and indexed on your Mac. The files themselves are never uploaded.
• Your calendar, if you connect it: read on your Mac through macOS's own calendar store, never changed. Meeting names and guest lists are saved with your meetings, locally.
• Call detection: Parrot asks macOS which apps are using the microphone (the orange-dot information). It never hears their audio.

Downloads

Parrot downloads models once, the first time it needs them: Whisper, voice detection and speaker detection models from Hugging Face, and for Arabic, Indic and sometimes Cyrillic documents, a language model from Apple. These are plain downloads. Nothing about you, your calls or your documents goes with them, and after that everything runs offline.

Sent out only if you set it up

• The Assistant on Claude or a custom server: transcript text from the current call (plus matched knowledge base snippets and your profile's instructions) goes to that provider during calls and for reports. Audio never goes.
• Instant document answers (TypeSafe AI): only with a TypeSafe key and only when the Assistant runs on Claude. When the other side asks a question, that question, the last couple of lines of the call, and the matching snippets of your documents go to TypeSafe AI, hosted in the United States, so the matching excerpt can show within a second. Audio never goes. TypeSafe states it does not train on what you send and keeps it only as long as needed to run the service.
• Calendar invites for the Assistant: only if you turn on "Brief the Assistant from the invite" and the Assistant runs on Claude or a custom server. The matched event's title, guest names and notes (minus dial-in links and numbers) go with the Assistant's requests during that call. Off by default.
• Ask Parrot with a cloud AI: the few best-matching excerpts from your meetings (not whole meetings, never audio) go to the post-call reports AI to write the answer. With Ollama, nothing leaves.
• Follow-up email: the meeting's transcript goes to the post-call reports AI to write the draft, only when you ask for one (or turn on "after every call").
• Webhook: the finished meeting (summary, next steps, notes, and the transcript only if you allow it) goes to the address you pasted.
• Claude and other AI apps (MCP): an app you connect, such as Claude Desktop, reads your meetings when you ask it something, and sends that to its own cloud (for Claude, Anthropic under your Claude account). It's off until you turn it on, it's read-only, and you choose what it sees on the Claude & AI Apps page: transcripts, reports and notes (on), Assistant cards (off), and call types to hide. It never sees on-device-only meetings, audio, keys or settings. Parrot only records counts and times of what the app read, never the content.
• Cloud transcription (Groq or Deepgram): the call audio is sent to them for speech-to-text as it happens. This is the one opt-in that sends sound. On-device stays the default.
• Update check: once a day Parrot reads its update feed on GitHub Pages. The request carries the app's version and nothing about you or your calls. Updates are signed, download in the background and install when you quit, never during a recording. Turn off Keep Parrot up to date in Settings → General to install by hand.

Your controls

Settings → Privacy has four switches:

• On-device only. One switch for nothing leaving this Mac. Whisper transcribes, Ollama runs the Assistant and reports, and there's no polish pass, no TypeSafe answers and no webhook. You can also turn it on for one profile (Settings → Profiles), so only your therapy or legal calls run this way. Meetings recorded like this stay out of Ask Parrot when a cloud AI would write the answer, out of the follow-up email on a cloud AI, out of webhooks, and out of Claude and other AI apps.
• Hide personal details from cloud AI. Before anything goes to Claude or a custom server, emails, phone numbers, card numbers and IBANs become placeholders like [EMAIL_1], and the real values are put back in what comes back. Names can be hidden too, using Apple's on-device name detection.
• Recording consent. The Consent button on the call screen copies your notice to paste into the call chat, or notes that everyone agreed out loud. The record stays with the meeting and shows in its report and exports.
• Automatic clean-up. Delete call audio (keeping transcript and report) and/or whole meetings after a set number of days. An imported recording counts from the day you imported it, not the file's own date.

Each meeting also shows a What left this Mac line under its title, built from that meeting's own record: which service got audio or text, and for what.

And Ollama?

Ollama runs on your own machine, so the Assistant on Ollama keeps everything local: Parrot only ever talks to it on localhost. Local model, local transcription, zero outbound bytes. That combination is the whole reason Parrot exists.

If you pick Private during setup, Parrot can install Ollama for you: it downloads the official app from ollama.com, checks that it's really signed by Ollama, and opens it. macOS asks you to confirm once.