Privacy Policy

Sonasi Notebook — Privacy Policy

_Last updated: 15 October 2026_

Sonasi Notebook is a macOS app made by Sonasi AI Studio. It keeps your files, notes and conversations on your Mac and lets you ask questions about them. It can also, when you choose, connect to tools and chat apps you already use. This policy explains what stays on your Mac, what leaves it, and where it goes.

What we collect

Nothing that says who you are, and none of your content. The app has no accounts of its own, no advertising, no tracking and no crash reporting service. We never see your files, your notes, your messages or your questions.

Two things can reach us, and only if you choose: anonymous usage statistics, if you said yes to them (see the next section), and a message you send us.

"Report a problem" and "Sonasi Apps" in the app are pages from sonasi.app, shown inside the app. Opening them loads them from our website, like any web page. If you submit the problem form, what you type into it — and an email address, if you give one — reaches us. We use it only to look into the problem and reply to you.

Anonymous usage statistics

The app asks you once — in the welcome tour, or the first time you open it after the update that added this — whether to share anonymous usage statistics. Nothing is sent until you say yes, and you can change your answer at any time in Settings › General › Usage statistics.

If you say yes, the app sends counts about how it is used to TelemetryDeck, a service run by TelemetryDeck GmbH and hosted in Germany, which processes them for us:

- that the app was opened and how long it was used, its version, the macOS version, the kind of Mac and its processor, the screen size, the time zone and the language the app is set to, whether it is the App Store or the downloaded build, and whether the Mac has less or more than 12 GB of memory; - which screens and features are used — for example that a notebook was created, a source of a given kind was added, a question was asked, a chat service was connected (by its name only), or translation or creating tasks with AI was turned on — and which kind of background job failed.

You appear in these statistics only as a random number created on your Mac the first time the app runs. It is hashed on your Mac before it is sent, then salted and hashed again by TelemetryDeck, so the statistics cannot be traced back to you, your Mac or your Apple Account.

Never sent: the contents of your files, notes, chats, questions or answers; file names, chat names, people's names, email addresses, account names or ids, keys, or the text of any error.

We use these statistics only to count installations and active users and to decide what to improve. They are not used for advertising, not sold, not combined with other data, and not used to track you across apps or websites.

Where your data lives

Everything — the files you add, the notes you write, the summaries and answers the app writes, the notebook memory, the messages fetched from chat apps you connect, the log of tools the assistant called, and the search index — is stored in the app's own folder on your Mac (`Library › Application Support › Sonasi Notebook`, inside the app's sandbox container). Settings › Your data shows where it is, backs it up to a single file you save wherever you like, and deletes it.

Reading files on your Mac

By default the app reads ("embeds") your files with a model that runs on your Mac. Model files — for reading, for chatting on your Mac, and for turning speech into text — are downloaded from the Hugging Face hub when you first use them. Hugging Face sees that a download was made, as any website does; no text of yours is sent there.

Speech in recordings and videos is turned into text on your Mac, with Apple's on-device speech recognition or with a downloaded Whisper model. Text in scanned pages and images is recognised on your Mac too. Nothing leaves the Mac for either.

When text is sent to an AI service

Only if you add an account for an online AI service (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or a server you name) in Settings. From then on, and only for the features you use:

- Chat / Ask: your question and the passages of your files, notes and notebook memory that the app selects as context are sent to that service to write the answer. - Asking about a chat message: the message you ask about becomes part of your question and is sent with it, like any other question. - Tools: when the assistant uses a tool on an MCP server you added, what the tool returns is sent to the AI service so it can write the answer. - Summaries: the text of a file is sent to that service when you ask for a summary or turn on automatic summaries. - Online reading model: the text of your files is sent to that service to be embedded, if you chose an online model instead of the one on your Mac. - Dashboard and chat summaries: when they are on, the messages of the chats you follow, your notes and the transcripts of your recordings are sent to write the daily briefing and the points each chat settled. - Translation: if you turn on translation for a chat, its messages, and the replies you write in it, are sent to be translated. - To Do: if you turn on "Create tasks with AI", the points settled in your chats, your own notes and your meeting summaries are sent to find tasks and to tell which are done. Drafting a reminder to someone sends the task and the recent messages of the chat it will go to.

Those services process the text under their own privacy policies. The app sends nothing to them until you have added an account. Choose a model that runs on your Mac and none of this leaves it.

This happens to answer the request you just made, or for the features you turned on — automatic summaries, the Dashboard briefing, chat summaries, translation, creating tasks with AI — and nothing else is sent in the background. We do not use your content, or anything derived from it, to develop, improve or train AI models, our own or anyone else's, and we ask the same of the services above through their API terms. We never sell your data, and it is never used for advertising.

MCP servers

MCP servers are tools you add yourself in the app — a CRM, a task tracker, a database, or a server running on your own Mac. The app connects to each one at the address you give it.

When the assistant uses a server's tool, the app sends that server the request the tool needs. That request can contain text from your question, your files, your notes or your chats — for example a customer's name to look up, or a task to add. The server's answer comes back to your Mac and is kept in the log under the answer.

You decide, server by server, which tools the assistant may use and whether it must ask you before changing anything. If a server asks you to sign in, the sign-in happens in your browser, and the app keeps only the access token, in your Mac's Keychain. Each server is run by whoever operates it, and what it does with what it receives is governed by that operator's own terms and privacy policy. Remove a server in the app to stop all contact with it and delete its token.

Chat apps: Slack and Microsoft Teams

If you connect a Slack or Microsoft Teams account, the app reads your conversations from that service and keeps a copy on your Mac, so you can read and search them next to your notebooks.

- Slack: you create a Slack app in your own workspace and paste its user token into Sonasi Notebook. The token can read the channels, groups and direct messages you are in, the names of people in them, and their files; it can also post messages and files as you. - Microsoft Teams: you sign in with Microsoft in your browser. The app asks to read your profile and your chats, to send chat messages, to read the channels you are in if you allow it, and to upload files you choose to send.

The app sends a message only when you press Send, and it goes out under your own name. The assistant can write a reply for you, but never sends one by itself. Tokens are kept in your Mac's Keychain. Signing out of an account in the app deletes its token and the copy of its messages on your Mac. Messages you send are handled by Slack or Microsoft under their own terms.

Cloud folders

If you sign in to Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive to follow a folder, the app asks that service for the folder's file list and downloads the files you chose to follow — read-only, nothing is written to your cloud storage. Sign-in happens in your browser with the service itself; the app receives only an access token, kept in your Mac's Keychain, and never sees your password. Signing out in Settings removes the token. Folders synced by the services' own desktop apps (or iCloud Drive) are read from your Mac like any other folder, without any sign-in.

Google user data

This section applies only if you sign in to a Google account in Settings › General › Cloud accounts. It answers, in order, the four things Google asks every app to tell you: what Google user data the app accesses, how it uses that data, who it is shared with, and how it is protected.

**The permission the app asks for.** One scope: `https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly` ("See and download all your Google Drive files"). Read-only — the app cannot create, change, delete or share anything in your Drive. No other Google scope is requested: no Gmail, no Calendar, no Contacts, no Photos.

**1. What Google user data the app accesses.** Only this, and only once you have signed in:

- **Folder names and ids**, while you browse your Drive in the folder picker to choose a folder to follow. - **For files inside a folder you chose to follow**: the file's name, id, size, type, last-modified time, content checksum and web link. - **The contents of those files**, downloaded when the folder is followed. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are exported by Google as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files so that their text can be read. - **The email address, display name and account id** of the Google account you signed in with, so Settings can show you which account is connected.

Nothing else is accessed. Files in folders you did not pick are never downloaded. The wider `drive.readonly` permission is what Google offers for reaching a folder of your choosing and following it over time; the narrower `drive.file` permission covers only files opened one at a time through Google's own picker, which cannot keep a folder in step as you add and change files in it.

**2. How the app uses that data.** For one purpose: to put those files into a notebook on your Mac and let you work with them. The app extracts their text, indexes it so you can search it, shows it to you, and uses it to answer the questions you ask and to write the summaries you ask for. That is the whole use. Google user data is never used for advertising, never sold, never used to build a profile of you, and never used — nor is anything derived from it — to develop, improve or train AI or machine-learning models, ours or anyone else's.

**3. Who Google user data is shared with.** By default, nobody. We run no server for this app, so your Drive files never reach us: no copy exists on our side and no one at Sonasi AI Studio can read them. There are exactly two ways Google user data can leave your Mac, both of which only happen because you set them up:

- **An online AI account you added** (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any OpenAI-compatible server you name — including one running on your own machine). When you ask a question, request a summary or a translation, the passages the app selects as context — which can include text that came from a followed Drive folder — are sent to that provider to produce the answer, and are then handled under that provider's own privacy policy. Choose a model that runs on your Mac and no Google user data leaves it at all. - **An MCP server you added.** When you let the assistant use a tool on such a server, the request sent to it can contain text from your files, which can include text from a Drive folder. Each server is run by whoever operates it, and you decide server by server which tools may be used.

Google user data is disclosed to no one else, for any reason, except where the law requires it of us.

**4. How Google user data is protected.** The app's defence is that the data stays on your Mac, and the specific mechanisms are these:

- **The app's own sandbox.** Everything downloaded from Drive is kept in the app's container (`Library › Application Support › Sonasi Notebook`), which macOS keeps other apps out of. - **Tokens in the Keychain, not in files.** The access and refresh tokens from the Google sign-in are stored in the macOS Keychain — the data-protection keychain, marked "available when this Mac is unlocked, this device only". They are never written to the app's database or its files, never leave the Mac, and never sync to iCloud or to another device. - **No password ever reaches the app.** Signing in happens in your own browser, through Google, with OAuth 2.0 and PKCE. The app receives only a token. - **HTTPS everywhere.** Every call to Google's APIs, and every download of a Drive file, is made over TLS. - **Nothing to breach on our side.** We hold no copy of your Google user data, so there is no server of ours that could leak it. - **Your Mac's own protection.** The app's folder is as private as the Mac it sits on; turning on FileVault encrypts it with the rest of the disk. A backup you export yourself (Settings › Your data) is an ordinary zip file with no encryption of its own — keep it somewhere you trust.

**How long it is kept, and how to remove it.** Copies of the files stay on your Mac until you delete them: remove a source or a notebook in the app, or clear everything under Settings › Your data. Signing out of the Google account in Settings deletes the stored token immediately; you can also revoke the app's access at any time at [myaccount.google.com/permissions](https://myaccount.google.com/permissions). Revoking there stops all further access; the files already downloaded remain on your Mac until you delete them, because they are yours.

**Limited Use.** Sonasi Notebook's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the [Google API Services User Data Policy](https://developers.google.com/terms/api-services-user-data-policy), including the Limited Use requirements.

Apple Notes

If you choose an Apple Notes folder, the app reads the notes in it, with your permission, through macOS, and keeps a copy in your notebook. It does not create, change or delete anything in Apple Notes.

Sonasi Meetings (Sonasi Link)

If Sonasi Meetings is installed on the same Mac, it puts its recordings and their transcripts in a folder that only Sonasi apps on this Mac can open. Sonasi Notebook reads them from there, so they can be added to a notebook. This happens on your Mac; nothing is sent anywhere.

API keys and sign-ins

Keys you paste, and the tokens left by any sign-in described above, are stored in the macOS Keychain, not in the app's files. Each one is used only to talk to the service it belongs to.

Web pages and YouTube links

When you add a link, the app fetches that page (or the video's caption track from YouTube) directly from your Mac, the same way a browser would. Cookies and other website data from these fetches are not kept.

How your data is protected

The same mechanisms described for Google user data above protect everything else the app holds — your files, your notes, your chat messages and your recordings:

- Everything is kept in the app's sandbox container on your Mac, which macOS keeps other apps out of. We run no server for the app and hold no copy of any of it. - Every key, token and sign-in is stored in the macOS Keychain, in the data-protection keychain, marked "available when this Mac is unlocked, this device only" — never in the app's database or files, and never synced to another device. - Every connection the app makes — to an AI provider, a cloud service, a chat service, an MCP server or a web page — is made over HTTPS, except to a server you yourself point it at on your own machine. - Sign-ins happen in your browser with the service itself, using OAuth with PKCE where the service supports it. The app never sees your passwords. - Your WhatsApp session, if you link one, is sealed on disk with a key held in the Keychain while the app is not running. - The app's folder is as private as the Mac it sits on: turn on FileVault to encrypt it with the rest of your disk, and keep any backup you export somewhere you trust, since that file is a plain zip.

Children

The app is not directed at children and we collect no personal information from anyone.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the new version is published here and dated above. Questions: support@sonasi.app.