Privacy
Dialogue is built around a simple principle: your data belongs to you. The architecture enforces this at every layer.
Local Processing
All transcription and speaker identification runs entirely on your Mac. No audio data is ever sent to any external service.
- Audio never leaves your machine
- Transcripts are generated on-device
- Speaker identification runs locally
- No internet connection is required for recording or transcription
End-to-End Encryption
When you enable sync, Dialogue uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to protect your data in transit and at rest on the server.
- Every document gets a unique 256-bit symmetric key, generated on your device
- Content is encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305 before leaving your device
- The sync server stores only opaque encrypted blobs — it cannot read your notes or transcripts
- Encryption keys are stored in your device’s Keychain and never sent to the server
- When you sign in on a new device, your master key is derived from your password — the server never sees it
This is a zero-knowledge design. Even the server operator cannot access your data.
For more details, see Encryption.
No Account Required
Dialogue works fully offline with no account. You can create notes, record and transcribe meetings, and search your data without ever signing in. Accounts are only needed for sync and collaboration.
Collaboration Privacy
When you share a document for real-time collaboration, the collaboration server can see document content while the editing session is active. This is a necessary trade-off for live multi-user editing — the server must process edits to merge them.
However:
- Persistent storage remains E2EE — after a collaboration session, data is synced back through the encrypted channel
- You control sharing — documents are only shared when you explicitly create a share
- Permissions are enforced — read-only shares cannot modify the document
- Shares are revocable — remove access at any time
Your Data
All data stored locally on your Mac is under your full control. Synced data is encrypted before upload. You can disable sync at any time to revert to a purely local setup — all your data remains on your device.