Privacy
Last updated 15 August 2026
meetrec records meetings, so this page has to be specific rather than reassuring. Below is what the software actually does with each kind of data, including the parts that are less comfortable.
Who is responsible
meetrec is operated by TechNow GmbH, Berlin, Germany. Contact details are on the Impressum page. meetrec is currently distributed to a named group of people by invitation and is not offered to the general public.
What is stored on your own Mac
The following never leave your computer. They are held in your user library folder, readable only by your macOS account, protected by file permissions rather than encryption.
- Transcripts of your meetings, including speaker labels and timestamps.
- Summaries, action items and any notes you type.
- Meeting titles, tags, participants and the search index over them.
- Speaker voiceprints, if you name a speaker so the app can recognise them later.
- Your invite derived sign in token for the transcription server.
What is sent to our server
Our transcription server runs on hardware we rent from Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany. Data reaches it in the following cases and no others.
| Data | Why it is sent | How long it is kept |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting audio | To be turned into text. Transcription needs a GPU. | Deleted once transcribed, unless you chose to keep the recording for that meeting. Kept recordings are deleted automatically after 90 days. |
| Transcripts, summaries and your notes | So your library opens on every Mac you sign in on, and is not lost with the laptop. They are also what a summary or a translation is produced from. | Stored on the server until you delete the meeting or the account. Deleting a meeting removes it from the server as well as from your Mac. |
| Your name and email | To create your account and send your invite. | Until the account is deleted. |
| Sign in tokens and device labels | So each Mac can be signed out individually. | Until revoked or the account is deleted. |
| Server logs | Operating the service and diagnosing failures. | Contain account identifiers and timings. They do not contain transcript text. |
Keeping recordings is off by default
The default is that your audio is discarded as soon as the transcript exists. Keeping a recording is a choice you make for one meeting at a time, and it does not carry over to the next meeting. Where a recording is kept, it is stored under a prefix belonging to your account, reachable only by the meetrec server, and removed automatically once it is 90 days old.
Live translation
If you switch on Read in while a meeting is being recorded, the text of each window — a few seconds of speech, already transcribed — is sent to DeepL SE, Maarweg 165, 50825 Cologne, Germany, and translated there. The audio never is, and neither is the meeting title, the participants or anything that identifies your account. DeepL states that text sent through its API plan is deleted once the translation has been returned and is not used to train its models.
This is the only case where the words from a meeting reach a company other than ours, and it happens only while the switch is on. Turn it off and nothing is sent. Translating a finished transcript or summary afterwards is a different thing entirely: that runs on our own hardware in Germany and never goes to DeepL.
Sub-processors
Everyone outside TechNow GmbH who touches your data, what they get, and where they are. There is nobody else.
| Who | What they receive | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | Hosting for the transcription server: the audio and text described above sit on hardware we rent from them. | Germany |
| DeepL SE | The text of a live window, and only while live translation is switched on. | Germany / EU |
| Resend (Plus Five Five, Inc.) | Your email address, to deliver an invite or a sign-in link. No meeting content. | United States |
| Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. | Your name, email and payment details on a paid plan. Card details go to Stripe directly and we never see them. No meeting content. | Ireland / EU |
What we do not do
- No third party AI services for transcription or summaries. Transcription uses Whisper and summaries use an open weights language model, both running on our own hardware. Nothing is sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or any similar provider. Live translation is the one exception and is described below.
- No training. Your recordings, transcripts and summaries are not used to train or fine tune any model.
- No analytics, advertising or tracking. The app contains no analytics SDK. This website sets no cookies and embeds nothing from another host.
- No access to your transcripts by us. They are on your Mac. An administrator can create and remove accounts and can see that an account exists. There is no mechanism for an administrator to read your meetings.
What is not built yet
Stating this plainly matters more than sounding finished.
- Encryption at rest is not implemented. Files on your Mac and recordings on the server are protected by access controls, not by encryption we apply ourselves.
- Automatic removal of personal data from transcripts is not implemented. A transcript contains whatever was said.
Legal basis and your responsibilities
Where you record colleagues or customers, you are normally the controller for that recording and we act as a processor on your behalf. Recording a conversation without the consent of everyone taking part is a criminal offence in Germany under section 201 of the Strafgesetzbuch, and is restricted in many other countries. meetrec asks you to acknowledge this before your first recording. That acknowledgement is not legal advice, and it is not consent from anybody else.
Speaker voiceprints are biometric data and count as a special category of personal data under Article 9 GDPR. meetrec only creates one when you name a speaker, keeps it on your Mac, and lets you delete it.
Your rights
You can ask for access to, correction of, or deletion of the personal data we hold about you, and you may complain to a supervisory authority. In practice most of your data is already in your hands: transcripts and summaries are on your Mac and you can delete them there at any time. For anything held on the server, write to the address in the Impressum and we will action it.
Deleting your account removes your server side account, your tokens, your invites and any recordings still stored for you.
Changes
If what the software does changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. We will not quietly widen what is collected.