Privacy

Aldernote is a personal meeting-notes app run by its developer. Sign-in is limited to an allowlist of Google accounts. This page says what the app stores about you, who can reach it, and how to take it back out.

What Aldernote stores

• Your Google account’s name, email address and profile picture, used to sign you in and show who you are.
• Your meetings: the title and timing, the notes you type, the audio you record or import, the transcript made from it, the polished notes the app writes, your edits to them, and the questions you ask in chat with their answers. For a recording, the app also keeps which browser or device recorded it (for example, “Chrome on Mac”), so another device can tell you where a recording in progress is.
• Your setup: folders, templates, your vocabulary list, appearance and model choices, and which action items you have checked off.
• Daily usage counters (how many questions, rewrites, uploads and so on today), kept for two days to enforce fair-use limits.
• Connected apps: for each AI assistant you connect, the name and return addresses it registered, when you approved it, when it last read something, and fingerprints of its access keys (never the keys themselves).
• Slack delivery: if you connect a Slack webhook, the webhook address encrypted, the Slack team and app ids it belongs to, and for each meeting whether its notes were posted, when, and the last error if a post failed.

Sharing notes

Notes are private until you create a share link. Anyone with that link can read the current notes without signing in, including later edits. The transcript is included only if you enable it; audio is never shared. Links expire after 30 days and can be revoked or regenerated. Revocation blocks future access but cannot remove copies a visitor already saved.

We store a hash of the secret link, its expiry, the number of admitted page requests and the last access time. Counts include reloads and bots, not unique readers. Daily abuse counters use hashed network addresses; these are pseudonymous, not anonymous, and are pruned after two days.

Connected apps

You can let an AI assistant you already use (ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, or another app that supports the Model Context Protocol) read your notes on your behalf. Nothing is connected until you approve an app on Aldernote’s own consent page while signed in. An approved app can list and search your meetings and memos and read their finished notes, your raw notes, transcripts and action items. It cannot hear a recording, change anything, or see another account.

What you ask that assistant, and what it does with what it reads, is handled by the assistant’s provider under their terms, not by Aldernote. Access keys expire after an hour and renew for up to thirty days; disconnecting an app in Settings stops it immediately. Deleting your account removes every connection. An app that registers with a secret of its own has that secret stored as a fingerprint only.

Slack delivery

You can have finished notes posted to a Slack channel of your own. Nothing is sent until you paste an incoming-webhook address from your Slack workspace into Settings. After that, each meeting or memo whose notes finish is posted to that channel, as text with a link back to the meeting: the title, date, length and the finished notes, shortened when they are longer than Slack allows. Aldernote aims to post each meeting once, but cannot promise it: if Slack accepts a message and the confirmation is lost or the server is interrupted before it is recorded, a later attempt posts it again, and after six interrupted attempts the meeting is marked as not posted even if one got through. Settings and the meeting page show what was recorded. You can turn the automatic post off, which also drops posts still waiting and stops retries of ones that failed, and send a meeting by hand instead, from its page. These automatic posts never include raw notes, transcripts or audio. What Slack does with a message is governed by Slack’s terms and your workspace.

The webhook address is a secret that lets anyone who has it post to that channel. Aldernote stores it encrypted and only ever sends messages to Slack’s webhook service with it. Disconnecting in Settings deletes the address and any queued posts; it cannot recall messages already in Slack. Deleting your account removes it too.

Chatting in Slack

When the workspace operator enables Slack chat, you can link your Slack identity to your Aldernote account using a code from Settings. The code expires after ten minutes and is stored only as a fingerprint. Send it only in a direct message to Aldernote.

Direct messages and questions mentioning Aldernote use your account’s chat model through Vercel AI Gateway. The assistant can search your meetings and read finished notes and transcript excerpts to answer. Channel answers and the meeting details they include are visible to everyone with access to that channel. Only the person who starts a conversation can ask follow-ups using that account’s private library. Links back to a meeting still require its owner to sign in.

We store your Slack workspace and user identifiers, conversation identifiers, questions, answers and source references for up to thirty days, with expired records removed by scheduled cleanup. Ordinary channel messages outside an active Aldernote thread are ignored. Slack supplies channel message events so replies within those threads work without another mention. Files and audio are not fetched. Slack chat history is excluded from account exports, like web chat history.

Disconnect Slack chat in Settings to remove the account link, stored conversation history and queued replies. Deleting your account also removes them. Neither operation removes messages already posted in Slack; a reply already being sent may still arrive. If a reply’s delivery cannot be confirmed, it is not automatically posted again; ask again if it does not arrive. The existing automatic notes webhook is managed separately.

Who can hear your audio

Only you, signed in to your own account. Audio is stored in a private store with no public links; the app serves it through a playback route that checks your session on every request and never hands out a direct address. No one at Aldernote listens to recordings.

To make a transcript, a copy of the audio is sent to the speech-to-text model selected in your Settings (OpenAI’s by default) through Vercel’s AI Gateway. The model that writes your notes and answers your questions (Anthropic’s by default) receives your typed notes and the transcript as text, never the audio. Long recordings are cut into parts in your browser before upload; the parts are deleted from storage once the transcript exists, and the whole recording is kept for playback until you delete it.

Your permission for AI processing

From the home screen, starting a recording or memo, or uploading audio, first asks whether Aldernote may send your data to AI providers, unless you have already allowed it. The screen lists what is sent (audio, typed notes, transcripts and questions), which provider receives each step as your Settings choose it, and why. Nothing is chosen for you: Allow is its own tap. Your account stores the version you allowed and when. When Aldernote starts sending a new kind of data or changes a default provider, it asks again. Choosing a different model in Settings sends that step to its provider under the permission you already gave.

Aldernote is asking every account before the permission becomes required. Until then, an account without it, including one that withdrew it in Settings, is still processed as before. Withdrawing never deletes what was already made; deleting a meeting or your account does.

Where it lives

• Database: Neon (Postgres).
• Audio: Vercel Blob, private access.
• The app itself runs on Vercel.

How long

Until you delete it. Deleting a meeting removes its rows immediately and deletes its audio from storage; a minimal record of the meeting’s storage location is kept so repeat scans also delete uploads that finish later. Deleting your account removes its live account data and ends access in the same database operation that records responsibility for audio cleanup. Housekeeping scans the deleted account’s audio namespace in bounded batches and retries storage failures, including uploads that finish after deletion. A minimal deletion record (opaque account identifier and cleanup progress) is retained for these repeat scans; it contains no notes or audio. This does not erase provider retention or backups immediately. Parts of an abandoned long recording are eligible for cleanup after 72 hours, unless some of its audio was already accepted; that recording is kept until you delete the meeting. Uploads the app did not accept, and stored audio no meeting uses, are deleted by a daily scan. There is no separate retention window: the app does not delete a finished meeting on its own.

No training, and what the providers keep

Aldernote does not train models on your data, and it uses your data only to produce your transcript, notes, answers and search index. The providers below process it on Aldernote’s behalf under their own data policies. The Gateway’s zero-data-retention option is not enabled today, so provider default retention applies to what passes through them.

Subprocessors

• Vercel: hosting, audio storage, and the AI Gateway every model call goes through.
• Neon: the database.
• Google: sign-in.
• OpenAI: transcription by default, and always the search embeddings — the embedding model is fixed and is not a Settings choice.
• Anthropic: polished notes, titles and chat, by default.
• Any other model provider you choose in Settings, for the step you choose it for.
• Slack: if you connect a webhook or Slack chat: finished notes you post, chat questions and answers, and any meeting details included in those answers.

Your choices

• Export your notes, raw notes and transcripts as Markdown or JSON from Settings.
• Delete any meeting from its page, or your whole account from Settings.
• Pick which providers handle each step in Settings.
• Allow or withdraw AI processing in Settings.
• Disconnect any connected app, or all of them, from Settings.
• Turn automatic Slack posts off, or disconnect Slack, from Settings.

Changes

When the app changes what it stores or who processes it, this page changes in the same release.