Nearhand runs on your Mac. The files you put on the shelf are copied into a folder on that Mac and stay there. There is no account, no analytics, and no telemetry of any kind.
Everything Nearhand keeps lives on your own machine:
~/Library/Application Support/Nearhand/. In the Mac App Store
version, sandboxing puts that folder inside
~/Library/Containers/com.nearhand.app/ instead. Annotations,
captions and page info are written next to the file as separate sidecar
files, so the original is never modified.None of this is uploaded, indexed, or read by us. We have no way to see it.
This is the complete list. Nothing else on this page is a summary of something longer.
If you bought Nearhand from this site, activating your licence sends your licence key and your Mac's name (as macOS reports it, often something like “Alex's MacBook Pro”) to Lemon Squeezy, who handle our licensing. That is how a key gets tied to a machine and how you can deactivate one later. It happens when you activate, validate or deactivate — not in the background.
The Mac App Store version does not contain this code at all.
If you bought Nearhand from the App Store, purchases go through Apple. Apple tells Nearhand whether you own the unlock and nothing more. We never see your name, email address or payment details, and Apple's privacy policy governs that transaction.
When you record something and caption generation is switched on, Nearhand uses Apple's Speech framework. Where the on-device speech model for your language is installed, the audio never leaves your Mac. Where it is not installed, Apple's framework falls back to its network recogniser, which means the recording's audio is sent to Apple for transcription under Apple's privacy policy. If you would rather that never happen, turn caption generation off in Settings.
This feature is not present in the Mac App Store version.
The Nearhand browser extension sends captured pages to the app over
127.0.0.1 — a loopback connection that cannot leave your
computer. It is not a server on the internet and it accepts no outside
connections.
These are not policy promises we are asking you to take on faith; there is no code in the app that does any of them.
Nearhand Cloud — expiring share links, comments on recordings, sync across your Macs — is still being built and is not part of the app you can install today. Nothing in the current app uploads anything to us.
It is being designed end-to-end encrypted, so that files are sealed on your Mac before they are sent and we cannot read them. When it ships, this policy will be updated to describe exactly what it stores before the feature is switched on for anyone.
Because we hold no personal data about you, there is nothing for us to export or delete on request — but if you think otherwise, write to us and we will look into it.
Nearhand is a productivity tool for general audiences. It is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them — it does not knowingly collect anything from anyone.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and material changes will be described here rather than quietly edited in. Adding a feature that sends data anywhere new means updating this page before that feature ships.
Nearhand is made by an independent developer trading as Nearhand. Questions about privacy, or about anything on this page, go to support@nearhand.app.