What Ariade keeps, what it never sees, and how to delete it.

Effective 16 September 2026. This policy covers the Ariade app for macOS, the ariade.me website and the Ariade coaching service.

In short

Audio never leaves your Mac. Speech is turned into text on your Mac by Apple's speech engine.
The transcript lives in memory only and is gone when the session ends. There is no transcript view because there is no transcript to keep.
To produce each cue, short text excerpts of the conversation, your goal and the conversation state are sent to the Ariade service, used to answer that request, and discarded.
What is stored is what your account needs: who you are, your settings, your plan, how many minutes you coached, and the sessions and recaps you chose to keep.
You can delete any session, or your whole account with everything in it, from the app.
No advertising, no tracking, no sale of data.

Who is responsible

Ariade is operated by liqpil ("Ariade", "we"). Questions and requests about your data: support@ariade.me.

During a session

When you start listening, the app captures your microphone and the audio your Mac plays (the other side of the call). Both streams are transcribed on your Mac with Apple's on-device speech recognition. Neither audio stream is recorded, stored or transmitted.

The transcript is held in the app's memory for the duration of the session. Every few seconds the app sends a rolling window of recent text, the goal and context you entered, and a compact summary of the conversation state to the Ariade coaching service over an encrypted connection. The service passes them to a large language model (provided by Anthropic) to produce the cue, and returns the cue to you. The excerpts are not written to disk or to a database by the service, and our logs never contain conversation text.

When the session ends, the transcript and the evidence behind each cue are wiped from memory. If you chose to keep a recap for that session, only the recap and the short evidence attached to its cues are stored.

What we store

Account. The email address and sign-in method (Google, Apple or email link) you used, and an account identifier. Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication.
Settings. Your coaching preferences (signal wording, cue interval) so they apply on every Mac you sign in to.
Plan and usage. Your tier (Free or Pro), its expiry, and the number of coached minutes per calendar month. When you subscribe, Apple sends us a signed record of the transaction (product, dates, environment); we never see your payment details.
Sessions. For each session: its type, the goal, desired outcome and private context you typed, start and end times, aggregate statistics (number of cues, your share of speaking time, cue latency) and your answers to the three end-of-session questions.
Cues. For each cue: its kind, confidence, timing and your rating (helpful, not helpful, distracting, wrong). The evidence text is stored only when the session has a recap.
Recaps. Only when you opt in for that session and your plan keeps recaps: the recap text and the cue evidence supporting it.

Cue ratings and session answers are used to improve Ariade's coaching. They are not shared with anyone else.

Retention and deletion

Stored data stays in your account until you delete it. In the app, a session can be deleted from its Close screen, and Settings › Account › Delete account removes your account and everything under it, including sessions, cues, recaps and usage, and deletes your sign-in. Deletion is immediate on our side; backups held by our providers expire on their schedule.

A kept recap also expires on its own: the service deletes the recap and the cue evidence when the retention period you chose for that session ends (24 hours after the session when you chose not to keep it, otherwise 7, 30 or 365 days), checking once an hour. The session's other details stay until you delete the session or your account.

Service providers

Google Firebase (authentication, database, website hosting), processing account, settings, plan, usage and session data in Google's data centres in the United States.
Anthropic (the language model that produces cues and recaps), receiving the conversation excerpts, goal and state for each request. We use Anthropic's commercial API, under terms that do not allow our data to be used to train their models.
Apple (Mac App Store and in-app subscriptions, on-device speech recognition). Apple's own privacy policy applies to your purchases.
Our own server, which runs the coaching service, hosted in Finland, reached through Cloudflare, which sees connection metadata but not the encrypted content.

Your responsibilities

Ariade listens to conversations with other people. Laws on recording and analysing calls differ by country and state; in some places every participant must be informed or consent. You are responsible for meeting the rules that apply to you. The app asks you to acknowledge this before it listens.

Security

All connections use TLS. Your sign-in token is kept in the macOS Keychain. Access to stored data is limited to your own account by database rules and by the service. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data, we will tell you.

Children

Ariade is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 16.

The website

ariade.me sets no analytics cookies and runs no tracking scripts. The sign-in page uses Firebase Authentication, which stores what it needs in your browser to complete the sign-in.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export or erase your data, or to object to its processing. Deletion is built into the app; for anything else, write to support@ariade.me and we will answer within 30 days.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will tell you at the next launch and this page will show the new effective date.