Things Cairn refuses to do.
Cairn will not:
- Send your screenshots to a server. The macOS app contains no networking code. Captures stay on your Mac.
- Transcribe your voice in someone else's data center. Whisper runs on your Mac. The audio file never leaves it.
- Run image understanding on someone else's GPU. The vision model (Qwen2-VL) runs on your Mac. The image never leaves it.
- Sit there listening, "just in case." The microphone is activated only by the capture hotkey, for the duration of a single voice note. macOS shows an orange dot in the menu bar whenever it is on.
- Train a model on you. Your captures are not used to fine-tune anything we ship — and there is no "share anonymized data to help improve Cairn" toggle, because there is no channel through which that data could be shared.
How to verify each promise yourself
- Network activity: with Cairn running, open Little Snitch / LuLu /
nettop -p $(pgrep Cairn). After the one-time model download on first launch (see the Privacy Policy), capture, transcribe, and search all happen with zero outbound traffic from the app process. - Microphone activity: macOS shows an orange dot in the menu-bar status area whenever any process is recording. Cairn turns it on only during the brief moments you hold the capture hotkey.
- Screen recording activity: macOS shows a purple screen-recording indicator. Same observation — only on during your capture.