Privacy

How text is translated

The app translates with Apple’s own frameworks: Apple Translation for Quick, the Apple Intelligence model for Natural, Vision for text in pictures and on the screen, and Apple’s speech frameworks for sound. Where each of them runs is up to Apple.

The first time you need a language or a speech model, macOS may download it from Apple. Apple handles those downloads under its own privacy policy.

Every result says which engine translated it — and where, whenever that is known.

What is kept on your Mac

• History: what you translated, its translation, the languages, the mode and the name of the app you were in. It stays in the app’s folder on your Mac, up to 1,000 entries; favorites stay until you remove them. Turn history off in Settings, and nothing new is saved; Clear History removes what was saved.
• Translations of the screen, of sound and from Shortcuts are not kept in history.
• Your glossary and settings, in the same folder.
• Nothing from the screen or from sound is saved as a file. A transcript is saved only when you save it yourself.

When the app reads what you didn’t type

• The selection, when you call the app: through Device Control and Data Access if you allowed it, otherwise from the clipboard after you press ⌘C twice.
• The clipboard, only when you call the app or run Translate Clipboard. When the app copies a selection or pastes a replacement for you, it puts your clipboard back afterwards.
• The screen: only the part or the window you chose, read in memory.
• Sound: only from the app you chose, or from the whole Mac, read in memory. The microphone is never used.

Permissions

The app asks for each one when you first use what needs it, and you can turn it off in System Settings › Privacy & Security.

• Screen & System Audio Recording: to translate a part of the screen and what apps say. For a whole window the app uses the system’s window picker instead.
• Device Control and Data Access: to read the text you select and to replace it. Without it, the app works from the clipboard.
• Paste from Other Apps: macOS may ask once whether the app can read what you copied in other apps.

Logs

The app writes technical messages to your Mac’s system log and marks your text in them as private, so macOS hides it. Nothing is sent to us.

What we don’t do

No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no crash reports sent to us. We don’t sell or share data: we don’t have it.

If this changes

If a feature ever sends your text off your Mac — a cloud engine, say — it will stay off until you turn it on, the app will say where your text goes before it goes, and this page will say so first.

This website

The site is served by Cloudflare. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from other sites. To deliver the pages, Cloudflare processes technical request data such as IP addresses, under its own privacy policy.