This is the principle the whole privacy story hangs off: recordings are local-first.

On your filesystem

Each recording is a folder in ~/Documents/ScreenSolo Sessions/ on a Mac, or %USERPROFILE%\Documents\ScreenSolo Sessions\ on Windows. Inside each session folder:

  • recording.mp4 — the video
  • session.json — duration, start time, device model
  • keyframes/ — the snapshot stills (the folder keeps its original on-disk name)
  • recap.json and summary.json — your snapshot write-ups and Session Summary
  • project.json and webcam.mov (webcam_2.mov, …) — on recordings with layers, your edits and one camera file per stretch the camera was on
  • .editor-cache/ — timeline thumbnails and sound waveforms the editor makes so it opens quickly. They're built from your own recording and never leave your device

You can back these up, sync them to your own iCloud Drive / Dropbox / wherever, or delete them. They're yours.

When something leaves your device

There's exactly one point where session data leaves your filesystem:

  • AI features — when you call Smart Extract, a snapshot write-up, a Session Summary, a Direct the video edit command, or ✦ Polish this recording, the specific frame(s), text, or instruction you asked about is sent to Claude (via our backend, which proxies for token billing). Claude's response comes back. Anthropic doesn't store or train on the data, and the desktop caches the response locally.

Polish looks at the whole recording, so it sends more than the others: up to 20 of the recording's snapshots with their titles, plus the recording's name and length. On a Mac, a recording with no snapshots sends up to 8 frames sampled evenly from the video instead.

Exporting a file (video, GIF, PDF, slide deck or text) writes it to your own device — nothing is uploaded. Pulling the text out of your snapshots happens on your device too.

What we never see

  • The other sessions in your folder
  • Your filesystem outside the session folders
  • Your iMessage / email / browsing history / anything outside ScreenSolo

Cloud sync (planned, not shipped)

We're considering an opt-in "sync recordings across devices" feature for a future release. If we ship it, you'd opt in explicitly per session, and the privacy policy would be updated to spell out the new data flow. As of 2026, it's not shipped — every recording stays on the device that captured it.