Your script never leaves your Mac.

Does Tellie send my script anywhere?

No. Tellie reads your script from the document you opened, displays it on your screen, and that is the end of its journey. Your script never touches the internet.

What about my microphone? Is my voice recorded or uploaded?

No. When you click the microphone button, macOS asks for permission the first time. Once you grant it, audio from your mic is passed to Apple's built-in Speech framework, which runs on your Mac. Tellie uses the transcribed words to advance the script and then discards them. Nothing is recorded, saved, or sent anywhere.

Where does the speech recognition actually run?

On your Mac, locally, using Apple's Speech framework. macOS ships with on-device language models for more than 40 languages and regional variants. Tellie asks the system to transcribe with the on-device flag set, so the audio never leaves the device.

You can verify this yourself: open Tellie, put your Mac in airplane mode, and the voice-follow feature still works perfectly.

Does Tellie collect any usage data, telemetry, or crash reports?

No. The app contains no analytics SDKs, no telemetry library, no crash reporter, and no event tracking. We do not know how often you open the app, what scripts you load, or whether anything has ever crashed for you. (If something does crash, please email us and we'll fix it.)

Then why does Tellie need an internet connection at all?

Once a day, Tellie quietly checks a small XML file at tellieapp.com/appcast.xml to see whether a new version is available. This is how the auto-update feature works (it uses the open-source Sparkle framework, the standard for Mac app updates).

The check sends only the request itself. No identifier, no Mac serial number, no account, no script content. It looks identical to your web browser fetching any other public file.

There are several ways to get text into Tellie. Does any of them go anywhere?

No. Here is the whole list, because "your script stays private" is worth more when you can see what it covers:

Opening a file (.txt, .md, .rtf, .docx, .pdf, .pages) reads it off your disk the way any Mac app does. Pasting with Command-V takes it from your clipboard. Send to Tellie, whether you use the Control-Option-Command-T shortcut or a tellie://send link, hands the text from one app on your Mac to another through macOS itself, the same way opening a PDF in Preview does. Presenter Magic asks Keynote for the current slide's notes, on your Mac, through the same Apple Events any automation uses. The Pulse Log writes to a file in your own Library folder.

Every one of those is your Mac talking to itself. None of them opens a network connection, and none of them can, because the app has no code that would send it: there is exactly one outbound request in the entire application, it lives in the license check described below, and it carries a license key and nothing else.

You do not have to take our word for it. Put your Mac in airplane mode and use Tellie normally. Open a script, paste one in, send one over, talk to it and watch the words highlight. Everything works, because none of it ever needed the internet.

What about sharing a script by link?

A shared script link is built so that the script never reaches us in the first place. The text rides in the part of the URL after the #, and browsers never put that part on the wire. It goes from your browser to your recipient's browser and is unpacked there.

The practical consequence: a script you share is not ours to store, to lose in a breach, or to be asked for by anyone. There is no database of shared scripts, because there is nowhere for one to live.

If I buy Tellie Pro, what does the license check send?

Your license key and a random ID, to tellieapp.com/api/license-verify. That is the whole request. It happens when you activate, roughly once a month after that, and when Tellie comes back after a long time offline. Tellie Free never makes this call at all.

The random ID is how your three activations are counted, so you can move Tellie between your own Macs and we can tell one from another. It is a fresh UUID generated on your Mac the first time it is needed and stored in Tellie's own preferences. It is not your Mac's serial number, hardware UUID, or anything Apple issued: we deliberately avoided the hardware identifier, because counting to three does not require knowing which machine you are on. Erase Tellie's preferences and you get a new one.

Nothing about your use of the app goes with it. Not what you opened, not how long you spoke, not whether you used voice follow. The verification result comes back and is cached so Tellie keeps working offline. We are naming this call because "no telemetry" should mean something you can check with a network monitor, not a slogan.

Does Tellie keep any history of the scripts I've opened?

No. There is no script library, no recents list synced anywhere, no cloud storage. macOS itself may remember recently opened documents (the same way it does for any app), but that information lives entirely on your Mac in your user account.

Is Tellie invisible to screen recorders by accident or on purpose?

On purpose. Tellie marks its window as excluded from screen capture using a documented macOS API. So when you record your screen, screenshot, or share your screen in Zoom or Google Meet, your script does not appear in the recording. This is both a presentation feature (your script stays private during a livestream) and a privacy feature (your script does not end up in someone else's cloud-stored Zoom recording).

Does the Tellie website use cookies or tracking?

The site uses Google Analytics 4 and Vercel Analytics to count visits and downloads. Both are configured with the standard, anonymous setup most websites use. No personal information is collected. Google Analytics may set its standard cookies; you can opt out via your browser settings or any tracking-blocker extension.

What information do you collect when I download Tellie?

When you click the download button, the site logs the version downloaded, the timestamp, and the channel the link came from (for example, "LinkedIn" or "newsletter"). It does not log your name, your email, your IP address, or any identifier that could trace back to you. The counts are used purely to understand which release channels work and which versions are in the wild.

How do I delete my data?

Tellie does not have any of your data to delete. There is no account, no profile, no synced library. If you want to remove the app from your Mac, drag Tellie.app to the Trash. macOS Keychain may retain the microphone permission entry, which you can clear in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.

What about GDPR or CCPA rights?

GDPR and CCPA give people rights over data that companies hold about them. Since we don't collect personally identifying data, there's nothing to access, correct, port, or delete on our end. If you believe we hold information about you, email steve@skytech.io and we'll respond within 30 days.

Is Tellie safe for children to use?

Tellie is not designed for or marketed to children under 13. It is also not designed to exclude them. Since the app collects no personal information, COPPA concerns don't really apply in the usual sense. That said, the app is named after my granddaughter Ellie, and she thinks the way her name appears in the menu bar is cool.

Will this privacy policy change?

If anything material changes (for example, if Tellie adds an optional cloud feature), this page will be updated and the change will be announced on the homepage and in the newsletter at stevechazin.com. We will never quietly start collecting data without telling you.

Who is "we"?

Tellie is built by Steve Chazin, a one-person operation. There is no parent company harvesting your data on the side. The skytech.io domain is also Steve. steve@skytech.io goes directly to a human.