Privacy

In short: Grasmere collects no data about you. There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Your documents stay on your Mac, in the folders you choose, and leave it only when you choose to send them somewhere. This website has no cookies, analytics or trackers either.

Your documents

Grasmere reads and writes the Markdown files in the folders you open. It never uploads them anywhere on its own. Your documents leave your Mac only when you choose one of these:

an AI provider (Claude or ChatGPT) that you’ve set up, when you ask it something (see below);
publishing a website you’ve built, through a Shortcut you choose;
pushing to a git remote, if you’ve turned that on;
sharing or exporting a document yourself.

To work, Grasmere keeps a few things on your Mac only: your settings, the folders you’ve opened, an index of the links between your documents, a record of recent link updates (so they can be undone), copies of unsaved changes (so they survive a crash), and a cache of web page titles and images. None of this leaves your Mac.

Connections to the internet

Grasmere connects to other websites only for things you do:

Web links: when you paste a web address or rest the pointer on a link, Grasmere fetches that page’s title and description to show you.
Images from the web: when a document contains an image from a website, Grasmere downloads it to show it. You can turn this off in Settings ▸ General.
Saving web pages: when you choose File ▸ Save Web Page, share a page to Grasmere or make a document from a copied web address, Grasmere fetches that one page (with no cookies or sign-in) and saves its article into your folder; saving a file from the web downloads it. Pictures in a saved page stay on the web.
Writing replay (experimental, off unless you turn it on in Settings): while a document you’ve chosen to record is written, Grasmere sends a hash of the record (a fixed-length fingerprint, never any text) to a public timestamp service, Sectigo’s unless you choose another, which signs it with the time. The service sees your IP address and when you write. The record itself stays on your Mac, in Grasmere’s own storage, and is shared only if you export it as a web page.

These requests go directly from your Mac to the website concerned, as they would from a web browser, so that website can see your IP address. Grasmere has no server of its own and sends nothing through one.

Ask Your Documents and summaries

By default, Ask Your Documents, Generate Summary and Brainstorm use Apple’s on-device model, so your documents never leave your Mac.

If you choose instead to use Claude (Anthropic) or ChatGPT (OpenAI) and enter your own API key, then:

when you ask a question, your question and excerpts from the documents Grasmere picks as relevant are sent to that company to answer it;
when you ask for a summary, the text of the documents being summarised is sent to that company to write it;
when you brainstorm, the subject you typed is sent to that company to write them;
when you ask a follow-up question, the document’s title, the heading you’re under and the passage beneath it are sent to that company to write it.

Nothing is sent until you ask, and only for that request. That use is covered by your agreement with that company and its privacy policy. Your API key is stored in your Mac’s keychain. The questions you ask are kept only while the window is open; an answer is saved to your folder only if you choose Save as Insight.

Copy as Context copies text to your clipboard for you to paste wherever you like. Grasmere itself sends nothing.

The clipboard

Grasmere reads the clipboard only when you paste, or choose File ▸ New Document from Clipboard, New Insight from Clipboard or Paste Link with Title. So that those commands can be dimmed when there’s nothing to use, it asks macOS what kind of thing is on the clipboard (text, or a web link) without reading it. It doesn’t watch the clipboard while you’re in another app.

Grasmere’s Quick Look extension shows Markdown files when you press Space in Finder. It reads only the file being previewed and pictures beside it, on your Mac; it has no network access.

When you share something to Grasmere from the Share menu, only what you shared (and any comment you add) is handed to it. It waits in Grasmere’s private storage on your Mac until it’s saved into the project you chose, and is then removed. So that the Share menu can list your projects, Grasmere keeps their names (not their contents or locations) in that same storage. A shared web page is fetched from its website and saved as Save Web Page saves it.

Shortcuts and git

If you choose a Shortcut to run when a document is saved or created, or to publish your website, Grasmere runs it with that document or the project folder; what the Shortcut does is up to you. If you turn on automatic git commits and pushing, your changes are pushed to the remote you’ve configured, using your own git setup.

Feedback

Help ▸ Report an Issue… and Help ▸ Send Feedback… open an email in your mail app with the app and macOS versions filled in. Nothing is sent unless you send that email yourself. We use what you send only to answer you and fix the problem.

Children

Grasmere collects no information from anyone, including children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new date.

Contact

Questions about privacy: email [email protected].