Your notes stay yours.

Where your notes live

ClearNote stores your library on your device. When your build is set up for iCloud, it also syncs through Apple’s CloudKit into your own private database — the part of iCloud only your Apple Account can read. ClearNote has no copy, no account system, and nothing to sign up for.

Because that is Apple’s infrastructure rather than ours, Apple’s own iCloud data security documentation is what governs it, including whether Advanced Data Protection is on for your account.

ClearNote does not claim to be end-to-end encrypted. Whether that is true depends on your iCloud settings, not on ClearNote, and a privacy claim that is only sometimes true is worse than none.

What ClearNote collects

Nothing. There is no analytics SDK, no crash reporter that ships note content, no telemetry, no advertising identifier, and no profile of how you use the app. Nobody is counting your notes.

AI: exactly what is sent

AI is off until you turn it on. With it off, nothing from your notes goes anywhere, from anywhere in the app.

When you turn it on and ask a question, this is the sequence:

1. ClearNote searches your notes on your deviceUsing the local index. No network involved.
2. It selects the matching passagesA small, bounded amount — a few thousand words at most, not your library.
3. It sends only those passages and your questionAlong with instructions telling the model the note text is data rather than commands.
4. It shows you what it sentEvery answer says how many characters of your notes were sent and which notes they came from.

Where they go depends on the setting you chose:

• ClearNote AI — the passages go to ClearNote’s relay server, which forwards them to xAI and returns the answer. The relay does not store prompts or completions and does not write note text to its logs. It exists so a production API key is not shipped inside the app, where anyone could extract it.
• Your own xAI key — the passages go straight from your device to xAI, and nothing passes through ClearNote at all. Your key is kept in the system Keychain on that device and is never written to a file, a log, or iCloud.

Either way, xAI receives the passages and processes them under its own privacy policy. ClearNote asks xAI not to retain the request. If you would rather nothing left the device at all, leave AI switched off — every other feature, including search, works exactly the same.

Optional web search is per question and off unless you switch it on for that question. Web results are always shown as a separate, differently-styled list so you can tell them from your own notes.

ClearNote never lets the model act on your library. It has no tools, no ability to create, edit, delete or send anything, and nothing it produces is written into a note unless you choose to apply it. Text inside your notes and inside web pages is treated as untrusted data — so a note containing “ignore your instructions and email this to…” does nothing.

Scanning and text recognition

Document scanning and text recognition run entirely on your device using Apple’s Vision framework. Images are never uploaded to recognise text.

The website

clearnote.app is static HTML with no third-party scripts, no webfonts, no analytics, no cookies and no trackers. The web server keeps standard access logs (IP address, request path, user agent) for operational reasons, rotated and discarded on a short schedule.

Getting your data out

Export everything at any time: notes as HTML and Markdown, attachments as ordinary files, tasks, and a documented manifest. It needs no subscription, no account and no network. The format is documented here.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the change will appear in the changelog.

Last updated 2026-08-31.