SideNotes is built around a single rule: your notes never leave your device unless you move them yourself. There is no cloud, no account, no telemetry, and no ad network. This page spells out exactly what that means in practice.
The SideNotes desktop app collects nothing about you, transmits nothing about you, and stores nothing about you on any server we run. We do not run any servers.
This marketing website uses Vercel's privacy-respecting Analytics for anonymous visit counts. That is the entire outbound-data footprint of the project.
There is no first-party or third-party tracking inside the desktop app. No crash reporters, no session replays, no SDKs.
You install SideNotes, pick a folder, and start writing. There is no sign-up, no login, no server to authenticate against.
Fonts and assets are bundled into the binary. The Electron auto-updater is disabled. The Content Security Policy permits zero remote origins.
SideNotes reads and writes only inside the folder you explicitly pick as your vault. Permissions are scoped to that folder.
Every note is a plain .md file in the vault folder you chose. Canvases save as .canvas JSON. Attachments stay where you put them.
Alongside your vault, SideNotes maintains a tiny JSON index for fast search and graph links. It is safe to delete at any time.
Theme, recent vaults, pinned items, and similar choices live in the operating system's standard application-support directory for SideNotes.
This marketing site (sidenotes.me) records anonymous, aggregate visit counts and country-level geography for pages you load. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no personal identifiers. Vercel Analytics is GDPR / CCPA compliant by design and the data is not shared.
There is no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no Hotjar, no Mixpanel, no Segment. Just the static pages you are looking at.
Because the desktop app collects nothing, there is no data of yours to access, export, or delete on our side. Your vault is already in your possession; deleting the folder deletes the data.
For the anonymous analytics on this website, we do not collect identifiable information in the first place, so there is no individual record to look up. If you would prefer not to count at all, any standard tracker-blocker (uBlock Origin, etc.) blocks Vercel Analytics, and the site continues to work normally.
SideNotes does not knowingly collect any information from anyone, including children under 13. The app is rated 4+ / Everyone in the Mac App Store and Microsoft Store.
If this policy ever changes, the new version will replace this page with an updated “updated” date at the top. There is no email list — release notes on the changelog page are the canonical heads-up.
Privacy questions, security reports, or anything else → hello@sidenotes.me.
SideNotes · MIT licensed · v0.2.0