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Comment by dsiroker | Hacker News Reader

Totally understand how it might feel that way initially. Rewind is built privacy first. Unlike other cloud-based products, all of the recording data is stored locally on your Mac. It's not accessible to others (or to us as employees).

Not only that, but we have the following features focused on privacy:

1. Full control: users can pause and delete recordings at any time

2. Exclude apps: users can exclude specific apps they don’t want recorded (e.g. Signal or 1Password)

3. Incognito: by default, we don't record Chrome Incognito or Safari private browsing windows

We have a long roadmap of things we have planned to further our commitment to privacy. Anything in particular you'd love to see us implement that might make you feel more comfortable?

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These are valuable and important, and perhaps the best that can be done, but this also reminds me of when Google Glass was first announced. People did not like the idea that the person you're talking to could be surreptitiously recording or photographing you. Similarly, people hate that Facebook may have a face recognition fingerprint for your face even if you don't use Facebook.

Recording meetings for later searching still feels weird in a similar sense. Even if I trust the way my data is handled when I use it, it's a violation of privacy norms in a way that feel "creepy" to be making a persistent record of things other people said to me in what is traditionally an ephemeral context.

(That said, this sounds like something I've occasionally wanted for a long time.)

Meetings might be touchy but just recording the web browser and having the ability to search the full text would be wonderful.

I'd like two AI toys on top of it - embedding similarity search and question answering. The AI part can be executed easily with HuggingFace. There is a great QA model (FLAN) trained with multiple tasks, it can sort of do what GPT-3 does but locally, the private & cheap option.

> all of the recording data is stored locally on your Mac

Actors can easily access data on a local machine, with the necessary tools and desire. Still seems like something that could be accessed and abused.

That could be said of anything one does with a computer. The point is that if it's stored locally YOU have responsiblity over it, rather than trusting to some other party to hopefully protect it (and not sell it or expose it or what-have-you).

True, but this is a specific record. Someone could access your machine once and have a record of everything you've done.

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