Last updated 6 September 2026
Short version: the app collects nothing, and your recordings stay on your Mac unless you deliberately publish a share link. The website counts a page view without cookies, and holds your email address only if you type it in.
Silk records, edits, transcribes and exports entirely on your Mac. It has no telemetry: it does not count launches, time your sessions, or report crashes. If something breaks, I only know about it because you tell me.
Two things reach the network, and only those two. First, the app asks
silkrecorder.com/appcast.xml whether a newer version exists. That
request carries no identifier and says nothing about you: my server learns that a
copy of Silk asked what the latest version was, and nothing more. Second, the first
time you transcribe, the app downloads the speech model once from Hugging Face,
which sees a file being fetched, as any download does. After that it never contacts
them again.
Everything else runs offline, and you can verify it by switching the network off: recording, the studio, export, the teleprompter and transcription all keep working.
Your voice is never uploaded to be read. Speech recognition happens on your machine, on the model described above, which is stored next to the app's other assets and reused for every recording afterwards. No audio, no transcript and no fragment of either is sent to me or to anyone else.
The language of a transcript is worked out from the audio itself, on your Mac. Nothing about which language you speak is reported anywhere.
The teleprompter listens on-device by the same rule, keeps nothing once the recording stops, and never appears in the exported video.
This is the one moment Silk sends anything of yours to a server, and it happens only when you press Share. What is stored, per share:
To stop the comment box being used as a spam pipe, the server keeps a short counter per request burst. It is not an address: it is a truncated one-way fingerprint that cannot be turned back into an address, and it is deleted when its time window closes, within the hour.
A public share link is unlisted, not password-protected. The file is served from a public address whose only secret is the random identifier in the URL, so anyone holding the link can watch. A private share is different in substance and not only in name: the file leaves that public address entirely, it is served only through our own server, and the link carries a second secret without which it opens nothing.
You can close comments on a share, delete a single comment, or delete the whole share from your account. Deleting a share removes the video, its transcript and its comments, and gives you the storage back.
A client folder reserves videos for named people. It is the only feature in Silk that stores an email address belonging to someone other than you, so here is exactly what happens.
Removing an invitation deletes the address. Not a flag, not an archive: the row goes, and with it any code still in flight. The person is cut off immediately, on their very next page view, without waiting for anything to expire. Deleting the folder deletes all of its addresses and its whole log at once.
What a folder does not promise. The code arrives by email, so an invited person who forwards that email lets somebody else in. No system built on email addresses can prevent this, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. What we do instead is make it costly and visible: the code works once, so giving it away costs the giver their own access, and the log shows you which address came in. For material where that is not enough, do not publish it.
If you are the invited person and you would like your address removed, ask the person who sent you the link, or write to matt@silkrecorder.com and it will be removed within a few days.
Buying a licence opens an account on the email address you paid with. There is no password, because none is stored: you sign in by asking for a link sent to that inbox, and the link works once and expires within a quarter of an hour. The account holds your licence key, the shares attached to it, and whether you want to be emailed about new comments.
Your licence covers three Macs, and those three are counted. The counting happens at sign-in and nowhere else, because that is the only moment Silk talks to the server at all. What identifies a Mac is a random number Silk draws on that Mac the first time you sign in, together with the computer name so you can tell one from another in the list. It is never a serial number, a MAC address or any hardware identifier: nothing here follows you from one app to the next, and nothing exists before you choose to sign in. Your account page lists the Macs and lets you remove one at any time, which frees the seat for the next.
Page views are measured with DataFast, using their cookieless script. It records that a page was viewed, from which country and referrer, and which buttons were clicked. It does not set a cookie, does not follow you across other sites, and does not build a profile of you.
After downloading, you are offered a field to leave your email. It is optional and the download works without it. If you give it:
If you buy a licence, the same address receives the key, the sign-in links, and the notice when someone comments on one of your shares. Those are transactional: they are sent because you asked for something, not as a campaign, and the comment notices can be switched off from the footer of any one of them.
The full list, so there is no surprise in it:
There is nobody else, and no advertising network anywhere in that list.
Write to matt@silkrecorder.com at any time to see everything held about you, correct it, export it, or have it deleted, shares and comments included. That is your right under the GDPR, and it takes me about a minute. If you would rather do it yourself, deleting a share from your account already removes its video, its transcript and its comments.
Silk is made by Matthias Marchione, an individual developer in France. There is no company, no investor and no analytics department. That is why the list above could be written out by hand: it is short enough to fit on one page, and it is the whole of it.