Private by design
Notes that never leave your Mac.
Some notes are covered by confidentiality duties, a professional college, or a workplace ban on cloud tools. Brainstorm has a setup built for exactly that, and the private path is enforced by the app, not by your discipline.
- Therapists and psychologists
- Physicians and clinicians
- Lawyers and mediators
- Social workers and counselors
- Journalists and researchers
- HR and anyone under NDA
Local-only mode
Tell Brainstorm at first launch that notebooks live on this Mac only. The promise is enforced inside the app: iCloud sync cannot be switched on while the mode is on, and every new notebook stays local automatically. No tap, no migration, no future feature can quietly move your library into the cloud.
Notebooks locked from birth
Create a notebook with a password and it is encrypted before the first page exists: AES-256-GCM on disk, a key stretched from your password with 600,000 rounds of PBKDF2, Touch ID day to day, and automatic relock when the Mac sleeps. There is never a plaintext window, and there is no recovery backdoor.
Your drive, your rules
Keep the library in any folder, including a hardware-encrypted drive or an encrypted APFS volume your practice designates. Brainstorm never copies a note off it, so the backup and retention policies that drive already lives under stay in force unchanged.
Plain files, easy audits
Every page is a plain file in a folder you control. A records request or an audit is a matter of opening a folder, not exporting from someone else’s database. And because nothing ever reaches our servers, there is no vendor to subpoena, breach, or trust.
Transcription for people who cannot use cloud AI
Many workplaces, regulators, and client agreements now prohibit putting confidential material into cloud AI tools, for good reason: those tools are servers, and sending a session to a server is a disclosure.
Brainstorm's transcription is different in kind, not just in policy. It runs Whisper entirely on your Mac: the speech model is downloaded once and executes on your own hardware. The audio never leaves the machine, the transcript lands as a plain file beside your notes, and the whole thing works with the network cable unplugged. There is no service to send anything to and no account involved.
So with consent, record the session. Writing your notes afterwards becomes reading, not remembering: the transcript sits next to the page while you write. Lock the notebook when you are done and the audio and transcript are encrypted along with the pages.
The honest version
Whisper is machine learning, so in the technical sense it is AI. But what the bans actually prohibit is sending data to an AI service. Here there is no service: nothing is transmitted, to us or to anyone. If your rule is “client data must never reach a third party”, local transcription satisfies it by construction, not by promise.
The honest fine print
- We never claim compliance. HIPAA, PHIPA, GDPR and their cousins describe your whole practice, and no app can make a practice compliant by itself. What Brainstorm does is remove the largest category of risk and paperwork: your notes never reach a vendor, including us.
- Backups are yours, by design. Brainstorm never copies your notes anywhere, which also means it never backs them up. Backup and retention are governed entirely by your own or your organization's policies, and losing the only copy is losing the notes.
- There is no password recovery. A locked notebook cannot be opened by us or by Apple without the password. Store it the way your practice stores keys.
- The license check sends a key, not content. Activating Brainstorm transmits only your license key, and the app verifies its signature offline afterwards. Note content is never part of any request.
The full details live in the privacy policy and the in-app user guide's Confidential work chapter.