Privacy

Your recordings and transcripts stay on your iPhone. Only the single sentence being fact-checked ever leaves it.

Last updated October 25, 2026. This policy covers the Sidebar: Verified Notes app for iPhone.

On your iPhone

• Audio and transcripts. Sidebar turns speech into text with Apple’s on-device speech recognition. Your audio and full transcripts are saved only in the app on your iPhone. We never receive them.
• Summaries. Notes and summaries are written on your iPhone by Apple Intelligence where it’s available.
• No account. There is no sign-up, login, or profile.
• Deleting. Delete a meeting in the app and its audio, transcript and checks are removed from your iPhone. Deleting the app removes everything.

Fact checks

When Live fact-check is on, Sidebar picks out statements that a public source could confirm, like “Amazon was founded in 1994”, on your iPhone. For each one it sends only that sentence to Sidebar’s fact-check service over an encrypted connection. Never the audio, never the rest of the transcript, and no name, account or device identifier.

The service searches public sources for the sentence (including the Serper web search API, Wikipedia and Wikidata) and has a private model compare the sentence with what it finds. The sentence is processed in memory to answer that one request. It is not stored and not linked to you. Our servers keep only timing and error counts, with no sentence text. Search providers receive the search terms and handle them under their own policies.

You can turn this off any time in Settings → Live fact-check. Recording, transcripts and summaries keep working without it.

What we don’t do

• No advertising, no tracking across apps or websites, and no selling or sharing of your data.
• No analytics or third-party SDKs in the app.
• We don’t build profiles or link fact-check sentences to you.

This website

sidebar.fyi sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from third parties.

Connection data

Like any internet service, our hosting providers see the network address of a request in order to deliver it, and we use it briefly to prevent abuse (rate limiting). It isn’t stored with the sentence.

Children

Sidebar isn’t directed at children and doesn’t knowingly collect information from them.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date above. Questions or requests: [email protected].