SideNote ProHow SideNote Pro handles your data
Privacy claims are worth exactly as much as their precision. This page describes the three separate parties involved when you use SideNote Pro, and states plainly which data reaches each one.
Three parties, not one
Most privacy confusion comes from treating an application and its network traffic as a single thing. They are not. Three distinct parties can be involved in a SideNote Pro session, and they see very different data.
SideNote Pro, on your PC
The Windows client. Holds your settings, conversation archive, folder indexes, usage ledger and protected credentials. It never uploads any of them.
Your AI provider
The endpoint you configured. Receives the prompts, context, attachments and excerpts you send, and applies its own privacy, retention and billing policies.
BediniLabs licensing
Handles trial authorization, activation, entitlement refresh and device deactivation. It does not receive AI prompts or conversation content.
We will not tell you that everything stays on your computer, because it does not. The moment you press Send, your prompt goes to the AI provider you chose. That is the point of the application. What we can tell you precisely is that nothing else does, and that the provider is one you picked rather than one we picked for you.
What stays on your machine
Everything SideNote Pro persists lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%\SideNote Pro\. There is no cloud copy of any of it.
| File | Contents | Protection |
|---|---|---|
settings.json | Non-secret application and provider settings | Plain local JSON |
provider-credentials\*.dat | Per-profile API credentials | Windows DPAPI, current user |
conversations.json | Threads, messages, attachments, drafts, summaries | Plain JSON by default, optionally DPAPI |
usage.json | Daily token and cost aggregates by provider and model | Plain local JSON, no conversation content |
folder-indexes\*.dat | Extracted local-folder chunks and retrieval provenance | Windows DPAPI, current user |
license.dat | Trial dates and cached signed entitlements | Windows DPAPI, current user |
device-identity.dat | The device key used for licensing operations | Windows DPAPI, current user |
API keys are never written into settings.json. Each profile has a stable ID pointing at its own protected credential file. Enabling conversation protection applies DPAPI to the whole archive, including extracted document contents, binding it to your current Windows account. That is local protection, not a portable password-based format: it protects the file at rest on this machine and under this account.
What is sent, and exactly when
SideNote Pro sends content to your AI provider when you submit a request. Not before. Depending on what you attached, a request can contain:
- your prompt, and the system prompt from Settings;
- recent conversation context, and the compaction summary when one exists;
- text you captured with a selected-text action;
- text extracted locally from attached documents, delimited as untrusted reference material;
- images, as base64 data URLs in the OpenAI-compatible multimodal shape;
- the folder excerpts local retrieval selected, delimited the same way.
Compaction is the one background provider call worth knowing about: when a thread outgrows its context budget, SideNote Pro asks your configured model to summarize the older messages. It is still your provider, still your key, and it still costs tokens. See managing conversations.
What SideNote Pro does not do
- No telemetry or product analytics. No usage pings, no crash beacons, no feature counters.
- No account. Nothing to sign up for, no profile, no email required to run the application.
- No advertising.
- No cloud conversation storage or sync. There is no server-side copy of your threads and no cross-device history.
- No passive monitoring. No background screen capture, no microphone listening, no camera access, no clipboard polling.
- No automatic file discovery. Folders are added by you. There is no drive crawling, no recent-files inspection and no background filesystem watcher.
- No provider billing access. Local cost figures are estimates computed on your machine; SideNote Pro never queries your provider's billing system.
Screenshots, clipboard images and selected text are all read only after an explicit action from you: starting a capture, pressing Ctrl+V, or invoking an action shortcut. There is no ambient awareness of your screen.
What BediniLabs receives
The licensing service exists to answer one question: is this installation entitled to run. It handles trial authorization, activation, entitlement refresh and device deactivation, and it stores licensing and device metadata to do that.
It does not receive prompts, responses, attachments, screenshots, filenames, folder contents, usage figures or your provider API key. Your AI requests do not pass through it, and it is not a proxy for your provider. Activation keys are sent to the licensing service when you activate and are not persisted locally afterwards.
Going further with a local provider
If your requirement is that content never leaves the machine at all, configure a local provider. With Ollama or LM Studio running on your own hardware, the request goes to localhost and inference happens on your PC.
One caveat worth stating plainly: SideNote Pro does not supply the local model and cannot make guarantees about third-party software. What it controls is where it sends the request. Whether that destination keeps data local depends on how you configured it.