Alma: Privacy Policy
Last updated: 30 September 2026
Alma is a new interface to your computer. Today it supports real time voice dictation with generative edits, voice prompting, and the surrounding features that make those work well.
This policy explains what we collect, what reaches us under each of your data settings, how long we keep it, who processes it, and the rights you have. It is also Alma's data policy.
The controller is Memfold AI Inc., doing business as Alma, 2261 Market Street STE 85610, San Francisco, CA 94114, United States. Contact: support@memfold.ai.
It covers our applications, our website and the services behind them. It does not cover other companies' sites we link to.
1. The short version
- You choose what we get. Two settings: full data, on by default, and usage data. One switch, Help improve Alma, moves between them at any time. See section 3.
- We never sell your personal information, and we never use your voice or your text for advertising.
- Improving Alma is your choice, not a condition of using it.
- Our providers do not train on your content, and are contractually barred from keeping it beyond answering your request.
- Alma has no voiceprint. We do not use your voice to identify you.
- Alma is free right now, so we hold no payment or billing data.
2. Why processing happens in the cloud
Alma uses cloud processing to be fast and accurate. Audio and text needed to answer a request may be processed by us and by our service providers while the request is being served.
Cloud processing does not mean we keep your content. What is stored, and where, depends on the setting you choose in section 3. Our service providers are contractually barred from retaining your content beyond answering the request, and from using it to train their models.
3. Your data settings
Your setting decides what we store:
| Setting | What we store |
|---|---|
| Full data (Help improve Alma on, the default) | Your voice, your transcripts, the text Alma wrote and the text it read to write it, with records of how Alma performed, tied to your account. It may be used to evaluate and improve Alma. Everything in usage data is included |
| Usage data (Help improve Alma off) | Numbers only: counts, timings, outcomes, error types and crash reports. Your voice and your text are not sent |
At both settings, your history and what Alma learns for you stay on your Mac, and your account keeps what section 4 lists under account data.
Alma's setup shows this choice before you start, and Settings › Privacy keeps the switch. A change applies immediately: turning Help improve Alma off stops sending your voice and text, including anything still waiting to be sent. It cannot reverse work already done with material shared earlier.
Serving a request and storing it are different things. Whatever your setting, your request travels to the services that answer it. What those services may do with it is covered in section 7.
4. What we collect
Account data. Your email address, your name and profile image where your sign in provider supplies them, each sign in with the IP address, city and country it came from, the Macs you sign in on, the settings you sync between them, the numbers on your Home page (for each dictation you keep, its day, word count and speaking time), and your free allowance and its usage. We hold this at both settings, because an account requires it.
Voice and interaction data. What you give Alma by voice and what it produces: your audio, transcripts, the text Alma writes and edits, instructions you speak and the text they act on, and the app you were working in. What we store from this is set by your data setting in section 3.
Screen context. Optional, and on only if you allow it. When it is on, Alma reads text from the window you are working in so that dictation and formatting come out better, for example by recognising names and specialised terms. It is used to answer your request, and at the full data setting the text it read is stored with the request (section 3). You can turn it off in Settings at any time.
What Alma learns for you. Your history, learned spellings, per app preferences, formatting habits, style notes and snippets. Settings lists them so you can delete any of them. They stay on your Mac. Parts of them travel with each request as context, and at the full data setting the requests we store include them.
Diagnostics. At both settings, records of how a request performed: timings, counts, outcomes, error types, crashes and app version, tied to a random installation identifier. At the full data setting these records also carry your voice and text, and your account identifier.
Usage counts. At both settings, a small fixed set of anonymous events made of counts, durations and closed vocabularies, under a random identifier that our analytics provider draws and that nothing else we hold is linked to. There is no free text field in them, so no content can travel this way.
Website and support data. What you send us, and standard web data such as IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed and cookie identifiers. Where you allow advertising cookies, this includes an identifier Meta sets in your browser so it can tell us how our own ads performed. See section 14.
Payment data. None. Alma is free and we have engaged no payment processor. If that changes we will update this policy first.
5. What we never collect
- Keystroke content. Where Alma counts typing, it records that a key went down, never which key.
- Password fields. Alma stops entirely while a secure input field is focused.
- Voiceprints or biometric identifiers.
6. Why we process data, and on what legal basis
| Purpose | Legal basis (GDPR and UK GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Providing the Service: recognising your speech, editing your text, carrying out what you asked | Performance of a contract |
| Accounts, sign in and devices | Performance of a contract |
| Metering a free allowance and enforcing quotas | Legitimate interests in managing our costs |
| Security, fraud prevention and enforcing our Terms | Legitimate interests |
| Diagnosing failures | Legitimate interests in keeping Alma working. At the full data setting this uses your voice and text; turning Help improve Alma off is your objection, and takes effect at once |
| Anonymous usage counts | Legitimate interests in learning how Alma is used, so we can improve it |
| Evaluating and improving Alma with your voice and text | Legitimate interests in improving Alma. Turning Help improve Alma off is your objection, and takes effect at once |
| Support and service messages | Contract and legitimate interests |
| Marketing email | Consent, withdrawable at any time |
| Advertising our own service, and measuring whether those ads worked | Consent |
| Legal compliance and lawful requests | Legal obligation |
Where we rely on consent you may withdraw it at any time, without affecting processing that already happened. Where we rely on legitimate interests you may object, as section 12 describes. We make no decision about you by automated means that produces legal or similarly significant effects.
7. Improvement, training, and our providers
Our providers do not train on your content. The third party services behind Alma operate under agreements that prohibit using your content to train or improve their models, and that require zero or minimal retention, no more than is needed to answer your request.
We improve Alma with your content only at the full data setting. There we may use your voice, transcripts and the records of how Alma performed to measure quality, debug failures and improve Alma. At the usage setting we use numbers only.
Google data. Where you sign in with Google, data obtained through Google APIs is used only to sign you in and provide features you asked for. It is not sold, not used for advertising, and not used to develop or improve generalised AI models. Our use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements: https://developers.google.com/terms/api-services-user-data-policy
8. How long we keep things
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Your voice and text, stored at the full data setting | Up to 12 months, then deleted |
| Diagnostics and usage counts | Up to 12 months, then deleted |
| Account, device, synced settings, Home numbers and allowance records | For the life of the account, then only as long as needed for legal, security or dispute purposes |
| Support messages | Up to 3 years from the last message |
| Anything on your Mac | Until you delete it or uninstall |
| Aggregated or anonymised statistics | Indefinitely, as they can no longer identify you |
At the usage data setting there is no stored voice or text to keep.
9. Security
We use technical and organisational safeguards designed to protect information against loss, misuse and unauthorised access, including:
- encryption in transit;
- encryption at rest for anything we retain;
- role based access controls and restricted production access;
- owner only permissions and the highest file protection class the platform offers, for Alma's files on your Mac; and
- security monitoring and operational controls.
Human access. Our personnel do not access your content except where you ask us to for support, where it is necessary to investigate a security or abuse incident, or where the law requires it. Access is limited to authorised staff under confidentiality obligations.
No system is perfectly secure and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your personal data we will notify you and the authorities as the law requires.
10. Who else processes your data
We use service providers that act on our instructions under contract, may not use your data for their own purposes, and are bound by confidentiality. By category: identity and authentication; cloud hosting and storage; speech and language processing; analytics; software distribution; email and support tooling; and advertising and conversion measurement for our website.
Advertising is the one category where a recipient also uses data for its own purposes, so we name it: Meta Platforms, Inc. receives the website events described in section 14, where you allow advertising cookies.
We also disclose personal data to comply with law or lawful requests, to enforce our Terms, to prevent fraud, security or technical problems, to protect rights and safety, to our professional advisers, and to a counterparty in a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets, subject to this policy continuing to apply.
11. International transfers
We are in the United States, and our providers process data there and in other countries where they operate. For transfers from the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, with appropriate safeguards. Write to support@memfold.ai for details.
12. Your controls and rights
In the app. Turn Help improve Alma on or off; review and delete your history and everything Alma has learned for you; turn screen context off; and revoke macOS permissions in System Settings.
Your legal rights. Depending on where you live you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to receive a portable copy, to object to or restrict processing, to withdraw consent, and not to be treated differently for exercising any of these.
EEA and UK. These rights arise under the GDPR and UK GDPR, and you may complain to your local supervisory authority.
California. We collect the categories described in section 4: identifiers, commercial information, internet and device activity, audio and electronic information, and inferences used only to improve Alma. Sources, purposes, recipients and retention are set out above. We do not sell personal information. Our marketing website does share online identifiers and browsing activity with Meta so we can measure our own advertising, which California treats as sharing for cross context behavioural advertising. Nothing from the app is shared this way, and neither is your voice, your text or your account data. To opt out, decline advertising cookies where we ask, or send Global Privacy Control, which we honour automatically in every region. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes that would give you a right to limit. You have the rights to know, delete, correct, opt out and appeal, and you may use an authorised agent.
Other jurisdictions. Comparable rights under other state and national laws apply where they cover you, and we honour them on the same terms.
How to exercise them. Email support@memfold.ai from the address on your account. We may verify your identity, and we respond within the time the law allows, usually 30 days. Some data cannot be deleted while your account exists, and some must be kept for legal reasons. If we refuse, we will say why and how to appeal.
13. Children
Alma is for adults. You must be at least 18 to use it, and older where the age of majority where you live is higher. We set one worldwide minimum, above every national digital consent age, including the 13 to 16 range EU member states set under Article 8 of the GDPR, the United Kingdom's 13, and the 13 at which the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act applies, so Alma never relies on parental consent.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and no data we believe comes from a minor is used to improve Alma. If we learn an account holder is under 18 we close the account and delete their data. Parents, guardians and schools can write to support@memfold.ai, and may exercise a minor's rights on their behalf.
14. Cookies and tracking
Our website uses strictly necessary cookies, analytics cookies where you allow them, and advertising cookies where you allow them.
The advertising cookie is the Meta pixel. It tells Meta that a browser visited alma.inc, which pages it opened, and whether it joined the waitlist, so we can tell which of our ads brought people here. It never carries your email address, your voice, your text or anything from the app.
Where the law requires us to ask before setting analytics or advertising cookies we ask first, and nothing loads until you choose. Where it does not, we set them unless you opt out, and you may withdraw consent at any time from the cookie settings on this site.
Whatever region you are in, and whether or not you were shown a banner, we honour Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track as an opt out. Under either signal the analytics and advertising tags are never loaded at all. The app itself uses no advertising trackers.
15. Marketing email
We send marketing email only to people who have asked for it, every message has an unsubscribe link, and we honour opt outs. We do not buy, rent or scrape email lists, and we do not sell or share your address for anyone else's marketing.
16. Third party links
We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of sites and services we link to. Read their policies before using them.
17. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as Alma and the law change. The date at the top shows the current version. If a change materially reduces your rights or expands how we use your content, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect, and ask for consent where the law requires it. Changes are not retroactive.
On 30 September 2026 the data settings went from three to two. Zero data retention ended, full data is on by default, usage counts and diagnostics without your voice or text are sent at both settings, and improving Alma with your voice and text rests on legitimate interests, with Help improve Alma as your way to object.
18. Contact
Memfold AI Inc. 2261 Market Street STE 85610 San Francisco, CA 94114 United States support@memfold.ai
For privacy questions, rights requests, or to ask what we hold about you, email that address.