VolEq privacy

Audio stays local

VolEq processes captured audio locally and in memory. Captured audio is not saved, uploaded, or used for telemetry.

When speech-aware leveling is enabled, bundled RNNoise states analyze and mildly denoise speech locally. Turning speech awareness off skips RNNoise and speech analysis entirely. Apple’s offline SoundAnalysis framework supplies the slower speech-versus-music decision. There are no model downloads or online speech-processing services.

Permission and audio safety

macOS controls System Audio Recording permission. VolEq explains its local-only audio use before the real processing pipeline causes macOS to present its permission prompt. VolEq does not infer permission from silence or run a separate permission probe.

An ordinary Core Audio startup failure leaves VolEq non-running and begins complete graph teardown. If Core Audio refuses to stop or destroy a resource, VolEq retains ownership, requires Quit, and does not claim that the original audio path was restored. The always-visible No sound? help repeats the privacy guarantee and opens the relevant System Settings page.

Application information

The application selector displays process information that macOS exposes for processes currently producing audio. VolEq does not intentionally persist that process list.

Accounts and analytics

VolEq creates no user accounts and includes no analytics. It retains no user dataset that a user could ask Patrik to delete.

Optional update checks

When a user chooses Check for Updates, or explicitly enables automatic checks, VolEq makes an unauthenticated request to api.github.com for the latest published VolEq Community release. Automatic checks run at most once in a rolling 24-hour period and only while VolEq is running. Opening View Release contactsgithub.com.

GitHub receives ordinary network metadata such as an IP address during update checks or when a release page is opened. VolEq sends no captured audio, account identifier, user identifier, or usage telemetry to GitHub. It stores no GitHub response body, cookie, or credential. The setting can be changed in VolEq Settings.

Policy changes

The canonical policy must be updated before VolEq adds telemetry, additional networking, persistent recordings, crash reporting, or other data collection.