Where your data lives

Esment is local-first. In the Mac app, your memories, notes and knowledge graph are stored on your own computer and never reach Esment’s servers. They live in a hidden folder called .esment in your home folder, which also holds the app’s settings and your access keys.

• Search runs on your Mac. The search models are part of the app, so the text you write is not sent to anyone to find the right memory, and it works offline.
• Only apps that hold your key can read it. The memory engine listens on your Mac only. Every request needs the Admin token (in Settings → Connection), so a web page open in your browser cannot read or change your memory.
• Sync is off until you turn it on. If you sign in under Settings → Account, new memories are sent to the workspace you choose. See the next section.
• Optional things that leave your Mac. If you choose your own OpenAI key for embeddings in Settings → Advanced, the text of your memories goes to OpenAI to be indexed. You can switch back to Local at any time.

Cloud memory is optional. It exists if you use the web dashboard, the hosted memory address, or sync from the Mac app. Then your memories are stored on Esment’s servers in the United States, in your workspace.

What is stored

The text of each memory with its tags and dates, your Memory Blocks and pages, voice notes, the people and projects Esment finds in your memories, and a history of every change so you can audit and undo it. Search also needs embeddings, which are numeric versions of the text.

Who processes it

• OpenAI receives the text of each memory, and of each search, to compute its embedding.
• Voyage AI receives the text of a search and of its candidate memories to rank them. Neither provider may use your content to train models.
• Hosting and backups run on Render, Vercel and Cloudflare.

Esment never sells your memories, never uses them for advertising and never uses them to train AI models. Our staff do not read them unless you ask for support, abuse must be investigated, or the law requires it. The full list of processors and your rights is in the Privacy Policy.

A workspace is shared by design: every member can read every memory in it. See Workspaces & members.

Transcription happens on your device, not on an AI service. On a Mac a speech model runs on the computer; in a browser it runs on your graphics card. The audio is never sent anywhere to be transcribed.

• On the Mac, the audio stays on your Mac. Only the text of the transcript syncs, if you use sync.
• On the web, the recording is uploaded to private storage at Cloudflare and played back through short-lived links. The transcript is stored with your memories.
• You can delete the audio of any note and keep its text, or delete the whole note. Memories your assistant already created from it stay until you delete them.
• Esment does not run an AI over your notes. Your own assistant reads the transcript, under your account. Recordings are never used to identify you by your voice.

How to record and manage notes is on Voice notes.

An assistant sees only what it asks for through Esment’s memory tools. When a chat starts it can read the session brief, a short summary of the people, projects and preferences that matter, your pinned memories and your Memory Blocks. Later it can search for a specific fact, read a page from your Library or, if you ask, a voice note’s transcript.

• It does not get a copy of your memory. What leaves Esment is decided by what the assistant requests and what you ask it.
• Each memory shows which assistant saved it, for example via ChatGPT.
• Once an assistant has read something, the company behind it (Anthropic for Claude, OpenAI for ChatGPT, and so on) processes it under its own privacy policy. Esment does not control that.
• On the Mac, an assistant on the same computer reaches your local memory only, and memory content never touches Esment’s servers. With the tunnel on, web assistants reach your Mac through Cloudflare’s network, not through Esment’s servers.

To stop an assistant seeing your memory, remove or disable the Esment connector or plugin in that assistant’s settings. Steps are on How connecting works, and Find, edit & forget shows how to remove a single memory.

Your Mac and your cloud account are separate stores, so you erase each one. If you use both, do both.

• The Mac erase keeps your keys and settings. It does not delete anything in the cloud, and sync never deletes on the other side. Erase both sides if you want both gone.
• Deleting a single memory removes it from search and from what assistants see at once, but its text stays in the workspace’s change history until the workspace is erased.
• Deleting a workspace ends everyone’s access immediately and erases its memories 30 days later.