Last updated 22 August 2026.
Bristlenose is a desktop app that runs on your Mac. We don't have a server. We don't have accounts. We don't collect any of your data.
Your interviews, transcripts, quotes, and notes stay on your Mac — including recordings you bring in from a meeting account, which are downloaded straight to your own project folder.
If you configure an AI provider (Claude, ChatGPT, Azure OpenAI, Gemini) and consent on first run, Bristlenose sends transcript text only — never audio — to that provider, under your account with them. We are not in the middle and never see it. If you use a local model (Ollama), nothing leaves your Mac at all.
Your API keys are stored in your macOS Keychain.
Two other things reach a third party, both only when you ask. If you use Export → Send to Miro, the quotes you choose are uploaded to your own Miro account under your own token — participant display names are never sent. And the first time a transcription model is needed, it is downloaded once from its host.
Bristlenose keeps a local record of AI calls inside your output folder — timing, token counts, cost estimate, model, and participant codes, but no transcript text, quotes, or prompt content. It stays on your Mac, is never part of an export, and can be turned off.
Bristlenose can fetch recordings and transcripts from Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, instead of you downloading them by hand. You sign in on Microsoft's or Google's own sign-in screen — we never see your password — and the access you grant is read-only, scoped to your own recordings and calendar rather than to acting as you. Your sign-in goes to them, not to us. Nothing about your study is sent: the requests ask for your own files and meetings, and carry no transcripts, quotes, or notes.
Bristlenose reads your own meeting recordings, the address you signed in with, and the meetings in the date range you chose — the last so it can show each recording's title, time, and who was invited. It does not read the rest of your files or your mailbox.
A meeting's invitee list holds your colleagues' and participants' names and email addresses. Bristlenose shows them in the import window so you can tell one session from another, and does not write them to disk. Close the window and they are gone; only the recording itself is kept.
Two things are kept, then. The recordings you tick are downloaded into the project folder you chose. And your sign-in — a token that lets Bristlenose fetch again without asking you to sign in every time — is stored in your macOS Keychain, alongside the address you used. If you have iCloud Keychain switched on, macOS replicates it to your other Macs as it does your other saved credentials. That is iCloud Keychain, not iCloud Drive: it is end-to-end encrypted, so the contents are not readable by Apple. Worth knowing where the account belongs to a client's organisation rather than to you, because their IT policy may have a view on it.
Where the files land is your choice, and worth a thought: if your project folder sits in a synced folder — iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox — then recordings you import sync there too, which may not be where your client expects their material to be.
Settings ▸ Accounts lists the accounts you have connected, and disconnects any of them. Disconnecting removes the stored sign-in from this Mac and stops Bristlenose listing or fetching from that account; recordings you have already imported stay in your projects. That removes our copy, which is not the same as revoking access — to do that, use Microsoft Entra ▸ Enterprise Applications, or your Google Account ▸ Security ▸ Third-party apps. For a work account, an administrator can do the same for the whole organisation.
Once imported, these are ordinary files, and the rest of this page applies to them from that point.
We don't run analytics, don't track you, don't share data, don't show ads, and don't bundle third-party SDKs that collect data for us.
Bristlenose is open source (AGPL-3.0) — you can read the data-handling code at github.com/cassiocassio/bristlenose.
Questions: hello@bristlenose.app
— Martin Storey, United Kingdom