Privacy Notes

Last updated: 2026-07-14

Stello Trace is a tool that “sees” how you work. We believe the privacy notes for such a tool shouldn't read like lawyers writing to lawyers — you should be able to understand, in five minutes, exactly what is recorded, where it lives, what leaves your machine, and how to undo everything. Here are the full answers.

1. What gets recorded

• Foreground events: the app in front, its window title, the browser URL, and when the switch happened.
• Screenshots (optional): captured at low frequency, only so you can recover context when reviewing your day. Can be disabled entirely in settings.
• Calendar events: meeting titles and times from your system calendar (EventKit) and Lark/Feishu (if you connect it), used to tell meetings apart from focus work in reports.
• Exclusion rules drop data before it's stored: block specific apps and sites (password managers, private browsing) — matching events are discarded, not recorded.

2. Where it lives

All raw data is written to a SQLite database file on your own machine. There is no cloud copy and no server of ours. It's standard SQLite — open it, export it or delete it with any tool, any time (the data location is shown in the app's settings).

3. What leaves your machine

• To generate reports, the app sends a text summary of events (app names, window titles, URLs, timestamps, meeting titles) to the model provider you configured — DeepSeek by default, or any compatible cloud API.
• Screenshots are never uploaded — not to the model provider, and not to us (there is no server of ours to receive them).
• No accounts, no telemetry, no crash-report phoning home. This website runs no analytics scripts either.

If you choose local Ollama as your model, even that single outbound transfer disappears — analysis runs on your machine and the entire pipeline is offline.

4. How your API key is handled

The API key you enter is stored in a local configuration file and used only for direct communication between your machine and that provider. It is never sent to Stello or any third party.

5. How to undo

• Pause recording: one click in the menu bar to pause/resume.
• Disable screenshots: a single switch in settings; existing captures can be deleted manually.
• Delete everything: removing the local database file erases all records. Uninstalling leaves no cloud residue — there never was a cloud copy.

6. About Stello and organizations

Stello Trace is a personal tool: your records belong to you and are not sent to your employer or to Stello. Organization-level automation diagnosis is a separate Stello on-site (FDE) service, scoped directly with the company — it does not receive any data from this app.

7. Questions

If anything above is unclear — or you find behavior that contradicts this document — reach us via s-tello.com/contact. “Behavior doesn't match the docs” is treated as a highest-priority bug here.