Privacy

Last updated September 29, 2026.

Syllabus records lectures on your Mac and turns them into transcripts, study notes, and study tools. Your recordings, transcripts, and notes are stored on your Mac and, if you connect it, in your own Google Drive. They are not kept in our database.

Syllabus is operated by Main Course Media LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("Syllabus," "we," "us," or "our"). This policy says what we keep, what passes through our service without being kept, which companies help us run Syllabus and what each one receives, how long things are kept, and what you can ask us to do.

What we keep

• Your account. When you sign in with Google we keep your Google account id, email address, and display name.
• Your Macs. For each Mac you connect: its name, when it connected, when it last checked in, its panel address, and a one-way hash of the token that identifies it. The token itself stays on the Mac.
• Panel address. Each connected Mac runs a small control page called its panel, where you see your recordings and settings. The panel address is the web address at which this service can show you that page in a browser when you are away from the Mac. We keep it so the link on your account page works. Anyone who opens it without being signed in to your Syllabus account is turned away; the address alone gives no access, and nobody else can see the panel.
• Your settings. The text of your class schedule, so it can follow you to another Mac.
• Your Google Drive connection. Described under "Google user data" below.
• Your plan, usage, and payments. Your plan, its status and renewal date, and the identifiers Stripe gives your customer record, subscription, and purchases. Each month we also count the hours of audio you used, the size of each summary, and how many study assistant sessions you opened, with what each cost us. These are numbers. They do not include what was said or asked. We do not keep your card number; Stripe does.
• Email. If you write to us we keep the message and our reply. We send you email about your account, billing, and changes to these pages. We do not send marketing email.
• Service logs. Our application logs name an account or a Mac by its id, never by a name or email address, and never contain audio, transcripts, summaries, or your questions. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, also keeps its own short-lived request records, which can include IP addresses and browser details, to run and secure the service.
• Sign-in cookies. This service sets only the cookies it needs to sign you in and keep you signed in. We use no advertising or analytics cookies, and no analytics or crash-reporting tools.
• Update checks. The Mac app periodically asks GitHub whether a newer version has been released. That request goes from your Mac to GitHub, not through us.

What passes through us and is not kept

On the trial or a paid plan, Syllabus uses our own accounts with the providers below instead of keys of your own. Your Mac sends the request to this service, our server forwards it to the provider, and the answer comes back the same way:

• Lecture audio, in short pieces, sent for transcription.
• Transcripts, sent to be summarized.
• Summaries, transcripts, and your questions, sent to the study assistant.
• Your Mac's panel pages, when you open the panel from a browser.

None of this is written to our database or our logs. What we keep is the usage count described above. A request runs on Cloudflare's servers for as long as it takes to hand it on, and no longer.

Who else handles your information

Service providers

Google	Signs you in and receives your name, email, and Google account id for that. If you connect Drive, holds the notes Syllabus files there.
Stripe	Takes payments. Receives your email, card and billing details, and purchases, and calculates sales tax.
Cloudflare	Hosts this service and its database, and carries requests to and from it.
GitHub	Serves the app's update information. Sees your IP address when your Mac checks for a new version.

AI providers

Groq	Receives lecture audio to transcribe it.
OpenAI	Receives lecture audio to transcribe it when Groq is unavailable.
Anthropic	Receives transcripts, summaries, and your questions to write summaries and answer study questions.

We send each AI provider only what its feature needs, through its business API. We do not use your recordings, transcripts, notes, or questions to train any model, and we have not opted in to any program that lets a provider train on them. Each provider applies its own rules to API requests, which can include short-term retention and, in limited cases such as abuse investigations, review by the provider's staff. We do not control those rules and they can change; see the privacy policies of Groq, OpenAI, and Anthropic. If you would rather none of this leave your Mac and this service, use Syllabus with API keys of your own.

If you use your own API keys, your Mac talks to those providers directly. Nothing in the list above passes through us, and that provider's own terms apply to those requests.

Google user data

• What we access. Your name, email address, and Google account id when you sign in. If you connect Drive, the drive.file permission, which reaches only files and folders Syllabus itself creates. It cannot see anything else in your Drive.
• How we use it. Only to sign you in and to let your own Macs file transcripts and notes in your Drive. We do not use Google data for advertising, do not sell it, and do not let people read it except as needed for security, to comply with law, or with your consent.
• How it is stored. The refresh token Google issues is stored encrypted. It is used only to obtain short-lived access tokens, which are handed to your own signed-in Macs. The Macs never receive the refresh token. Your notes go from your Mac to your Drive. They do not pass through our servers.
• Who it is shared with. Only Google, and Cloudflare as our host. Neither Stripe nor any AI provider receives Google user data.
• How it is deleted. Disconnecting Drive revokes the grant at Google and deletes the stored refresh token. Deleting your account does the same and erases the rest of your account. Files Syllabus already filed in your Drive stay there until you delete them.

Syllabus's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

How we use information

Only to run Syllabus for you: signing you in, connecting your Macs, syncing your settings, filing notes to your Drive, transcribing and summarizing your lectures, running the study assistant, billing your plan, keeping the service working and secure, preventing abuse and fraud, answering you, and complying with law. We do not sell your personal information, share it with advertisers, or use it to build profiles.

How long we keep it

• Account, Mac, settings, and usage records: until you delete your account.
• Stripe payment records: Stripe keeps its own record of past payments as the law and its rules require. We keep only the identifiers and dates needed for accounting, tax, and payment disputes.
• Email you send us: until it is no longer needed to help you or to meet a legal duty.
• Logs: short-lived, kept by Cloudflare under its own schedule.
• Deleted accounts: backups can hold data for a short time before they are overwritten.
• After a deletion we keep one thing: a one-way scrambled identifier made from your Google sign-in, used only to stop the free trial being given out twice. It cannot be turned back into your name or email, and nothing else is kept with it.

Where it lives

On Cloudflare, in a database that belongs to this service, in the United States and wherever Cloudflare operates. Traffic to and from it is encrypted, and stored credentials are encrypted. No online system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise otherwise.

Your choices and rights

• In your account. Remove a Mac (its token stops working at once), disconnect Google Drive, cancel billing, or delete your account, all from your account page. Deleting cancels any plan and refunds the unused part of the current month, signs out every Mac, revokes Drive, deletes your saved card and billing details from Stripe, and erases the rest. Your recordings, transcripts, and notes on your Mac and in your Drive are yours and are not deleted for you.
• By email. Write to syllabus@maincoursemedia.com to ask what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to receive a copy in a common format, or to ask us to stop using it in a way that is not needed to run Syllabus. We do not sell personal data, use it for targeted advertising, or use it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects, so there is nothing further to opt out of.
• Proving it is you. We will ask you to write from the email address on your account, or to sign in, and may ask one or two questions about the account. We will not ask for more than we need.
• Someone acting for you. An authorized agent may write on your behalf with your written permission, and we may confirm it with you.
• Our answer. We reply within 45 days. If we need more time we will say so and may take up to 45 more. If we decline a request we will explain why.
• Appeal. If you disagree with our answer, reply to it within 60 days with the word "appeal" and your reason. We will answer in writing within 60 days of your appeal. If it is still denied, you may contact the Texas Attorney General at texasattorneygeneral.gov.

Legal requests and business changes

We may disclose information when we reasonably believe the law, a court order, or valid legal process requires it, or to investigate fraud, abuse, or a security problem, or to protect Syllabus, our users, or others. If Main Course Media LLC is sold, merged, or reorganized, information about Syllabus accounts may go to the successor, which must honor this policy.

Age

Syllabus is for people 18 and older. We do not knowingly keep an account for anyone younger, and we delete one when we learn of it.

Changes

When this page changes in a way that matters, we update the date at the top and email account holders before the change takes effect.

Contact

Main Course Media LLC, 5900 Balcones Drive, Suite 100, Austin, Texas 78731. syllabus@maincoursemedia.com

The code for this service is open source at github.com/SyllabusAI/syllabus-accounts.