Privacy
Last updated 2 October 2026
Telly sees your screen, hears your voice, and moves your cursor. That only works if you know exactly what leaves your Mac, when, and who receives it. This page describes what the app does today, not what a policy template says it might do.
What leaves your Mac, and when
Nothing is captured in the background. Telly sends data only during a turn you started, either by holding the push-to-talk shortcut or by scheduling a task yourself.
One turn sends three things to three services, each through a proxy on hey-telly.com that holds the API keys so no credentials ship inside the app.
| What | Goes to | When |
|---|---|---|
| Microphone audio | AssemblyAI, for transcription | While you hold the push-to-talk shortcut, and not a moment either side of it |
| A screenshot of your displays | Anthropic, so Claude can see what you are asking about | Once per round of a turn you started |
| Telly's reply text | ElevenLabs, to be spoken aloud | When a reply is ready, unless silent mode is on |
What stays on your Mac
Your memories, your scheduled tasks, and the skills Telly writes for itself are stored locally: memories and tasks in the app's preferences, skills as files in the app's Application Support folder. They are never uploaded, never backed up by us, and never readable by us.
They reach Anthropic only in the ordinary way anything else does, as part of a turn you started, because Claude needs to know what you told it to remember. Delete any of them at any time from the menu bar panel.
Your email address
Telly asks for an email address the first time you open it. It is checked for deliverability by Hunter.io, which returns only whether the address is deliverable. The address itself is then stored on your Mac and sent to PostHog as the identifier for your usage, so support requests and usage can be tied to an account.
If you downloaded Telly from this site, the form you filled in sent your email, industry, use case, and platform to a spreadsheet we keep. That is lead capture for the product, not something the app reads or uses.
Analytics: what is measured
Telly reports usage to PostHog so we can see which features work and where the agent fails. Every property falls into one of three tiers, enforced in one place in the code rather than trusted to each call site.
Always collected
Structure, never content: event names, counts and durations, the model used and its token counts, error classes, whether an action worked, the name and bundle id of the app you were in, the host of a browser tab and never the full address, how many displays you have, and the size of a screenshot in pixels.
Collected verbatim today
Five things: what you said, what Telly said back, Telly's thinking preview, the label of a button it clicked, and the label of an element it pointed at. In the current build this content capture is switched on, so that text is sent for every interaction. It is the one place your own words reach our analytics, and we would rather say so here than let you find out later. Write to support@hey-telly.com and we will delete yours.
Never collected, and no setting turns it on
Screenshots and image data of any kind. Anything you type through Telly. The contents of a text field it reads to keep its place. Full web addresses, since only the host is kept. Window titles, so document names, email subjects, and chat contacts stay out. The inventory of buttons on your screen. The text, title, or folder names of your memories. The text of a scheduled task.
The permissions Telly asks for
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| Screen Recording | To capture the screenshot Claude looks at. Capture happens per turn, never continuously, and is never written to disk except when you ask Telly for a screenshot file. |
| Accessibility | To click, type, scroll, and read the labels of buttons on screen. Every synthetic action is refused while your Mac is locked. |
| Microphone | To hear you while you hold the push-to-talk shortcut. |
| Desktop folder | Only if you ask Telly to save a screenshot, which it writes to your Desktop. |
Who else is involved
| Service | What it receives |
|---|---|
| Anthropic | Screenshots, your transcript, and the context of your turn |
| AssemblyAI | Push-to-talk audio while the key is held |
| ElevenLabs | The text of Telly's reply, for speech |
| PostHog | Usage analytics as described above, and your email address as an identifier |
| Hunter.io | Your email address once, to check it is deliverable |
| Vercel | Hosts this site and the proxy every request passes through, and counts visits to its pages |
| An advertising tag and Google Analytics on this website, both delivered through Google Tag Manager, and nothing inside the Mac app | |
| Meta | An advertising pixel on this website that records page visits and completed download forms, without your email or answers, and nothing inside the Mac app |
Removing your data
Memories and scheduled tasks are deleted from the menu bar panel and are gone from your Mac immediately. Skills are files you can delete from the panel or from Finder.
Uninstalling Telly removes everything it stored locally. To have your analytics history and email address deleted from our side, write to support@hey-telly.com and we will remove them.
Changes to this page
If what Telly sends changes, this page changes with it in the same release. It is written from the app's own observability documentation, and the two are kept consistent on purpose.