Effective July 10, 2026 · Rewrite beta
The short version: Rewrite has no content servers. It reads text only at the moment you invoke it, pseudonymizes sensitive details on your Mac before anything is sent to your own AI provider, and restores them locally. We never see what you write.
Rewrite reads the text field you are working in only at the moment you trigger it (for example, by double-tapping your shortcut), and only the content of that field — or just the portion you highlighted. There is no ambient monitoring, no background recording of keystrokes, and no history of what you typed. Text is held in memory only for the life of the rewrite tooltip and is discarded when it closes. Password and other secure input fields are refused at the operating-system level.
To produce a rewrite, Rewrite sends the invoked text to the AI provider account you connect (ChatGPT or Claude). Before it is sent, sensitive details — names, email addresses, phone numbers, card numbers, SSNs, URLs, IP addresses, and filenames — are replaced on-device with anonymized keys such as [[NAME_1]]. The key map between placeholders and real values never leaves your Mac. The rewritten text comes back, and the real details are restored locally. The app's "What the AI sees" tab shows you the exact payload for every request.
Detection is best-effort, not guaranteed. It relies on pattern matching and on-device machine learning, which can miss sensitive details — unusual formats, uncommon names, context-dependent identifiers — and, like all software, can have bugs. If detection misses something, that text is transmitted to your AI provider unmasked. Use the "What the AI sees" tab to verify any payload before you rely on it, and do not use Rewrite on text you are legally or contractually prohibited from sharing with your AI provider (see the Terms of Use, sections 7, 9, and 10, which govern our responsibility here). Rewrite is not designed for use with regulated data such as protected health information or cardholder data.
Rewrites are processed by the provider you sign into, under your account and that provider's terms and privacy policy (OpenAI's for ChatGPT, Anthropic's for Claude). Rewrite does not operate, proxy, or log that traffic — requests go from your Mac to your provider directly.
If you email us feedback or crash reports, we keep the correspondence so we can fix the problem and follow up. Don't include sensitive text in feedback unless you're comfortable sharing it.
Rewrite is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.
If this policy changes — for example, when the beta ends — we will update this page and note the new effective date. Material changes will be called out in the app's release notes.
Questions or requests: support@collectivetheory.com