SwitchyardWhat the vendors actually say.
Every AI notes vendor serving this profession will sign a business associate agreement. A BAA covers protected health information. It stops covering data the moment that data is de-identified — and what happens to de-identified session content is governed by the terms you accepted, not by HIPAA.
This page exists because that is worth checking and almost nobody does. It is not a ranking and not an accusation. It is quotes and links, so you can read the source and decide.
Four questions to ask any vendor, including us.
Terms change, often quietly. This part does not. Open the vendor's privacy policy and terms of service, search for these, and read what you find rather than what their marketing page says.
- Is there a de-identified or anonymized carve-out? Search the privacy policy and terms for de-identified, de-identified, anonymized, aggregate, and Safe Harbor. A BAA governs protected health information. Once data is de-identified to the HIPAA Safe Harbor standard it is no longer PHI, so the BAA stops applying to it and whatever the terms say about it is what governs.
- Can that data be used to train or improve a model? Look for improve our services, product improvement, train, and machine learning. Some vendors distinguish improving a feature from training a foundation model. Whether that distinction matters to you is your call, but you should know which one you agreed to.
- Can it be shared, sold, or transferred? Look for third parties, sublicense, transfer, sell, and in our sole discretion. Also look for who the subprocessors are — the vendor may be careful and its subprocessor may not be.
- What is the default, and how do you change it? An opt-out that exists is not the same as an opt-out you know about. Find where the setting lives, whether it applies per clinician, per client, or per session, and what happens to data retained before you found it.
One more, worth its own line: HIPAA's Safe Harbor de-identification standard was written in a different era of data analysis. Whether Safe Harbor de-identification is still meaningful protection for narrative psychotherapy content is a genuinely open question, and it is a question you are entitled to have an opinion about before someone retains a transcript of your session.
What we have read ourselves.
Only entries we confirmed in the vendor's own live documentation appear here, each with the date we checked it. We are adding to this as we verify more. If a vendor believes an entry is out of date, tell us and we will re-read the source and correct it.
From SimplePractice's own support documentation on transcript retention: session audio is converted to a transcript and the audio is deleted immediately after the transcript is generated. The transcript stays available to the clinician for up to seven days or until the note is signed and locked.
Beginning 17 June 2026, for clinicians who are opted in, SimplePractice retains “a de-identified and de-coupled version of the session transcript” after that window instead of deleting it, in order to “help us continue improving Note Taker and other AI-powered features.”
The default depends on when you started. Clinicians who used Note Taker before 17 June 2026 are opted out by default. Clinicians who enable it on or after that date are opted in by default and can opt out at the clinician, client, or session level.
Retained transcripts are de-identified to the HIPAA Safe Harbor standard and de-coupled from client, clinician, and practice. Retention excludes draft notes, signed notes, pre-session summaries, assessments, and psychotherapy notes.
Source: Transcript retention FAQs · see also their Addendum to Terms of Service for Add-On AI Products, referenced from that page.
Mentalyc's privacy policy states that user-generated data is “stored securely, encrypted in transit and at rest, and is never shared with third-party analytics platforms,” and separately that the company “may aggregate anonymized Personal Data and use the aggregated information to analyze the effectiveness of our Service, to improve and add features to our Service, and for other similar purposes.”
A widely-shared 2025 reading of Mentalyc's terms quoted stronger language about ownership of models built from anonymized data. We could not confirm that wording in the live privacy policy on the date above, and their terms-of-service URL did not resolve for us. We are not repeating a quote we cannot source. Read it yourself: privacy policy.
De-identified carve-out: none, because nothing is transmitted. Training: none. We have no copy of your content to train on. Sharing or sale: none, same reason. Default: there is no setting, because there is no retention to configure.
The models ship inside the app and run on your Mac. There is no account and no server. What we hold about you is what the App Store tells us, which is a sales count.
Do not take that on faith either — the four questions apply to us too, and unlike the others our answer is checkable in ninety seconds. See the offline test and our privacy notice.
Corrections: hello@dks.studio. We would rather fix an entry than defend one.