Privacy Policy

Pearl — ambient capture for Apple Watch

Last updated 12 August 2026

Pearl listens to your day and lets you ask about it later. That only works if it records real conversations, which makes what happens to those recordings the most important thing about the app. This page says exactly what happens to them, in plain terms, without a lawyer's hedge on every sentence.

What Pearl records

• Audio, only while capture is on. Pearl does not listen in the background of its own accord. You start capture, and the gem on the watch face is lit for as long as it is running. Turn it off and recording stops.
• Speech only. Pearl detects when someone is speaking and uploads only those clips. Silence is never sent and never counted.
• Your questions. When you ask Pearl something, the recording of the question is sent so it can be transcribed and answered. Questions are not stored as conversations.
• An approximate place, once per conversation. Pearl takes a single coarse location fix — accurate to hundreds of metres, not to a street address — and converts it to a name like "Santa Monica" before storing it. It does not track you continuously and keeps no trail of your movements.
• Your location at the moment you ask a question, if you have granted location access, so that "somewhere to eat around here" can mean anything at all.

What Pearl does not record

• No name, email address, phone number, or date of birth. Pearl has no sign-up form.
• No contacts, photos, calendar, health data, or messages.
• No advertising identifiers. Pearl contains no advertising or analytics SDK.
• No continuous location history.

Who you are, to Pearl

Pearl has no accounts. The first time it runs it generates a random identifier and stores it in the device keychain. That identifier is the only thing tying your conversations to you. It is not derived from your Apple ID, your hardware, or anything else about you, and it cannot be reversed into your identity.

The identifier syncs through iCloud Keychain so that your own devices agree on it without asking you to sign in anywhere. It never leaves Apple's keychain except as an authentication header to Pearl's own backend.

Where recordings go

• Audio leaves the watch, is transcribed, and is then discarded. Pearl's servers do not keep audio files, and the copy on the watch is deleted as soon as it has been sent.
• Transcription is performed by OpenAI. Audio and transcripts are processed under OpenAI's API terms, which do not permit using this data to train their models.
• Transcripts are stored in a Supabase (PostgreSQL) database, isolated by your identifier, and indexed by OpenAI so that asking a question can search them.
• Questions about the outside world — restaurants, opening hours, facts — are answered using web search. Only the question itself is sent; your transcripts are not.

These are the only three parties involved: you, OpenAI, and Supabase. No data is sold, rented, shared with advertisers or data brokers, or used to train anyone's model.

Other people in the room

Pearl records whoever is speaking near you, and those people have not agreed to anything. Recording law differs by state and by country: some places require the consent of every person being recorded, not just yours. Some conversations — in a doctor's office, a courtroom, a school — carry rules of their own.

Complying with the law where you are is your responsibility. Tell people when Pearl is running. Turn it off when someone asks. The lit gem is deliberately visible so that a recording is never a secret from the person sitting across from you.

How long it is kept

Transcripts are kept until you delete them. Audio is kept only for as long as it takes to transcribe it — seconds — and is then gone from both the device and the server.

Deleting everything

Pearl has a delete control in the app that removes every conversation, every transcript and the identifier itself, permanently and without a waiting period. Nothing is retained in a shadow copy afterwards.

You can also email the address below and ask, and it will be done for you.

Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit. Your identifier lives in the device keychain, protected by the same hardware that protects the rest of the device. Conversations are readable only by a request carrying your identifier — the app cannot read another person's conversations, and other people's copies of the app cannot read yours.

Children

Pearl is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 13. No account is created, so no information about a child is knowingly collected. If you believe a child's recordings have ended up here, email the address below and they will be removed.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete your data, and to object to its processing. Because Pearl holds no name or email address, the practical way to exercise any of these is from inside the app, or by emailing from the address you contact us with.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who receives it, the app will say so before the change takes effect. The date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.

Contact

Questions, deletion requests, or anything else: konlim2010@gmail.com