Shoulder Help CenterShoulder records your screen, sends the recording to be analyzed against a goal you set, and keeps the results in a knowledge base on your device that you can chat with. This page explains what that involves.
What the app captures
When you start a recording, Shoulder captures whatever is on your screen for as long as the recording runs. You start and stop it yourself, through Apple's own screen-recording controls — Shoulder has no access to your screen at any other time.
What stays on your device
Your recordings, the questions you've asked, and the answers Shoulder has given all live on your device. Shoulder keeps a limited number of recent recordings to let you revisit a session; older ones are removed automatically to make room for new ones. None of this is backed up to a Shoulder-operated server.
What gets sent, and to whom
When you ask Shoulder to analyze a recording, the clip is uploaded to our server, which forwards it to Google's Gemini to extract what matters against your stated goal. When you chat with Shoulder afterward, your message and the relevant extracted notes are sent to whichever model you've selected in Settings — Anthropic's Claude by default, or Google's Gemini if you've switched it — to generate a reply.
To answer some questions, the model searches the web. When it does, a short search query that the model writes — a few words, not your message itself — goes through our server to Tavily, a web search service, and the model can ask Tavily to fetch a page it found. The replies show each search as a "Searched:" line, so you can see what was looked up.
Our server does not keep a copy of what it forwards. Recordings, goals, and extracted text are not retained — they exist only for the moment it takes to process your request, and nothing about them is written to a database or a log. What our server does keep, tied to an anonymous identifier generated on your device, is described below.
What we collect
| Data | Linked to you | Why |
|---|---|---|
| An anonymous device identifier | Yes | Lets us apply a free usage allowance per device and prevent abuse. It is not tied to your name, an account, or anything else that identifies you — there are no accounts in Shoulder. |
| Usage counts (how many requests, how much processing, when) | Yes | Tracks your usage allowance and helps us understand what the service costs to run. |
| Your screen recordings and any photos you analyze | No | Sent for analysis and not retained afterward, as described above. The identifier that would link this data to you never travels with it. |
| Web search queries the model writes while answering you | No | Sent to Tavily to run the search. Tavily may keep queries and use them to improve its search results; see its own privacy policy. The identifier never travels with them. |
| Your chat messages and the notes Shoulder extracted from your recordings | No | Sent to the AI model that writes each reply, and kept by that provider for a limited time before deletion — about 30 days for Anthropic, up to 55 for Google. As with recordings, the identifier never travels with them. |
We do not use any of this to track you across other apps or websites, we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers, and we do not use it to train any AI model. Shoulder has no third-party analytics or advertising software in it at all.
The AI and search providers we use
Both Google and Anthropic are used under paid commercial terms, and under those terms neither company trains its models on what you send. Google retains prompts for up to 55 days solely to detect abuse of its service, after which they're deleted; Anthropic keeps API prompts for about 30 days by default, then deletes them. Neither arrangement is what's formally called "Zero Data Retention" — we don't claim that term, because it isn't in place with either provider today.
Tavily runs web searches for the model. It receives only the search query and the addresses of pages to fetch, never your recordings, your messages, or your device identifier. Its handling of those queries is governed byTavily's privacy policy.
Deleting your data
Settings → Erase everything permanently deletes every recording, project, and everything in your on-device knowledge base, including the anonymous usage record on our server. It cannot be undone.
Children
Shoulder is for adults. It is rated 18+ on the App Store, is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. The AI providers Shoulder relies on set that same line in their terms.
Changes to this policy
If what we collect or how we use it changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top.
Contact
Questions about this policy: support@myshoulder.app. For help using the app, see the Shoulder Help Center.