The Private AI Assistant

Three privacy decisions Arc was built on

1. It's off in your banking apps — automatically

Most assistants handle financial apps with a warning label: "please don't ask us to read your bank." Arc doesn't ask for that trust. It carries a built-in list of 200+ banking, crypto, and payment apps — from the big retail banks to exchanges and wallets — and disables itself the moment one of them is frontmost. There's nothing to configure, and nothing to forget. If you summon Arc while your banking app is open, it stays blind. Your balances, transactions, and card details are never read, never captured, and never sent anywhere.

This is a design constraint in the product, not a setting you can accidentally flip off — which is the only kind of privacy promise worth much.

2. It never monitors in the background

"Screen-aware" sounds alarming until you look at when the reading happens. Arc reads the screen only at the moment you invoke an action — when you swipe in the sidebar on Android or summon the menu on macOS. There is no polling, no persistent capture, and no watching while the assistant sits idle. Between invocations, Arc sees nothing at all. It's a tool you pick up, not a camera that's always rolling.

3. Screenshots require an explicit yes

Some actions benefit from seeing the screen as an image, not just text. The first time one of those runs, Arc shows an explicit consent dialog before capturing anything. Decline it, and text-based capture keeps working — you've lost nothing except the image path. You can also choose whether Arc asks for a region each time, always captures the full screen, or reuses your last selection. The point is that a screenshot is always a decision you made, never something that just happened.

What happens on your device vs. what leaves it

Any honest privacy pitch has to be specific about the cloud. Arc is not a fully offline AI — and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose your trust. Here's the real breakdown:

So the honest version is this: the AI generation — the part that summarizes an article or drafts a reply — needs the internet, and that request carries the content you asked it to act on. Everything else is local. Your library never uploads itself. Your Info Vault entries are never synced, indexed, or transmitted on their own; they travel only as context inside a generation you asked for, and nothing is attached unless you attach it.

Two grants, once, and the whole thing works: on macOS, Arc asks for Accessibility (to read on-screen text) and Screen Recording (for screenshot actions, with the consent step above). On Windows, no special grants are needed. What Arc never does on either platform is read anything between your invocations.

You decide where Arc works — per app

The banking list is automatic, but your control doesn't stop there. Arc gives you a per-app allow/deny list: if there's any app you'd rather it never appear in — a messaging app with sensitive threads, a password manager, a health app — you can exclude it entirely. And the exclusion is surgical in the other direction too: Arc stays fully functional in the ordinary apps where you actually want AI help, instead of crippling itself everywhere in the name of privacy.

That's the design philosophy in one line: surgical, not blanket. A private AI assistant that's blind everywhere is just a worse assistant. Arc works fully where you allow it and doesn't exist where you don't.

Your data belongs to you — and you can prove it

Privacy claims are cheap. Deletion controls are verifiable. Arc keeps every artifact it creates — saved summaries and screenshots, flashcard decks, chat sessions, custom actions, Info Vault entries — in local storage you can inspect, delete, or export:

Delete anything, any time

Saved items can be deleted inline or in bulk, with a counted confirmation so a mass delete never happens by accident. Chat sessions can be searched and bulk-deleted. Vault entries can be edited or removed in one tap — when you delete an entry, it stops appearing as a context chip immediately. There is no "contact support to erase your data" step, because none of it is locked up on our servers.

Backup is opt-in, and it's yours

Arc never uploads your library on its own. Backup happens only through Google Drive, and only after you explicitly connect your account in Settings → Backup. Once connected, you can back up on demand, set automatic daily or weekly backups, and disconnect whenever you like. Restoring is a merge, not an overwrite — a restore can't destroy anything you already have on the device. The trade-off is stated plainly: deletions don't propagate between devices, because a restore that can't lose your data also can't silently erase it elsewhere.

Start as a guest

You can use Arc as a guest, with no account and no credentials, from the very first launch. Sign in with Google only when you want cross-device sync, purchases, or backup. An account is an upgrade, not a requirement — and it's hard to leak data tied to an identity you never gave us.

How Arc makes money (the honest version)

Arc is built by one person — I'm Mamata, an indie developer — and funded by an optional subscription, not by advertising or data. The free plan includes a weekly allowance of AI requests, which exists for a simple reason: AI generation costs money per request, and someone has to pay for the servers. The subscription is what keeps the lights on instead of your data.

That means: no ads in the product, no selling or sharing your content with advertisers or data brokers, and one paid plan that unlocks the same limits across Android, macOS, and Windows on a single account. Telemetry exists — anonymous crash reporting — but it's a toggle you'll find in Settings → Privacy with a plain-language explanation of what gets sent, and switching it off stops reporting entirely.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. The privacy policy is written in plain language, and every claim on this page maps to a behavior you can verify in the app in under five minutes.

A private AI chatbot that still works everywhere

"Private" usually means "crippled" — but Arc's privacy layer is surgical, not blanket. It works fully in the apps where you want it and stays blind in the apps where it shouldn't exist.

Arc is live on Android and macOS today. Windows and iPhone versions are coming soon.

Arc vs. "no filter" AI apps

When people go looking for a private AI app, they often land on "unfiltered" or "no filter" chatbots — apps marketed on having no guardrails. It's worth being straight about what those trade away. The no-filter pitch is usually built on removing safety layers, and privacy is frequently one of the casualties: many of these apps log conversations liberally, run on anonymous infrastructure, or monetize usage data precisely because they can't monetize a subscription. A chatbot with no rules and no accountability isn't private — it's just unaudited.

Arc takes the opposite position. It's powerful inside the normal apps where you already work, and it's deliberately blind where your money and identity live. It won't pretend to be an offline LLM — generation runs on Google's Gemini models, with all the quality and all the caveats that come with that — but it will never invent access it doesn't have, watch you between requests, or hold your library hostage. The filter Arc applies isn't about what you can ask; it's about what it can see.