Full disclosure

How Capture Works

Everything CogniPage reads, everything it doesn't, and how to check for yourself

1. The short version

CogniPage needs to see what you are reading, because reading along with you is the entire product. That is a serious permission to ask for, so this page states plainly what it means in practice.

  • CogniPage reads the text of windows you have explicitly approved — nothing else, and nothing until you approve it.
  • It asks per website, per document, and per video. Approving one never silently approves the next.
  • It never records keystrokes, never opens your microphone, never stores screenshots, and never captures passwords or form fields.
  • Captured text is written to a database on your own machine. It is only sent to us when you use an AI feature or turn on sync.
  • You can revoke every permission in your operating system's settings at any time, and remove the app and all its data in a few minutes.

2. Permissions we ask for

Your operating system asks for each of these — we cannot grant them ourselves, and you can withdraw any of them at any time without uninstalling.

macOS

  • Accessibility — the primary way CogniPage reads text. macOS exposes a structured tree of the text an app is displaying; we read the paragraphs from it. This is the same interface screen readers use.
  • Screen Recording — used for two things: reading text from windows that expose no accessibility tree (image-only PDFs, canvas-rendered apps) by recognising it on-device, and tapping the audio a specific application is playing during a watch-along.
  • Automation (Apple Events) — to identify which application and document is in front, so CogniPage knows which material a paragraph belongs to.
  • Camera — optional. Only used if you choose to track a physical book.

Windows

  • UI Automation — the equivalent of Accessibility on macOS, and the primary text source. No separate prompt; it does not require administrator rights.
  • Screen capture — for on-device text recognition where UI Automation exposes nothing.
  • Per-application audio loopback — captures the sound one chosen application is playing, during a watch-along.
  • Camera — optional, for physical books.

Permission from your operating system only makes capture possible. CogniPage then asks you separately about each thing it might read. The default mode is Ask: until you answer, nothing is captured.

  • Per website or document. Approval covers one origin (https://example.com) or one file. It does not cover other tabs, other sites, or the rest of your browser.
  • Per video. A watch-along is approved one piece of media at a time. Approving a lecture on a platform says nothing about the next video you open there.
  • Per application, only as a fallback for apps that expose no identifiable document. Browsers never fall back to this tier — every tab is a separate document and is asked about separately.
  • Blocking is permanent and broad. Blocking a site also blocks media served from it, so "never here" means never, and you never have to block the same place twice.

You can review and revoke every approval you have given from Settings inside the app, and switch the global mode to Never capture at any time.

4. Reading on screen

When a window you have approved is in front, CogniPage reads the paragraphs it displays and keeps the ones you actually dwell on. It detects dwelling from how long content stays in view and whether you are still at the keyboard — it asks the operating system only for how long since any input happened, never for what that input was.

Where a window exposes no readable text, CogniPage recognises the text from the pixels instead, on your device. The image is read and discarded in memory; no screenshot is ever written to disk or transmitted.

The one-key highlight shortcut (⌘⇧H / Ctrl+Shift+H) captures the passage you have selected. Where an app exposes no selection, CogniPage falls back to copying it: it saves your clipboard, issues a copy, reads the result, and puts your original clipboard back. This only ever happens at the moment you press the shortcut, never in the background.

5. Watch-along audio

For a lecture or a video, the words are spoken rather than written, so CogniPage captures what is said. It taps the audio that one specific application you approved is already playing — so a call, a notification, or anything else on your machine is not part of it.

  • Your microphone is never opened. CogniPage requests no microphone permission at all.
  • Speech is transcribed entirely on your device. No audio is sent anywhere.
  • No audio file is written to disk. Only the resulting text is kept.
  • Nothing is downloaded, ripped, or saved from the service you are watching.
  • Advertisements are detected and left out, so a sponsor read never becomes a flashcard.

6. Physical books

Entirely optional and entirely manual: you create a material for the book and point a camera at the page. Recognition runs on your device, the text is kept, and the frame is discarded — no photograph of any page is stored or transmitted. The camera is only active while you have this feature open.

7. What CogniPage never does

  • No keystroke logging. CogniPage never records which keys you press. It asks only how many seconds have passed since the last input of any kind, to tell whether you are still reading.
  • No microphone access, ever.
  • No stored screenshots or page photos.
  • No password, credential, or payment-field capture.
  • No bundled software. No toolbars, no browser extensions, no third-party offers, no advertising.
  • No changes to your system. CogniPage does not modify your browser settings, search engine, home page, proxy, certificates, or hosts file.
  • No autostart. CogniPage does not add itself to your login items or startup programs. It runs when you open it.
  • No selling of data, and your content is never used to train AI models.

8. What leaves your device

Captured reading is stored in a database on your machine. Text leaves it in exactly two situations, both of which you control:

  • You use an AI feature. Generating flashcards, building or grading an assessment, or producing analytics sends the relevant passage to our backend and our AI provider, solely to produce that result.
  • You sign in and enable sync. Your materials and progress are then synced so you can pick up on another device.

Both require an account. Without one, CogniPage still captures, schedules, and lets you review — offline, on that machine only. Diagnostic logs are written locally and are not transmitted; your reading text is never written into them. See the Privacy Policy for the full detail.

9. Components downloaded after install

Two things are fetched after installation rather than shipped inside it, both only when the relevant feature is first used:

  • The on-device speech-recognition model (roughly 180 MB), used for watch-alongs. It is fetched the first time you switch a watch-along on, from the public Hugging Face repository for whisper.cpp, and is what allows transcription to happen locally instead of on a server. If you never use a watch-along, it is never downloaded — and you can delete it again from Settings.
  • Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows, if your machine does not already have it. Windows 11 always does; most Windows 10 machines do too. This is a Microsoft system component that CogniPage renders its own interface with.

Nothing else is installed, and no third-party application is ever bundled with or installed alongside CogniPage.

10. Updates

CogniPage checks for a new version when it starts, and shows you a banner if one is available. It does not install anything on its own — the update is downloaded and applied only after you press "Update now", and you can dismiss the banner and carry on. The current version and a manual "Check for updates" button are in Settings.

Every update is cryptographically signed by us, and the signature is verified before it is applied. An update that fails verification is refused.

11. Verifying your download

Only ever download CogniPage from cognipage.io. We do not distribute through download portals, bundlers, or mirrors, and we have never paid for a third party to distribute our installer.

macOS. Our builds are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so Gatekeeper accepts them on a normal double-click. You can confirm it yourself in Terminal:

spctl --assess --type exec --verbose=4 /Applications/CogniPage.app

A genuine build reports accepted and source=Notarized Developer ID.

Windows. Code signing for our Windows installer is in progress. Until it lands, Windows SmartScreen shows a "Windows protected your PC" notice on first run, and we publish a SHA-256 checksum next to the download so you can confirm you have the exact file we built:

Get-FileHash .\CogniPage_*_x64-setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256

We would rather say this plainly than let you wonder about the warning. Compare the result with the checksum shown on the download page.

12. Removing CogniPage

CogniPage uninstalls like any normal application, with no survey, no "are you sure", and nothing left running. Step-by-step instructions for each platform, including how to delete every trace of local data, are in the FAQ.

Questions

If anything here is unclear or you think it does not match what you observe, we want to know: support@cognipage.io. CogniPage is published by Kenaff Limited — see Company.