Can my notes app read my notes?

Yes. Any notes app can read the notes you put into it, because reading them and showing them back is the whole job. The question worth asking is different: does the app send what it reads anywhere, and can anyone at the other end read it?

For an app that keeps your notes as ordinary files on disk, the answer splits in two. On your machine, the app reads your notes, and so can every other program running under your user account. No app can change that.

Encryption starts to matter the moment a note leaves your machine. When people ask whether their notes app sees their content, that trip is usually the part they mean.

Local files are readable by anything on your machine

If your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder, anything running as you can read them, and the list is longer than most people expect.

What reads your notes folder	Why
Backup software	It copies every file it is pointed at
Antivirus	It scans file contents
The system search indexer	It opens files to index the text
Community plugins in your notes app	Most get the whole vault plus network access
Any AI assistant you gave file access	You granted it the folder

None of that needs your notes app to cooperate, because the files are just files. Plugins deserve a second look: one usually runs with the same reach as the app itself, so a single install can read the vault and phone home. A plugin ecosystem is a genuine reason to pick an app. It is also the widest read path in that table.

Full disk encryption does not change this. FileVault on Mac, BitLocker on Windows, and LUKS on Linux protect a machine that is powered off or stolen. After you log in, the disk is decrypted for every process.

One caveat: that is a desktop picture. Phones keep each app’s storage private from other apps, so a vault on your phone is not open to everything installed.

Encryption protects the trip, not the disk

Once you turn on sync, your notes travel, and this is where apps differ most. The weak version is transport encryption only: your notes go over HTTPS, then land on the server as readable text that the company, and anyone who breaches the database, can read.

The strong version is end to end encryption. Your device encrypts each note before upload, using a key derived on your machine and never sent to the server. The server only ever holds the encrypted blob, called ciphertext. Good implementations encrypt the filename and folder path too, because Health/mri-results.md tells a story before anyone opens it.

Be precise about what that buys. Stored data cannot be read by an employee, by an attacker who takes the database, or by a legal order served on the company. It does not defend against the software on your own device. If a future version of an app quietly uploaded plain text, server-side encryption would not save you.

Two catches come with it. The derived key is only as strong as the passphrase behind it, so a short or reused one gives most of the protection back. A server with no key also cannot help you when you lose yours, which is why these apps issue a recovery phrase at setup. Note sync recovery phrase explained covers what to do with it.

What an encrypted sync server can still see

No sync server is blind, whatever its encryption. The rows below are typical of an end to end encrypted service, though every app’s list differs.

The server knows	Why
Your account email	It identifies you and sends sign-in mail
How many encrypted objects you have	It stores them
The size of each object	Ciphertext has a length
When you sync, and from which devices	It handles the requests

What it does not hold is content, filenames, or any key that would unlock them. Any app claiming to hide the timing and volume too is overselling.

Does your notes app train AI on your notes

Privacy policies answer this one badly. Read the sections on machine learning, product improvement, and third party service providers, not the promise on the marketing page. Check whether training is opt out rather than opt in, because opt out means the default already ran. A company able to read your content can change its terms later, while end to end encryption removes the question instead of answering it.

How the common apps handle this

App	What the company can read	Where it wins
Apple Notes	Your notes, unless you lock one or turn on Advanced Data Protection	Free, on every Apple device, great scanning
Notion	Your content, with staff access set by policy, not math	The best team workspace and databases here
Evernote	Your content, apart from text you encrypt by hand	Web clipper, and search inside scans
Obsidian	Nothing by default: files stay local, and Obsidian Sync is end to end encrypted	Plugins, graph view, an iOS app
Standard Notes, Notesnook	Nothing, both encrypt end to end by default	Open source, so the encryption is auditable

How to check an app for yourself

Start in the app’s settings and look for a telemetry toggle: an app that collects nothing has nothing to toggle.

The network check is stronger, and free tools do it. LuLu on macOS shows which hosts an app contacts, and Resource Monitor’s Network tab does the same on Windows.

Read the result carefully: you see which hosts get contacted, not what was sent. Update and license checks are normal traffic, so the signal is the destination, not the bare fact of a connection.

Where Jotura lands, including the unflattering parts

Jotura is a free local-first Markdown notes app for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android. There is no iOS app. Your vault is an ordinary folder of .md files that you pick, and the app collects no telemetry or analytics.

The honest answer for Jotura is the general one. On your machine, Jotura reads your notes, and so can anything else you run. The files are not encrypted at rest, by design, because that is what keeps them readable by every other tool you own.

Jotura has no plugin system, which closes the widest read path in that first table. It also means you cannot extend the app, and there is no graph view, no canvas, and no publish-to-web. If those matter, choose another app.

Jotura Sync is the paid part, at £4 per month or £40 per year, with no free trial. It is end to end encrypted. Keys are derived on your device with Argon2id, a deliberately slow password hashing function that makes guessing a passphrase expensive, and every file gets its own key. File paths become HMAC identifiers, keyed one-way fingerprints, so the server can match an update to the right note without learning its name.

The security page has the full model. Jotura is also closed source, so the network check above is your substitute for reading the code. Sharing needs Sync on both sides, and a member you remove keeps whatever they already saw.

Search and agents on your own machine

Search is where a local-first app can quietly stop being local. If a search box sends your query and the surrounding text to a hosted model, a third party is reading your notes even though the files sit on your disk.

Jotura’s semantic search runs an embedding model on your machine. You turn it on in desktop Settings, the model downloads once, and indexing and searching then happen locally with no API key. Converting a PDF or Word file into searchable Markdown also runs on your machine.

Agents are the bigger exposure. Jotura ships a first-party command line tool that agents use to read and write the vault, described on the CLI page. It does not reduce what leaves your machine: anything an agent reads through it can still land in the model provider’s context, exactly as if it had opened the file itself.

The control is which folders an agent can reach, not which tool it uses. To see whether a vault syncs, run:

jotura sync status

On a vault with no sync configured, that prints sync: not enabled.

Frequently asked questions

Does encrypting my notes on disk stop other apps reading them? Not meaningfully. The app has to decrypt them to show them to you, so anything running under your account can reach the decrypted content. It does protect a machine that is powered off, which full disk encryption already does.

Is open source the only way to be sure? It is the strongest signal, because someone can audit the code. It is not proof on its own, since the binary you installed may not match the source. Watching an app’s network traffic tells you what it actually does, whatever the license.