Local-first screen recording: keep footage off the cloud

Short answer: many popular screen recorders upload your footage to their cloud, for hosting, processing or "AI features", sometimes before you've reviewed a single frame. If your screen ever shows customer data, internal dashboards, credentials or anything under NDA, use a local-first recorder: capture, editing and rendering all on your own device, with the export you consciously share as the only artifact that leaves it.

What "cloud recorder" actually means for your data

Cloud-centric tools (Loom-style messengers, cloud-export editors) stream or upload the raw recording to their servers. That raw file contains everything that was on screen, including the notification toast with a customer name, the tab you forgot, the moment before you blurred the key. Even with good vendors, you've expanded your data's surface area to include their retention policies, their breach exposure, and their subprocessors, often without your compliance team ever hearing about it.

When local-first is non-negotiable

• Screens showing customer PII (support, success, sales walkthroughs).
• Internal tools: admin panels, infra consoles, finance dashboards (onboarding libraries are made of these).
• Regulated environments, health, finance, legal, where "we uploaded a recording of the patient system to a video startup" is an incident report.
• Anything you'd blur: blurring after upload is too late; the unblurred original already left (blur guide).

How to verify a recorder is local-first

1. Does it work with no account? (Accounts usually mean cloud.)
2. Does export produce a file on your disk rather than a share link?
3. Does the marketing say "processed on-device", and does the app work offline?

Girato is built local-first on purpose: no account, recording and cursor data stay on your machine, editing and rendering are on-device, and the output is an MP4 on your disk. The convenient side-effect: it's also why exports are fast, no upload/download round-trip.

Convenience features are lovely until the screen contains something that can't leak. Default to local; opt into cloud deliberately, not by installer default.