A lifelog is the most intimate database that has ever existed about you. The 2025 acquisitions of Limitless and Bee showed exactly what happens when that database belongs to a company instead of to you. Here's how to keep ownership.
Limitless made the most popular memory pendant in the world. Its users trusted it with years of conversations — doctors' visits, work meetings, arguments, bedtime talks. In December 2025, Meta acquired the company. Within weeks: device sales stopped; remaining users had to accept an updated privacy policy and terms of service to keep using the product; the service shut down entirely on December 19, 2025 for users in the EU, UK, Brazil, China, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey; and the company's Rewind app disabled all recording the same day. Continued support was promised for "at least a year." Earlier in 2025, Amazon had acquired Bee, whose ~$50 wristband transcribes nearly everything its wearer — and everyone within earshot — says.
Nobody using those products did anything wrong. They simply learned the structural truth of cloud lifelogging: your memories sit under someone else's terms of service, and those terms travel with the company, not with you. To their credit, Limitless shipped export and deletion tools during the transition — users who acted got their data out. That is the difference an export path makes, and it's the single most important thing to verify before you ever need it.
| Cloud lifelogging (Plaud, Omi, Bee…) | Local-first (the Keeper, DIY setups) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where audio & transcripts live | Vendor's servers | Equipment in your own home |
| Who sets the rules | Terms of service — changeable at acquisition, policy update, or shutdown | You; nothing to accept, nothing to sunset |
| AI features | Strong and improving fast — big cloud models | Good and improving — local transcription and search run well on modest home hardware in 2026 |
| Ongoing cost | Subscription tiers for transcription/search | Hardware you own; no monthly gate on your own memories |
| If the company disappears | Export window if you're lucky (Limitless offered one); bricked service if not | Nothing changes — the archive is already yours |
| Breach exposure | One vendor breach exposes many users' most intimate data | Your risk is your own home network — smaller target, your responsibility |
Neither column is 'wrong.' Cloud is convenient and capable; local-first is sovereign. The mistake is choosing cloud without an exit plan.
Local-first lifelogging keeps the pipeline — recording, transcription, storage, search — on hardware you control: a home computer, a small server, or the device itself. In 2026 this stopped being exotic: open-source speech-to-text models transcribe accurately on an ordinary consumer GPU or even a recent laptop, and searching years of text is trivial for any home machine. The pieces exist; what's been missing is a product that assembles them for non-technical families. That is precisely the premise of the Keeper: the pendant records, your home equipment remembers, and the answer to "where is my data?" is pointing at a box in your own house.
Local-first has real obligations, too — honesty requires saying so. You own backups (two copies, one off-site, or a fire takes your memories with your house). You own the household's security basics. And you own deletion: a lifelog you control should still be one you prune, because some conversations don't deserve to be permanent.
Your recordings contain other people's words. Data ownership means you also hold their privacy in your hands: guests who spoke candidly in your kitchen, a friend's medical news, a child's meltdown. The consent rules are in our recording-laws guide; the ethics go one step further — store other people's moments as carefully as you'd want yours stored, and delete on request without being asked twice.
The Keeper writes your day down at home, on your own equipment. No terms-of-service surprise can take it away.
Meet the Keeper Wearable buyer's guide