Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 21, 2026

This policy covers the PrivateWispr apps for Mac and iPhone. Questions go to support@privatewispr.com.

The short version

Most privacy policies run long because the company collects a lot. This one is short because PrivateWispr collects almost nothing. There is no account, no analytics and no advertising, and your recordings and text never reach us.

Your voice, your transcripts and your notes stay on your device. We don't collect them and we never receive them, so we can't see them or sell them. The apps need no account and contain no analytics, no telemetry and no advertising.

The apps connect to the internet for a short list of jobs: downloading model files from Hugging Face, and on Mac, checking a licence key with Polar and looking for app updates on privatewispr.com. iPhone purchases go through Apple. None of these requests contain your recordings, transcripts or dictations. The section "What the apps connect to" lists each one.

What stays on your device

Speech recognition and Smart Cleanup run on your device with Apple's on-device machine-learning frameworks, which can use the CPU, the GPU and the Neural Engine. The apps send nothing off your device for processing. Your microphone audio and the transcripts made from it are stored on the device and are not transmitted.

The apps ask for microphone access so they can hear you while you dictate. On iPhone, the app keeps its audio session ready between dictations so dictation starts without delay; while the microphone is live, iOS shows the orange microphone indicator at the top of the screen. On Mac, dictation uses the microphone, and Meeting Notes can also record the sound your Mac plays (the other side of a call) after you allow system audio in macOS.

The Mac app also asks for the Accessibility permission and uses it for four things:

• Dictation: it types the finished text where your cursor is, in whatever app you are in.
• Voice Actions (on by default): when you hold its shortcut, it reads the text you have selected in any app, up to 10,000 characters, so it can rewrite that text on your device according to the instruction you speak. The app does not store the selection or send it anywhere.
• Send to an app: it finds the other app's text box and pastes, after checking that the box is empty. It reads the box only to check that and keeps none of its content (see "Sharing a transcript with another app").
• Held modifier keys: if you set the dictation shortcut to a modifier key held alone (for example Option), the app watches which modifier keys are down to notice the shortcut. It sees only which modifiers are down, not what you type. A shortcut that is a key combination doesn't need this.

You can revoke any of these permissions in your device settings at any time. The app then can't dictate, and it sends nothing either way.

Voice Actions on Mac has an experimental "Summarize & rewrite" switch, off by default. It uses Apple's on-device model through Apple Intelligence and opens no network connection.

What the apps connect to

The apps contain no general-purpose networking. These are the only connections they make:

• Model downloads (Mac and iPhone). The apps download speech-recognition models, the optional Smart Cleanup model and optional language packs from Hugging Face (huggingface.co and its download servers under hf.co). Downloads happen when you first use a feature that needs a model, or when you add a language. Each file is pinned to a fixed version. A download request carries no audio, transcripts, dictionary, snippets or meeting content. Like any web request, it tells Hugging Face your IP address and which file you asked for and when. Their privacy policy covers that.
• Licence check (Mac, only if you buy Pro). When you enter a licence key, the Mac app checks it with Polar's API (api.polar.sh), then once a day while the app runs. When you remove a key, the app tells Polar the key has left this Mac, and retries hourly until Polar confirms. These requests carry only the key, our store's ID at Polar, a device label with no personal data (for example "Mac · 3f2a · 2026-10-19"), and the activation ID. They never carry your voice, your text, your usage counts or device identifiers. If your Mac can't reach Polar for more than 7 days, the app falls back to the free plan until it can.
• Update check (Mac). The Mac app looks for updates on privatewispr.com once a day and when you choose Check for Updates. You can turn the daily check off in Settings, General. The request carries the app's name and version and the version of the update library in its User-Agent, and no system profile. Like any web request, it reaches our web host with your IP address. Every update is signed, and nothing installs until you confirm it.
• Purchases (iPhone). iPhone subscriptions go through Apple's App Store. Apple's own system makes those requests; the app adds none of its own.

The apps have no account system, no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK and no crash-reporting service.

Information we do not collect

• No account, no email address, no phone number. The apps collect no email address. If you buy the Mac app, Polar, our payment provider and merchant of record, records you as a customer of our store, so we can see the email address you gave at checkout and what you bought in Polar's dashboard. We use that only for receipts, licence keys, support and refund requests. To ask us to delete your purchase data, email support@privatewispr.com, or ask Polar directly. Polar's privacy policy covers its side.
• No analytics or usage statistics.
• No telemetry and no advertising identifiers.
• No location data.
• No screen capture and no access to your photos. On Mac, the app reads the text you have selected when you use Voice Actions, and it can read the text box of the app you choose to send a dictation to, to check that it is empty. It stores none of that content. (The iPhone keyboard's word suggestions use the system's standard word list, which can include names from your Contacts; see "The iPhone keyboard".)

The iPhone keyboard

PrivateWispr ships a custom keyboard for iPhone. It asks for "Full Access", and dictation from the keyboard needs Full Access on. The reason is practical: an iPhone keyboard extension can't record audio, so the PrivateWispr app itself owns the microphone and the speech model. The keyboard and the app talk through Apple's shared app-group container, which only this app's own processes can read. The keyboard inserts the finished text into the field you are typing in.

Like every keyboard on iOS, the keyboard can read the text of the field you are typing in, because that is how it inserts and edits text. For suggestions it uses the standard word list that iOS gives to keyboards; that list can include names from your Contacts, and the keyboard doesn't read your Contacts itself. The keyboard records no audio, doesn't read your clipboard and opens no network connection. You can turn Full Access off at any time in Settings. Normal typing keeps working, and dictation asks you to turn Full Access back on.

Meeting recording

Both apps can record and transcribe meetings. You must get consent from everyone you record, and you are responsible for following the recording laws where you are. The apps remind you: on iPhone, the line "Always ask for consent before recording others." sits on the Start card in Meetings; on Mac, it appears in the "Set up Meetings" card when a permission is missing. Meeting recordings and transcripts are stored on your device like everything else.

Sharing a transcript with another app

The apps share nothing on their own, but you can share a transcript yourself. On iPhone, the share sheet in a meeting can send the transcript as plain text to any app you pick, including AI apps; it goes out only when you choose the app and press send there. On Mac, a setting called "AI apps (MCP)", off by default, lets the AI tools you connect on your Mac list, read and search your meeting notes and transcripts. It never gives them your dictations.

On Mac, each dictation on Home has a "Send to an app" button. When you click it, the app puts your dictation into the app you choose, for example an AI chat, a chat app or Mail. For most apps it pastes into the app's text box, and only when that box is focused and empty. Mail is different: the app opens a new email with your text as its body, with no paste and no Accessibility involved, and nothing is sent until you press Send in Mail yourself. If the app can't place the text, it puts the text on your clipboard instead, where clipboard managers can see it and Universal Clipboard may share it with your other Apple devices. Once you share something with another app, that app's own privacy policy applies to what you shared.

Optional calendar connection (Mac)

The Mac app can connect to the Calendar app to show your upcoming meetings. This stays off until you turn it on. When connected, it reads the calendars already on your Mac through Apple's EventKit framework: each event's title, start and end time, whether it is all day, the attendee count, whether you declined, whether the event was cancelled, and the event's notes, location and URL fields. It reads them on the Mac, opens no network connection, sends nothing to us or anyone else, and never writes to your calendar. Disconnecting in Settings stops the reading, but macOS keeps the permission; to remove it, turn PrivateWispr off under System Settings, Privacy & Security, Calendars.

Crash reports

The apps contain no crash-reporting code. If the iPhone app crashes, Apple may collect a crash report according to your device's settings ("Share with App Developers"). If you have turned that setting on, Apple may forward the report to us. Such a report contains technical diagnostics, not your dictated content. If the setting is off, we receive nothing.

Backups and how long things are kept

On iPhone, your dictation history and your meetings live in the app's Documents folder, so they are part of the iCloud or Finder backup of your device. Downloaded models are backed up too, except the Smart Cleanup model folder, which is large and can be downloaded again. The app processes dictation audio as you speak and doesn't keep it; only meeting audio is stored, and the app deletes it after 24 hours. Meeting transcripts and speaker labels stay until you delete them. You choose how long dictations stay in history: the app keeps at most the 100 most recent, and the "Keep dictations" setting defaults to Forever and can be set to one month, one week or one day.

On Mac, the app deletes nothing on its own. Your history, recordings and meetings stay on your Mac until you delete them, or until you turn off "Keep dictation history" or the recordings switch in Settings, Privacy & data.

Your data: how to delete it

Everything the app keeps lives in the app's own storage on your device: dictation history, audio recordings, meeting transcripts, your dictionary and snippets, the word pairs the app learned from your corrections, a monthly count of the words you dictated and the meetings you recorded, and the downloaded models. You can delete any of it at any time.

• Mac: Settings, Privacy & data, "Delete everything" removes your dictation history, recordings and finished meetings in one step and can't be undone. It keeps your Dictionary, Snippets and Style; delete those in their own settings if you want them gone. "Delete everything" leaves two small files in the app's PrivateWispr folder: the monthly word and meeting counts, and the word pairs learned from your corrections. To remove those too, delete the PrivateWispr folder (see "Uninstalling"). Notes you exported as Markdown are ordinary files that you saved where you chose; delete them there. You can also delete single dictations from Home and single meetings from Meetings. On the Smart Cleanup settings page, "Remove data" deletes the Smart Cleanup model. On the Performance page, the speech engines can only be unloaded from memory; their files stay until you delete them (see "Uninstalling").
• iPhone: Settings, "Clear history" deletes all saved dictations. You can delete meetings one by one in the Meetings tab. You can remove the Smart Cleanup model data in Settings, and language packs on the Languages screen. Other downloaded models go when you delete the app.
• Uninstalling: on iPhone, deleting the app removes all of its data. The Mac app is not sandboxed, so deleting it does not remove its data. Before you delete the app, use Settings, Privacy & data, "Delete everything". To remove what is left, delete these three folders: the app's own data in ~/Library/Application Support/PrivateWispr/ (your dictations, recordings, meetings, the Smart Cleanup model, the monthly usage counts and the learned correction pairs), the speech models in ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/, and the Farsi pack in ~/Library/Application Support/OpenWisper/Models/. Your Dictionary, Snippets and Style live in one more file, ~/Library/Preferences/com.privatewispr.PrivateWispr.plist; delete it too if you want those gone. A Mac licence key is kept in your Keychain; "Remove key from this Mac" in Settings deletes it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version on this page with a new date. The apps collect almost nothing, so a change that matters to you will be rare.

Contact

Questions about this policy: support@privatewispr.com.

Email you send to support@privatewispr.com or sales@privatewispr.com reaches our mailbox. We use it only to answer you.