Privacy Policy
Effective date: August 17, 2026
Private Transcribe is built so that the sensitive part of what it does — recording your voice and turning it into text — happens entirely on your device. We run no accounts and no transcription servers. This policy explains exactly what stays on your phone, and what the few third-party services we use (advertising, purchases, optional analytics) handle on our behalf.
Your audio and transcripts never leave your device
- Speech recognition runs locally, powered by Whisper AI models (whisper.cpp) executing on your phone's own processor.
- Recordings, transcripts, and downloaded models are stored only in the app's local storage.
- No audio, transcript text, or filenames are ever uploaded, analyzed remotely, or shared with us or anyone else.
- Deleting the app deletes this data. You can also wipe everything from Settings → Clear All Data at any time. Note that your phone's own system backup (iCloud/Google) may include app data according to your device settings.
Microphone access
The microphone permission is used solely to record audio for on-device transcription, only while you are actively recording. The recording is written to local storage and processed locally — nothing is transmitted.
Model downloads
Speech models are downloaded once from Hugging Face's public servers. The download is an ordinary file fetch; we attach no account or identifier to it. After download, transcription works fully offline.
Advertising (Google AdMob)
The free version shows ads served by Google AdMob. Like any mobile ad network, Google may collect: advertising identifiers, IP address (and the approximate location derived from it), device information, and ad interaction data — used for ad delivery, measurement, and fraud prevention. This is the only personal data collection in the app, and it exists only while ads are shown:
- In the EEA/UK, a consent form is shown before any ad, and your choices can be revisited via Settings → Ad Privacy Options.
- On iOS, the App Tracking Transparency prompt controls access to the advertising identifier; declining it keeps ads non-personalized.
- Without consent, ads are requested in non-personalized mode.
- Purchasing Pro removes ads entirely — and with them, this collection.
See Google's Privacy Policy and how Google uses data in AdMob.
Purchases (Pro)
The optional Pro upgrade is processed by Apple or Google — we never see your payment details. Our purchase infrastructure provider, RevenueCat, processes a pseudonymous app-instance identifier and purchase history to validate and restore your purchase (RevenueCat privacy policy).
Analytics
The app may record anonymous product counters (for example: a transcription was completed, a model was downloaded, an error occurred), tied to a random install identifier. These counters never include your audio, transcript text, or anything identifying, and there is no account they could be linked to.
Children
The app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.
Your choices
- Ad consent: Settings → Ad Privacy Options (where required by law).
- iOS tracking: Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.
- Reset your device's advertising ID in system settings at any time.
- Delete all app data from Settings → Clear All Data, or by deleting the app.
Changes
If a future version changes how data is handled, this policy will be updated before that version ships, with a new effective date.