What stays, what leaves, what we collect
Last updated
The short version
- The work happens on your Mac. Your voice is turned into text, cleaned up and turned into meeting notes by models that run on your Mac.
- We collect nothing from the app. There is no account, no analytics, no crash reporting and no advertising, and we run no server that receives your dictations, recordings or notes.
- The app goes online to download things: itself, its models and its updates.
- Local mode cuts the app off from the internet. With it on, nothing you say, write or see is uploaded.
- A few features send something because you ask them to. They are listed below, and each is off until you use it.
- This website has no trackers and no cookies. Its pages load nothing from any other site.
Who this covers
This policy covers the mumbly app for Mac and this website. “We” means the people who make the app. “The app” means mumbly.
What the app keeps on your Mac
Everything below is stored on your Mac, in ~/Library/Application Support/LocalDictation and in the app's settings. None of it is sent to us.
| What | Details | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Dictation history | The words that were recognized, the text that was typed, when, how long it took and which app it went into. | 7 days unless you change it: off, 1, 7 or 30 days, or forever. |
| Dictation audio | Thrown away as soon as it has been transcribed. If you turn on “Keep audio”, recordings are kept so you can play them back. | Not kept. With “Keep audio” on: 14 days. |
| Meetings | The transcript, the summary, action items, your own notes and questions you asked about the meeting. The recording itself is deleted once the notes are written. | Until you delete them, or for the limit you set. |
| Notes, dictionary, snippets, styles | What you write in Scratchpad and the words, snippets and writing styles you set up or the app learned from your corrections. | Until you delete them. |
| What the assistant remembers | People, projects, dates and preferences picked up from your meetings and notes, so it can answer questions about them. You can read, edit and delete each one. | Until you delete them. |
| Usage counts | How many words you dictated, your speed and which days you used the app, for the numbers on the Home page. | Until you delete everything. |
| Connection log | For each connection the app made: when, what for, which server and how many bytes. Never the address of a page, a search or anything that was sent. | The last 1,000 entries. |
Settings → Privacy has “Export all my data”, which writes what the app keeps into a folder as ordinary files, and “Delete everything”, which removes your history, notes, meetings, dictionary, snippets and what the assistant remembers. Your settings, the downloaded models and the connection log stay until you remove the app.
What the app reads on your Mac, and why
- Your microphone, only while you are dictating or recording a meeting.
- The sound your Mac is playing, only while you are recording a meeting, so the other side of a call is in the notes. This is all the sound your Mac plays during the recording, not only the call.
- Text near your cursor and in the window you are dictating into (up to 500 characters before the cursor, 250 after it, a selection of up to 1,000, and up to 12,000 characters of the window), so names are spelled the way they appear on screen, spacing is right, and a reply can answer the message in front of you. It is used for that one dictation and is not saved. The app is built to leave out password fields and password managers, but treat anything visible in the window you dictate into as something it may read. You can turn this off with “Use nearby text”.
- Nothing on screen during a test. In a lockdown or secure exam browser (Respondus LockDown Browser, Safe Exam Browser, Examplify, Guardian Browser, OnVUE, PSI and Mettl secure browsers, Inspera, FLOWlock, Bluebook), on a proctoring service (Proctorio, Honorlock, Examity, ProctorU and Meazure Learning, Proctor360, ProctorExam, Respondus), on an assessment or interview platform (HireVue, CoderPad, Codility, TestGorilla, Karat, HackerRank and CodeSignal tests) and on a course quiz while you take it (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Brightspace), the app is built to read nothing on screen: Buddy and voice commands say “not during a test” instead. Dictation still types there. The full list is in the app's source,
Core/Context/ExamGuard.swift. - Which app is using the microphone. When another app is on a call, the app checks whether it is a calling app, or a browser tab on a meeting site, so it can offer to record. For a browser that means reading the tab's title and address. They are used for that check only.
- Your contacts, only if you allow it: names and companies, so they are spelled correctly. They are held in memory while the app runs and are never stored or sent.
- Your calendar, only if you allow it and turn it on: to name meetings, list who was invited and show today's calls.
The app does not record or keep pictures of your screen. If macOS can't hand it the call's sound directly, it falls back to Apple's screen-capture system for the sound alone, and the two-by-two-pixel video that comes with it is thrown away.
When the app connects to the internet
On its own, the app connects to the internet to download. These are the downloads it makes. Settings → Privacy shows the connections it has made, and Local mode cuts the app off from the internet: with it on, none of these happen and nothing you say, write or see is uploaded. Local mode covers the app's own connections. An AI app you have connected is a separate program, and what it has read it can still send; switch its access off in Settings → Connections if you want that closed too.
| What | Where | When |
|---|---|---|
| Checking for an update | GitHub | A few seconds after the app starts and every six hours. You can turn this off. |
| Downloading an update | GitHub | When there is a new version. |
| Speech model and cleanup model | Hugging Face | When you press Download in Setup. |
| Speaker-label models | Hugging Face | The first time a recording needs speakers told apart. |
| More languages model | Hugging Face | Only if you turn on More languages. |
A download tells the server what any download tells it: your IP address, the file you asked for, and a standard line naming the app and system software that is asking. We do not run those servers. GitHub and Hugging Face handle that information under their own privacy policies.
Things that leave your Mac because you asked
- A voice web search. If you say “search Google for…” (or Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, YouTube, Wikipedia), the app opens your browser at that site with your question. The site receives the question, as it would if you had typed it.
- AI apps you connect. You can let apps such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor look things up in your meetings and Scratchpad notes. A small program on your Mac answers their requests. Two switches, off to begin with, decide whether those apps can also see your dictation history and your own notes around a meeting. What an AI app reads, it can send to the company that makes it. That company's privacy policy applies, not this one. You can switch the access off, and see the recent requests, in Settings → Connections.
- Dictating from your iPhone. Off until you turn it on. Your Mac then accepts requests from your phone over your own network (or a private network such as Tailscale, if you use one) and sends the text back to it. Treat it like any service on your network, and use it on a network you trust.
- A shared folder. If you choose a folder to share your dictionary, snippets and transforms with a teammate, those are written to that folder. If the folder is in iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a similar service, that service copies it.
- Sharing and exporting. When you copy, share or export notes or a transcript, they go where you send them.
What we collect
From the app: nothing. The app has no account, sends us no usage statistics, has no crash reporter and shows no ads. We run no server that receives your dictations, recordings, notes or settings, so we have no copy of them to sell, share or hand over.
If you write to us, we receive your email and what you put in it, and we use it to answer you.
Sync between devices (not available yet)
The app contains an optional sync feature that is not switched on and cannot be used yet. Before it is offered to anyone, this policy will be updated to say exactly what leaves your Mac, where it is stored and how it is protected.
This website
These pages are plain files. They set no cookies, run no analytics, and use no fonts or tracking pixels from anywhere. The copy button writes the install command to your clipboard when you press it and reads nothing.
No page of this website loads anything from another site: no library, no font, no tracker.
The company that hosts the site keeps ordinary server logs (the address a request came from, the page and the time), as every web host does. Links to GitHub take you to GitHub, which has its own policy.
Your choices
- Set how long history is kept, or turn it off.
- Turn off “Use nearby text” so the app reads nothing from the screen.
- Turn on Local mode to cut the app off from the internet.
- Export everything, or delete everything, from Settings → Privacy.
- Remove the app completely: quit it from its menu bar icon, then delete
~/Applications/LocalDictation.app(the app),~/Library/Application Support/LocalDictation(your history, notes, meetings, dictionary and the cleanup model) and~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio(the speech model). If you connected AI apps, disconnect them in Settings → Connections first. To also clear saved settings, rundefaults delete dev.localdictation.appin Terminal.
Because we hold no data about you from the app, there is nothing for us to look up, correct or delete on our side. If the law where you live gives you rights over personal data, you can exercise them over everything the app keeps by using the controls above.
Children
The app is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone.
Changes
If the app starts connecting anywhere new, or we ever start collecting anything, this page will say so before that version is released, and the date at the top will change. The changelog lists what each version changed.
Questions about this policy: open an issue (it is public, so leave out anything private) or write to us.