Privacy
What leaves the machine. What doesn't.
The desktop app keeps everything on your machine by default. The iPhone companion sends what it records to your own computer, encrypted so that we cannot read it. This page covers both, in that order.
Last updated 16 October 2026 · desktop app verified against v0.6.65 · iPhone app v1.0.0
The desktop app
LocalTranscript on Windows, macOS and Linux: the app that does the transcribing. What follows describes that app, and only that app. The iPhone companion is covered separately below.
On your computer by default.
- Meeting audio. Recorded to your local disk.
- Transcripts. Generated by local models.
- Voiceprints. Speaker recognition runs locally and voice profiles never upload.
- Notes. Anything you type alongside.
- AI outputs. Summaries, reports and answers from the local LLM.
- Dictation history. The rolling log.
- Library index. Embeddings and search metadata.
- Speaker names. The labels you assign.
Every possible network call.
- Update check. GitHub Releases. HTTP GET, no user data.
- Model downloads. The first-run wizard fetches the AI models from Hugging Face, with GitHub as a fallback mirror; every file is checksum-verified. It only happens when you start it.
- User-triggered feedback. Only when you click Send: your message, optional email and attachments you explicitly add.
- Cloud AI, only if you configure it. Your own API key, your chosen provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Infomaniak in Switzerland). Local is the default.
- Calendar fetch. Only if you add your own calendar URL.
- Anonymous usage reports, only if you turn them on. One small report a day with rounded counts, never content. Off by default; details below.
Each of these is logged in the in-app network log and blocked by Hard Offline Mode. On the desktop app, meeting content has no upload path unless you configure a cloud provider yourself.
Anonymous usage reports (only if you turn them on)
The desktop app can send one small anonymous report a day, but only after you say yes in the app. It is off by default, and the app works exactly the same without it.
Only after you say yes, either to a one-time question in the Library or in Settings › Privacy & data. If you never answer, nothing is sent. Once you have said yes, the app sends at most one report a day.
- a random ID, created when you say yes. It is not linked to your licence, to an account or to your computer.
- the app version, update channel and build type
- your operating system (major version only), the processor type, the maker of the graphics card (for example Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, never its model or serial number), and a rough class for the graphics card and memory
- the app's language
- rounded counts of meetings recorded, imported or sent from the phone, dictations, AI actions, processed minutes and failed processing steps. Counts are ranges such as 0, 1, 2-5, 6-20 or 21+, never exact numbers.
- how AI actions, transcriptions and speaker detection ended on your computer (worked, cut off, failed, crashed or stopped), with only the engine, the model and the graphics setup they ran on (for example “AI action, Qwen 2B, graphics card: 2-5 crashed”), as rounded counts. This shows us which setups need fixing. Never the error message, never what was being processed.
A report never contains recordings, transcripts, notes, summaries, AI results, meeting titles, names, email addresses, contacts, voice profiles, file paths, user names, computer names or error messages.
Only to improve the app. Reports are not sold, not used for marketing and not shared with advertisers.
In Switzerland. Reports are stored by Supabase, acting as our processor, in a database in Zurich. Our server does not store your IP address; Supabase's own request logs keep request metadata for a short time. Individual reports are deleted after 90 days. After that, only totals across all users are kept.
- See every report before it is sent, and the last one that was sent.
- Switch reports off at any time.
- Start over with a new ID.
- Delete the reports already sent.
All of this is in Settings › Privacy & data. Organisations can force reports off with the admin policy key telemetry: false.
The iPhone companion app
The iPhone app is a companion to LocalTranscript on your computer. It records audio and sends it to a computer you have paired it with. We do not run speech recognition on our servers, and we never receive your recordings in a form we can read.
The microphone is used only while you are recording, and only after you start a recording yourself. Recordings are stored on your phone until you delete them.
The camera is used for one purpose: reading the pairing code your computer displays. Nothing is stored and no image leaves the phone.
When your phone and your computer are on the same network, the recording goes directly from one to the other. No server is involved and nothing reaches the internet.
When your phone is not on that network, the recording travels through our relay so that it is not lost. Before it leaves your phone it is encrypted end to end (X25519, XChaCha20-Poly1305), using keys that were exchanged directly between your phone and your computer when you paired them. We do not have those keys and cannot decrypt what we forward. Your computer decrypts it. Transcripts, and a summary if you ran an AI summary on your computer, come back to your phone the same way.
Even though we cannot read the contents, operating a relay means we can see certain technical information:
- opaque routing identifiers that tell us which mailbox to put the data in, and a device identifier for each pairing. Neither is linked to your name, your email or your phone's hardware.
- what kind of message each transfer is (a part of a recording, a transcript, a status update, a title or language change, a receipt), but never its content
- the size of each encrypted transfer, and when it happened
- when your computer is connected to the relay
- the IP address the request came from, which may be retained in server access logs
- for every pairing that uses the relay, your phone's Apple push token (an opaque delivery address) and the time of the last wake-up we sent. We need it to wake the app so it can fetch a transcript in the background. Turning on notifications in the app only makes that wake-up visible; the token is stored either way, and it is deleted when the pairing is removed.
We cannot see who you are, who was in your meeting, or anything that was said.
An encrypted recording or transcript is deleted from the relay as soon as the other device has collected it, and at the latest after 7 days, collected or not. If your computer has not collected a recording after about 5 days, the app sends it again (at most twice) so it is not lost, and tells you if it still has not arrived.
The relay runs on Supabase (Supabase Inc., on Amazon Web Services) in the eu-central-2 region, Zurich, Switzerland. Supabase acts as our processor.
If you allow notifications, we send your phone a signal when a transcript is ready. That signal contains no part of your meeting: no text, no title, no identifier. If you decline, the same signal still wakes the app silently to fetch the transcript, and everything still works.
The iPhone app contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier and no tracking of any kind. There is no account, so there is nothing for us to build a profile against. We do not sell or share data with anyone, because we do not have any to sell.
- Turning the companion off on your computer stops it accepting recordings.
- Unpairing, on the phone or on your computer, removes the connection and asks the relay to delete everything still waiting for that pairing (recordings on their way to your computer, transcripts on their way back) and the push token stored for it.
- Deleting a recording on the phone deletes it from the phone. You can also ask for it to be deleted on your computer; if your computer cannot be reached, the app keeps asking until it can. Anything already delivered to your computer otherwise lives there, under your control.
- Deleting the app removes every recording it holds on the phone. Recordings are part of your iPhone's backups (iCloud or computer) only until they have reached your computer; after that they are excluded from backups. So a lost phone does not lose an undelivered meeting. Copies in backups made earlier remain in those backups.
For questions about privacy, write to hello@localtranscript.com.
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Verify it, then run a meeting through it.
Open the desktop app's in-app network log (or Wireshark) and watch the wire yourself.