Privacy Policy
Austin's Transcriptor is built around a simple idea: your audio is yours, and it should never leave your Mac. The app does its work entirely on your device.
What the app does on your Mac
You drag an audio file (or capture system audio) into the app. The app converts it to PCM, hands it to a local Whisper model, and produces a transcript. Speaker labels come from a second local model. Both models run inside the app's sandbox on your machine. Your audio is never uploaded.
Transcripts are stored as JSON files on your Mac at ~/Library/Application Support/AustinsTranscriptor/transcripts/. Audio files stay where you put them; the app references them via Apple's security-scoped bookmarks.
What our servers see
None of your audio. None of your transcripts.
The app downloads Whisper model files from Hugging Face the first time you select a model. Hugging Face receives standard HTTP metadata for those downloads (IP, user agent). After download, models live on your Mac and the app no longer talks to Hugging Face for that model.
This marketing website (austinstranscriptor.com) is hosted on Netlify and protected by Cloudflare. Standard request metadata is visible to those providers. We do not run analytics on this site.
Advertising
The free version of the app shows one small banner ad in the sidebar. The ad is served by a third-party network (Carbon Ads, Google AdSense, or a fallback house ad) inside a sandboxed WKWebView. The ad network may collect:
- Coarse location derived from your IP address
- Standard device metadata (OS version, language)
- Cookies used for fraud prevention and ad targeting
The ad network does not receive your audio, your transcripts, your filenames, your microphone, or any data the app produces. The WKWebView is isolated from app data by macOS.
If you purchase the lifetime ad-free upgrade, no ad is ever loaded and the ad network receives nothing.
Detailed practices for the ad provider in use are described at carbonads.net/privacy (Carbon Ads) and policies.google.com/technologies/ads (Google AdSense).
Purchases
The $39.99 lifetime ad-free upgrade is sold and processed by Apple via the Mac App Store. We never see your name, email, payment method, or billing address. Apple tells the app whether you've purchased — that's the only purchase information our app receives.
What we don't collect
- No account creation, no username, no email
- No analytics SDK that tracks you across the app
- No crash reporting that includes personal information
- No microphone access unless you explicitly enable system-audio capture
- No data sold to data brokers, ever
System audio capture (optional)
If you choose to record system audio (for example to transcribe a Zoom call playing on your Mac), macOS asks you to grant Screen Recording permission. That recording is captured to a temporary .wav file on your Mac, transcribed locally, and the audio file is deleted unless you save it. Nothing is uploaded.
Children
Austin's Transcriptor is rated 4+ in the Mac App Store and is suitable for general audiences. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.
Your choices
- Remove ads: tap "Remove Ads" in the toolbar and complete the one-time $39.99 purchase.
- Screen recording (system audio): System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording → toggle Austin's Transcriptor on or off.
- Delete a transcript: right-click in the sidebar → Delete. Or move/empty the folder at
~/Library/Application Support/AustinsTranscriptor/to clear everything.
Changes
If this policy materially changes we'll update the effective date at the top and, where appropriate, surface the change in-app on the next launch.