Privacy is not a feature. It's the whole product.
Your voice and your vault never leave your Mac. When you use Pro rephrasing, only the transcript text is sent to a Zero-Data-Retention provider. Here's exactly what stays local, what goes to the cloud, and what is never sent.
TL;DR
- Voice audio is transcribed on-device and discarded. It never touches the internet.
- Your vault — files, folders, tags, links — never leaves your Mac.
- Rephrasing (Pro, optional) sends only the transcript text to Groq with Zero Data Retention.
- Both providers are contractually prohibited from training on your data.
- Telemetry is anonymous, opt-out, and every event is documented in full.
What stays, what's sent, what's never sent
Stays on your Mac
- Your voice recordings (transcribed locally by Whisper, then discarded)
- Your vault contents, file names, tags, and links
- Your dictation history
Sent to the cloud (only when you use rephrasing)
- The transcript text of your dictation
- The rephrasing instruction (e.g., "clean up grammar")
Never gets sent
- Your voice recordings
- Your vault content, files, or folder structure
- Anything identifying you beyond your license key
Rephrasing uses Groq as the primary provider and Fireworks as a fallback if Groq is down. Both run Llama 3.3 70B. Groq has Zero Data Retention enabled on our organization. Fireworks does not log prompts or generations on open-source models by default. Both are contractually prohibited from training on your data. Both process data in memory and discard it after the response is returned.
How to verify this yourself
You don't have to take our word for it. ThoughtMic is designed to be inspectable:
Run Little Snitch. With rephrasing disabled, the app should make zero outbound network connections during dictation. With rephrasing on, you'll see one call to thoughtmic-worker.thoughtmic.workers.dev per rephrase, carrying transcript text only.
The telemetry and crash-reporting SDKs we use are open source: TelemetryDeck SwiftSDK and Sentry Cocoa SDK.
Your controls
In Preferences → Privacy you can:
· Turn off cloud rephrasing entirely (app works 100% offline)
· Turn off anonymous usage metrics
· Turn off crash reports (already off by default)
· Mark any dictation as Private — it skips telemetry and vault writes