Whisperpad privacy policy
Last updated 2 August 2026.
This covers the Whisperpad app for Windows. The main privacy policy covers the website.
The short version
- Your voice never leaves your PC. Transcription happens on your own hardware.
- There is no account, no sign‑in, and no server belonging to me for anything to be sent to.
- No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no adverts.
- I cannot see anything you dictate. Not because I promise not to look — because it is never sent anywhere.
- The app connects to the internet exactly once: to download the speech model you choose.
What happens to your audio
When you hold the hotkey, the app records from your microphone into memory. That audio is passed to a speech model running as part of the app on your own processor or graphics card, converted to text, and then discarded.
The recording is never written to disk and never transmitted. There is no cloud speech service involved — no Google, no Amazon, no OpenAI, no Microsoft. The model file on your machine does the work by itself.
The one time it uses the internet
Speech models are large, so they are not bundled with the app. When you choose one, it is downloaded over HTTPS from Hugging Face, which hosts the open models the app uses.
This is an ordinary file download. No account is involved, nothing about you is sent, and Hugging Face is told only that a file was requested — the same as downloading anything else from a website. Hugging Face sees your IP address for that request, as any web server does, and their own privacy policy applies to it.
Once a model is on your disk, the app never contacts the internet again. It works perfectly on a computer that has been disconnected entirely, and you are welcome to block it in your firewall after downloading.
What is stored on your computer
| What | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Settings | %APPDATA%\Whisperpad\settings.json |
Your hotkey, chosen model, language and audio preferences. |
| Speech models | %APPDATA%\Whisperpad\models, or a folder you choose |
The downloaded model files that do the transcribing. |
| Log file | %APPDATA%\Whisperpad\logs\app.log |
A record of what the app did, for diagnosing problems. |
All three are yours. Deleting the folder removes everything the app has ever kept. None of it is synchronised or backed up anywhere by the app.
The log file does not contain what you say
The log records what the app did — that a recording started, which model ran, how long it took, and how many characters came back. It does not contain the transcription itself.
Earlier builds wrote the first 80 characters of each transcription into the
log to help diagnose problems. That was a bad idea — dictating a
password into a login box would have put it in a file — and it has
been removed. If you ran an older build, deleting
app.log clears anything it captured.
One thing you should know
Text is inserted using your clipboard
To put text into another program reliably, the app copies the transcription to the Windows clipboard, pastes it, and then puts your previous clipboard contents back.
That works well, but if you run a clipboard manager or clipboard history — including the one built into Windows — it may keep its own copy of what was dictated. That copy belongs to that program, not to this one.
Permissions the app uses
- Microphone — only while you are holding the hotkey. It is not listening the rest of the time, and there is no wake word.
- Keyboard — to notice your hotkey, and to type the result into the focused window. Keystrokes are not recorded or logged.
- Clipboard — briefly, as described above.
The app does not read your documents, your browser history, or anything else on your computer.
Children
The app collects nothing from anyone, of any age, so there is nothing here that could be collected from a child.
Changes
If any of this changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything that affects you will be stated here before a version making that change is released.
Contact
Questions about this policy — see how to get in touch. Since nothing about you is held, there is no data to request or delete: deleting the app’s folder is complete and final.