Privacy Policy

Shaberu has an account, and it holds as little as an account can. Signing in is Sign in with Apple; what we receive is the identifier Apple issues for this app and, if you allow it, an email address to reach you at. No analytics, no tracking, no advertising, and nothing is sold or shared.

Dictation runs on our server. When you speak, the audio is sent to api.getshaberu.com, transcribed, converted and polished, and the finished text is returned. The recording exists only in memory for the length of that one request. It is never written to disk, never backed up, and there is no storage bucket it could be written to.

Transcription is performed by OpenAI and polishing by Anthropic, as processors on our behalf, under their API terms. Neither trains on data submitted through those APIs. They receive the audio and the transcript, and nothing that identifies you.

The text of a dictation is not kept either. It is returned to the app that asked for it and is gone from our side in the same moment. There is no transcript table, no setting to turn off and nothing here to delete. One exception, and it exists to protect you rather than us: an app may ask us to hold its answer for five minutes, so that a connection dropping on the way back does not take the words with it. What we hold is encrypted with a key derived from a value only that device has — not something we can open on our own — and it is discarded when the five minutes are up. The history you can scroll is the last fifty on that device, kept by the app itself.

Deleting your account deletes everything you put into it. Settings, General, Account, Delete account removes the vocabulary, the settings and the device list immediately and irreversibly. Exactly one thing is kept, and it is not content: a one-way hash of the identifier Apple issues for this app, alongside the word and second counts for the week you are in. It exists so that deleting an account is not a way to restart the free allowance. Nothing can be read back out of it, it is deleted once that week ends, and a new account made with the same Apple ID picks the week up where the old one left it.

We record how many words and how many seconds of audio your account used each week. That is what the free plan is measured against and what tells us what serving you costs; it is a count, not content.

The microphone is open only while you are speaking, on both platforms. It opens when a dictation starts and closes when you send or cancel, and the system recording indicator agrees with it.

The iPhone keyboard requires Full Access and uses it for exactly one thing: reaching the container it shares with the app, to read the finished text and to write back start, send and cancel. The keyboard opens no network connection, records nothing, logs no keystrokes and keeps nothing you type.

Accessibility permission on the Mac is what lets Shaberu see the shortcut key and put text into the app in front of you. It also reads the title of that window, on your Mac and nowhere else: the title is checked against the names you gave your own vocabulary lists, so that a word you keep for one project is expected while you are in it. What travels with a dictation is the name of the list that matched — one you made yourself — and nothing more. A title that matches nothing is sent nowhere, and no title is stored on either side.

Your local dictation history is the last 50 transcripts in plain text on the device.

Questions about any of this: contact@getshaberu.com.