Transcription Studio Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how FCT Technologies LLC handles information for Transcription Studio.

Summary

• We do not sell personal data.
• We do not run ads, and we use no third-party analytics or tracking SDKs.
• Transcription itself never leaves your device. Speech recognition, speaker separation and highlight extraction all run locally. No transcription service, cloud provider or third-party API ever receives your audio.
• Storage is a different question, and the honest answer is that it is not local. Transcription Studio requires an FCT account, and your library, including the recordings themselves, is stored in that account on FCT’s cloud infrastructure.
• Transcription Studio reports anonymous diagnostics, crash and performance data keyed to a random install identifier that is joined to no account, and never any of your content.

We separate those last two points deliberately, because “on-device transcription” and “on-device storage” are not the same claim and it would be easy to let the first imply the second. It does not.

Your FCT account

Transcription Studio requires an FCT account. There is no signed-out mode. You create an account with Sign in with Apple, Sign in with Google, or an email address and password.

We store the account identifier from your chosen sign-in method, or your email address. Authentication is handled by our authentication provider (Supabase) on our behalf.

What runs on your device only

• Speech recognition. WhisperKit, running as a Core ML model on your own hardware.
• Speaker separation. An on-device diarizer running on the Apple Neural Engine: NVIDIA’s Sortformer on macOS, SpeakerKit on iPhone.
• Highlight extraction. Decisions, action items, events, people and places are pulled out of a transcript by Apple’s on-device foundation models. The transcript is not sent to us or to any AI provider for this.

There is no API key in the App for a transcription or AI service, because there is no such service in the pipeline.

What Transcription Studio stores in your account

Your library syncs to your own access-controlled space on FCT’s cloud infrastructure (a Postgres database and file storage hosted on Supabase), scoped to your account and readable by no other account:

• sessions and their metadata, including title, dates, duration and any place tag you allowed
• the full transcript: every segment, its timing, and its speaker label
• extracted highlights, decisions, action items, events, people and places
• speaker assignments, including any real name you bind to a speaker
• the recordings themselves, uploaded as files to your account’s storage

If you mark a session private and lock it behind Face ID or Touch ID, that lock controls access on your device. It is not an additional encryption layer over the copy stored in your account.

What stays on your device only

• Your app settings and appearance.
• The Spotlight index that lets you and Siri find sessions on that device.
• Media you have imported but not yet turned into a session.

Permissions

Each permission is requested when it becomes useful rather than at launch, and each is optional: the App works without any of them except the ones a given capture path needs.

• Microphone: to record. Recognition runs on your device; the recording and transcript are then stored in your account.
• System audio capture (macOS): to record a call or meeting playing on your Mac, through ScreenCaptureKit and the standard screen-recording permission. You control what is captured.
• Contacts: read only, to match names in a transcript to people you know so speakers show real names. A name you bind to a speaker is saved with that transcript in your account.
• Calendars: write only. The App adds a meeting you choose from a transcript. It never reads your existing calendar.
• Reminders: to add an action item you choose from a transcript.
• Location: captured only while recording, and only to tag a session with where it was made. The tag syncs with the session. The App does not track your location at any other time.
• Face ID / Touch ID: to unlock sessions you marked private.

You can change any of these at any time in system settings.

Analytics and tracking

Transcription Studio contains no third-party analytics SDK, no advertising identifiers, no behavioral profiling, and no cross-app tracking. Nothing about you is shared with another company.

Transcription Studio does report anonymous diagnostics to FCT: crash and performance data, a short trail of screen and action names (never content) leading up to a problem, feature-use counts, and timing measurements such as how long setup took. Screen and action names are fixed values built into the app, so nothing you type, view, or store can appear in them.

Diagnostics are keyed to a random install identifier created on first launch. They are not linked to your account or identity, the diagnostics system has no connection to account data by construction, and reinstalling the app starts a new identifier. We use diagnostics to fix crashes and improve the app, and for nothing else.

Deleting your account erases everything in it (see Your choices and deleting your data), but not these: nothing marks which diagnostics are yours, so none can be singled out, not by us, and not on request. They expire on their own schedule instead (see Retention).

Sharing

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for advertising, profiling, or analytics. We do not use your content to train AI models.

We use service providers to operate the App: Supabase for authentication, database and file storage. They process data on our behalf, under our instructions.

When you use Apple platform features such as Sign in with Apple, notifications, Contacts, Calendars or Reminders, Apple processes data as part of providing those services, governed by Apple’s own terms. The same applies to Google if you sign in with Google.

Retention

Your library is retained while your account exists. Deleting a session in the App removes it, recording included, from your account across your devices.

Diagnostics are kept on their own clock, because they are not tied to your account: usage metrics and counters are deleted after 180 days, and crash diagnostics after 400 days. A daily job enforces both windows.

Your choices and deleting your data

• Delete Transcription Studio’s data. Settings removes everything the App holds in your account, transcripts and recordings alike, on our servers and on your devices, and leaves your FCT account and any other FCT app intact.
• Delete your account. Settings also offers account deletion, which removes your FCT account and all of its data everywhere, across every FCT app.
• Delete the app to remove its local copy from that device. This does not delete your account, and signing back in restores your library.
• Decline permissions and change them later in system settings.

Recording other people

Transcription Studio records conversations. Laws on recording differ by jurisdiction and some require every participant’s consent. Obtaining any consent the law requires is your responsibility. Please see the Terms of Service.

Children

Transcription Studio is a productivity tool and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect information. No system is perfectly secure.

If a breach happens, this is what we do. Where a personal-data breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. Where the risk to you is high, we notify you without undue delay, describing what happened, what data was involved, what we are doing about it, and what you can do. We keep a record of every breach and its handling whether or not it is notifiable.

We hold the whole app fleet to this single deadline deliberately: it is the strictest one that applies to us, so meeting it satisfies the others rather than requiring separate timetables to be tracked and one of them to be missed.

International users

FCT Technologies LLC is based in the United States. If you use Transcription Studio outside the United States, your information may be processed in the United States or in other locations where our service providers operate.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

FCT Technologies LLC may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If that happens, the date at the top of this page will be updated.

Contact

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, contact:

FCT Technologies LLC
support@fct-technologies.com, and we respond within 5 business days