Your voice stays yours.

• While you hold the hotkey, your microphone is on.
• When you release the hotkey, your audio is sent to a transcription service, returned as text, and immediately discarded. Nothing is stored on the server.
• Halopen does not record continuously. It does not transcribe in the background. It does not capture your screen.
• Halopen does not sell or share your data. There is nothing to sell — none of it is kept.

To dictate text, Halopen needs to hear what you say while you hold the hotkey and to know that you held the hotkey. Specifically, when the hotkey is held:

• Microphone audio — captured by the operating system and held in memory in a temporary buffer.
• Hotkey state — when you start and stop holding the key.

When the hotkey is released, the buffered audio is compressed and uploaded to our transcription service, transcribed, and the resulting text is placed at your cursor in the active app.

When the hotkey is not held, the microphone is not active. Halopen does not stream audio continuously. There is no “always-on” mode.

Audio leaves your Mac in only one circumstance: a hotkey-bounded clip is sent to our hosted transcription endpoint. The endpoint forwards the clip to a third-party automated speech recognition service, returns the text to your Mac, and discards the audio. Halopen does not retain the audio on the server, and our transcription provider has contractually committed not to train on or retain the audio either.

The local recording, the network upload, and the returned text are all ephemeral. None of them are written to disk on the server. Logs are limited to operational metadata (timestamps, anonymous request IDs, response times) used for monitoring uptime, with no transcript content recorded.

Halopen stores a small amount of state in the standard macOS user defaults database for your account:

• Your chosen hotkey, recording-pill preference, and sound-cue preference.
• A monthly transcription-minutes counter so the menu can show you usage.
• The license token associated with your subscription, after you sign in.

That is the entire footprint. There is no transcript history, no “recent dictations” window, no folder of saved audio. If you want to delete this data, deleting Halopen and removing its preferences via ~/Library/Preferences/com.halopen.Halopen.plist wipes it.

• Your screen. Halopen does not capture, share, or analyze your display.
• Your typing. Halopen does not log keystrokes apart from detecting whether the hotkey is currently held.
• Other applications. Halopen reads the bundle identifier of the foreground app to send your typed text there. It does not read other applications’ content.
• Your clipboard. Halopen briefly snapshots and restores your clipboard around an injection so it isn’t clobbered. The snapshot is discarded immediately.

Halopen relies on the following hosted services to function. None receive identifying information beyond the minimum required for operation.

• Supabase — hosts our transcription endpoint.
• OpenAI — performs the speech-to-text transcription. Audio is processed and immediately discarded; OpenAI does not train on enterprise API audio sent through this endpoint.
• Cloudflare — serves halopen.com and the download.

Halopen is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. The product is offered to general audiences.

If we change this policy in a way that materially expands what we collect or retain, we will email subscribers and post the change at the top of this page before it takes effect. The previous version remains available on request.

Questions, deletion requests, or anything else: email hello@halopen.com. We answer in person, usually within a day.