Security at Murmurtale

Our approach: collect less

Murmurtale’s default is on-device processing. On the free tier, your audio and text are transcribed and cleaned up entirely on your Mac and are never transmitted to us. We cannot lose, leak, or be compelled to hand over content we never receive. That is the foundation everything else builds on.

Current controls

These describe how Murmurtale works today. We have deliberately kept the list to things we actually do — no certifications, audits, or guarantees we have not earned.

• Local-first by default. Free-tier dictation itself never leaves your device. A free account tracks only a monthly word count — never the words — and the first 10,000 words need no account at all.
• Encrypted transport for cloud features. When you opt into the Pro cloud engine, audio/text travel over TLS 1.3 to the backend and its subprocessors.
• In-memory cloud processing, nothing stored by us. The Pro cloud path holds request content in memory only and never logs or persists it on our servers — this is enforced structurally in the backend handlers. Our cloud subprocessors process content transiently; a subprocessor may retain it briefly (up to 30 days) for trust-and-safety monitoring before automatic deletion, and never uses it to train models. More in the Privacy Policy.
• Minimal, non-content metadata. The backend keeps only operational metadata (timestamps, counts, error codes, account ID and tier) needed to run and bill the service — never your dictation audio or text.
• Privacy-safe diagnostics, off-switchable. Crash/error diagnostics carry no dictated text, audio, prompts, dictionary terms, manuscript content, email, or secrets, and can be turned off in Preferences.
• Least-privilege permissions. Murmurtale requests only Microphone and Accessibility, used solely to capture dictation, detect the hotkey, and insert text.
• Distribution integrity. The Mac app is signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple. In Apple’s words, Apple checked it for malicious software and none was detected. Apple also states plainly that Notarization of macOS software is not App Review.

Not yet in place / what we are not claiming

To keep this page honest, some things we deliberately do not assert at this stage:

• We don’t claim zero vendor retention. Our cloud subprocessors process content transiently, but a subprocessor may retain it briefly — up to 30 days — for trust-and-safety monitoring before automatic deletion. They never use your content to train models, and Murmurtale actively deletes each AssemblyAI transcript the moment your result is returned.
• No third-party security certification or audit (for example SOC 2 or ISO 27001).
• No specific encryption-at-rest boundary or key-management guarantee beyond what is described here.
• No formal uptime or incident-response SLA.

If and when any of these change, this page will say so plainly, with a date.

Responsible disclosure

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, we want to hear from you. Please report it privately rather than disclosing it publicly, and give us a reasonable chance to investigate and fix it before any public discussion.

Helpful reports include what you found, the steps to reproduce it, and the potential impact. Please do not include real private content — a synthetic example is enough.

A note on scope

Murmurtale is a Mac app in a founding-writer beta. This page covers the current Mac app, accounts, and optional Pro cloud features. We will update it as those systems change rather than promise controls in advance.