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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

Claim: For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac. Only you have access to them.

From the docs:

> Video data is never sent off your Mac. The only data sent to a cloud service is the audio. We send it to a cloud transcription service in order to generate a transcript of what was said. This transcript is created so you can read it and search for specific words that were said. [1]

Yeah, we only "store locally", but hey, that doesn't stop us from sending it to a third party service for transcription. I was already uncomfortable with the idea of being voice recorded. Reading between the lines of how it works doesn't inspire a ton of confidence.

[1]: https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/6526620-recording-meeting...

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The reason we wrote that article is to be 100% transparent about what happens to your data. No reading between the lines necessary.

The only time this cloud-based transcription is used is during a Zoom meeting, which is already in the cloud.

When you join a new Zoom Meeting we prompt you to ask if you want to record & transcribe the audio. You can choose to do this selectively for each meeting, or not record & transcribe any of them if you aren't comfortable with cloud-based transcription.

That said, we do plan to move away from cloud-based transcription, likely with Whisper from OpenAI.

It would help to tweak the marketing a bit around recording "everything you say." Is the mic always on? Is it always recording in the background? Is it just for Zoom/Video Conf meetings? Because the first impression I get is that of a scary Black Mirror episode.

You are right, it's a bit too aspirational right now. The "everything you say" part is just for Zoom meetings right now. Once we implement local transcription with OpenAI Whisper then I think it makes sense to expand beyond meetings to things like YouTube videos, Podcasts, Audiobooks, or anything else you might want to search by "what you've heard".

Yea my first impression when reading the landing page was also that this is exactly a Black Mirror episode: "The Entire History of You": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/

The "memex" in various form is a classic idea many tried to implement with the best tech of the moment, BUT there is a big BUT: I can't trust modern hw, full of closed source gazillion of SLoC firmwares, with networking capabilities and normally connected everywhere. Similarly I can't trust a third party closed source OS or EVEN a FLOSS one not developed by a vast community but by few big entities centered in a country (no matter witch, mine included).

In the modern world even the most genuine and honest people can't be trusted on black boxes so such kind of memex while wonderful and potentially useful have a so big safety trade off that's a no-go for me... Personally I do not even live my smartphone near me at home since I consider it a macro-spy tool operated by someone else. I can't do much for in-car stuff since I need cars and can't live on historic one for mere comfort. But more than that is beyond personal Overton window of acceptability...

Anyway, that's a very nice implementation of a very nice idea.

They could easily use offline transcription like Vosk

Then don't use it

you got downvoted for it but it's a valid point. if you have an objection due to the privacy aspects then you're not in the target market. TAM is big and doesn't include you at this juncture.

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