Privacy for Audio Journalists

Privacy for audio journalists

A raw interview is one of the most sensitive files there is. It carries an identifiable voice, an unedited conversation, and sometimes a source whose safety depends on staying unidentified. Most audio tools route that file through cloud services for transcription, AI features, or sync, and a working journalist has no practical way to evaluate the logging, retention, or legal exposure on the other end.

DeadCat is designed so the question does not come up. Recording, storage, transcription, and the assistant all run on the device. There is no account, no upload, and no server of ours involved.

What stays on the device

• The audio. Takes are written to the device's storage and never leave it. There is no cloud sync unless a future, clearly labeled option turns it on, and that would use your own iCloud, not our servers.
• The transcripts. The Transcribe milestone uses Apple's Speech framework on the device. The words your source said never reach a transcription service.
• The assistant. The Assist milestone runs on Apple's Foundation Models, the on-device model behind Apple Intelligence. Conversations with the assistant are processed on your hardware, work offline, and require no account.

Milestone status is on The-DAW; transcription and the assistant are planned milestones, recording works today.

Why this is structural, not a promise

A privacy policy is a promise; an architecture is a fact. DeadCat collects nothing because there is nothing in the design that could collect: no analytics, no account system, no server endpoints. The code is public under the Apache 2.0 license, so the claim is checkable. The Privacy-Policy is short because the design left it little to say.

This matters for journalists in a specific legal sense: material that never reaches a third party cannot be logged, retained, breached, or subpoenaed from one. Protecting a source starts with not creating copies you do not control.

Encryption is on the roadmap

We intend to bring encryption to DeadCat itself, on top of what the platform already provides. Today a take is protected by the device's own encryption: iPhone and iPad encrypt storage when the device is locked, and FileVault covers the Mac. That protects the device. It does not protect a file once it is exported, backed up, or handed to someone else.

The intention is app-level encryption for sessions, designed for journalists first: a session holding a sensitive interview could be locked so its audio and transcript are unreadable without the key, on the device and in any copy that leaves it. This is not built yet. It will arrive as a milestone with the same discipline as the rest of the app, and the specifics will be documented here when they are real.

What this does not solve

DeadCat protects the material on the device and in transit to nowhere. Until the encryption milestone ships, it does not encrypt beyond the device's own protection (use a passcode and FileVault), it does not protect material you export and send, and it cannot protect a conversation that happened over a compromised channel. Treat it as one strong link in a chain you still have to mind.