Privacy policy

Last updated 4 September 2026.

Who this is about

Pilcrow is a macOS application published by The Alpha Circuit (“we”). This policy covers the application and the website at pilcrow.thealphacircuit.com.

What the app collects

Nothing. There is no account, no sign-up, no e-mail field, and no identifier for you anywhere in the application.

• Your speech is transcribed by Apple’s on-device speech models, on your Mac. The audio is not uploaded, not sent to us, and not sent to any third party.
• Your transcripts exist in memory while the app is running. The recent-transcripts list in Settings is a fixed-size buffer in memory, not a file. Quitting Pilcrow discards them.
• Nothing is written to disk except your own settings — your chosen trigger key and similar preferences — which macOS stores locally in the usual preferences file for the app.
• There is no analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or licence check of any kind.

Network activity

Pilcrow makes exactly one kind of network request: it asks this site whether a newer version exists. Nothing else leaves your Mac — not your audio, not your transcripts, not a word of what you dictate. Dictation itself works with Wi-Fi switched off, and you are welcome to confirm all of this with Little Snitch or by pulling the cable.

That request tells this site your IP address, which version you are running, and roughly when you asked. We do not log it or build anything from it, but it is a request, and a privacy policy that omitted it would be the kind of technicality this one exists to avoid.

You can switch it off. Settings, General, Updates, “Check automatically”. With it off Pilcrow makes no network requests at all, and you can still check by hand from the menu whenever you want to.

One thing does use the network, and it is not us: the first time you dictate in a new language, macOS downloads that language’s speech model from Apple. That download is made by the operating system, on your behalf, under Apple’s privacy policy. We are not a party to it and receive nothing from it.

The permissions we ask for

Permissions are granted by you in System Settings and can be revoked there at any time.

• Microphone — to hear you while you are dictating. Audio is held only for as long as it takes to transcribe it.
• Accessibility — to notice the trigger key, and to paste the result into the field you were typing in. It is not used to read the contents of other applications.

The website

This site is static HTML. It runs no analytics and sets no cookies — there is no tracking script, no pixel, no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Our hosting provider records ordinary server logs (IP address, page requested, timestamp) as an unavoidable part of serving a web page. Fonts are self-hosted from this domain rather than fetched from Google, so loading a page contacts nobody but this server.

If you write to us

If you e-mail support@thealphacircuit.com, we keep the message so we can reply and so we can recognise the problem if someone reports it again. We do not add you to a mailing list — there is not one. Ask us to delete the correspondence and we will.

Your rights

Privacy law (the GDPR, the CCPA, and their equivalents) gives you rights to see, correct, export, and delete the personal data a company holds about you. We mention them mainly to say that there is nothing here to exercise them against — we hold no data about users of the app. The one exception is e-mail you have sent us, covered above.

Children

Pilcrow is not directed at children, and since it collects no data it collects none from them either.

Changes to this policy

This policy was written when the app had no network feature at all. Version 1.0 added Sparkle update checks, and the Network activity section above describes exactly what they send and how to switch them off. That is the only thing that has changed, and it is the only thing this page has ever had to disclose.

The promise stands for whatever comes next: if the app ever sends anything else, this page will say so before that version ships, and the date at the top will change. We will not quietly widen what is collected.

Contact

Questions about this policy: support@thealphacircuit.com. See also the terms of use.