Privacy & security
Privacy Mode decides whether your content is ever used to improve models. Cloud Sync decides whether your notes are stored on our servers. They are independent — neither one implies the other — and with Privacy Mode on and Cloud Sync off, nothing is retained at all.
This page explains both in plain language, along with what leaves your device, why it has to, and the certifications we do not hold. It is not the legal document. The Privacy Policy is, and it governs.
Said first, because it matters most
Waver is a cloud transcriber. Your audio leaves your device — on every plan, in every configuration, including the zero-retention one. There is no on-device mode and we are not going to imply there is. Everything below is about what happens to that audio and what is kept afterwards, which is a different question from whether it travels.
The two controls
Most products bundle these into a single "privacy" setting, which forces a choice nobody wants to make: give up sync to stop the training, or accept the training to keep your notes on more than one device. Waver splits them because they are genuinely different questions and you may well have different answers.
Is my content used to make the product better?
On, your content is never used to improve models.
On
Your recordings, transcripts and notes are used to give you your result and for nothing else. They are not reviewed, not sampled, and not fed into any improvement loop.
Off
Waver may use your content to improve the product. This is the permissive setting — it is the one that makes the app better over time, and it is a real trade, which is why it is a switch and not a default we chose for you.
What it is not: It does not keep the audio on your device. Transcription happens off-device in every configuration, so Privacy Mode governs what happens to your content, not whether it travels.
Is my content stored where I can get it back?
Off, your notes are never stored on our servers.
Off
Nothing is stored on our servers. Your notes exist on the device that made them, and only there — which also means if that device goes in a river, so do the notes. There is no copy for us to restore, because that is the entire point of the setting.
On
Your notes live on your account, so the note you dictated on your phone is on the laptop when you open it, and a lost device is an inconvenience rather than a loss.
What it is not: It does not stop the audio being sent for transcription. The recording still makes the round trip; Cloud Sync governs whether the result is kept afterwards.
| Privacy Mode | Cloud Sync | Called | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| On | Off | Zero retention | Nothing is kept. Your audio is transcribed and the text comes back to your device; no note is stored on our servers and nothing is used to improve models. This is the maximum-privacy configuration and it is available on every plan, including the free one. |
| On | On | Private, but portable | Your notes are stored so they follow you between devices, and they are still never used to improve models. This is the setting most people want: sync is a convenience, not a consent. |
| Off | Off | Local, but permissive | No note is stored on our servers, but your content may be used to improve the product. An unusual combination, and a legitimate one — it says you do not need sync but you do not mind helping. |
| Off | On | Fully permissive | Notes are stored and your content may be used to improve the product. Everything works, nothing is withheld. If this is not what you want, both switches are in Settings and neither costs anything to flip. |
Both switches live in Settings, both are free, and neither is buried behind a paid tier or a support request. Changing one does not change the other.
The zero-retention corner
Your audio is transcribed, the text comes back to your device, and that is the end of it. No note on our servers. Nothing used to improve models. Nothing to hand over, because there is nothing there.
What zero retention means
Nothing is kept. After the transcript is returned there is no stored copy of the recording or the note on our side, and no downstream use of either.
What it does not mean
Nothing is sent. The audio still makes the round trip to a transcription provider — that is how the transcript gets made. Retention and transmission are different claims and only one of them is zero.
The cost of this configuration is honest and worth knowing before you pick it: with Cloud Sync off there is no copy anywhere but the device in your hand. Nothing syncs to your other machines, and if that device is lost, the notes are gone. We cannot restore them — not as a policy, but as a fact about where they were.
What leaves your device
No "trusted partners". The providers are named, because a list you cannot see is a list you cannot evaluate. Before any of this happens the first time, the app asks — and if you decline, the AI features stay off rather than quietly degrading.
| What | Goes to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your audio | Groq (Whisper), or NVIDIA NIM for English | Transcription. This is the round trip that makes the product work — there is no on-device mode. |
| Your Personal Dictionary | Sent in the same request as the audio | So the recogniser hears your colleague's name, your product and your internal jargon correctly the first time. Explained in full below. |
| Transcript text you act on | Google (Gemini) | Cleanup, transforms, translation, summaries and AI chat. Only text you actually asked to transform — plain transcription never reaches this provider. |
| Images you scan | Google (Gemini) | Pulling text off a photographed page of handwriting. |
| Your email address | Waver | Signing you in and telling you about your account. Passwords are hashed, never stored in a readable form. |
| Payment details | Lemon Squeezy | Subscriptions are handled by our payment processor, not by us. |
Why your dictionary travels with the audio
Your Personal Dictionary — the names, products and internal jargon you have added or that Waver has learned from your corrections — is sent in the same request as the recording, as context for the decoder. That is the difference between a transcript that gets the surname right and one that guesses phonetically and gets corrected afterwards. Find-and-replace on a finished transcript cannot recover a name the recogniser never considered; supplying it up front means the model is already weighing it while it decodes.
The trade is straightforward and we would rather you knew it: that dictionary contains real names of real people and real projects, and it leaves your device with every recording. It is subject to the same encryption and the same two switches as everything else. If a term is too sensitive to send, do not add it — the feature is opt-in per term, and a dictionary with a gap in it is still a working dictionary.
The claims we will stand behind
Six statements, each one narrow enough to be checked. Nothing here says "bank-grade" or "military-grade", because those phrases describe nothing and are chosen precisely because they cannot be falsified.
Every request between your device, Waver and the AI providers runs over TLS. Nothing about your audio or your notes crosses a network in the clear.
Notes stored under Cloud Sync are encrypted on disk. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, so a database dump does not hand anyone your password.
We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information or your content. There is no advertising business here to sell it to — the free tier is ad-free and the paid tier is how Waver makes money.
Under the terms Waver operates on, Google and Groq do not train their models on API content. That is a contractual position with those providers, and it is separate from — and additional to — what Privacy Mode controls on our side.
The app asks before the first time your content goes to an AI provider. Decline and the AI features stay switched off rather than quietly degrading.
One note or the whole account. No support ticket, no retention specialist, no email asking why you are leaving.
Note the fourth one carefully: "the providers do not train on it" and "Waver does not use it to improve models" are two different promises from two different parties. The first is contractual, and holds regardless of your settings. The second is what Privacy Mode controls. Collapsing them into one sentence would be tidier and less true.
What we do not have
Not "certification pending", not "SOC 2 ready", not "aligned with". Those formulations exist to be misread by a procurement team in a hurry, and we are not going to use them. Formal certification is simply not in place yet.
No Type I and no Type II report. No audit is complete and none is in progress.
Not certified.
Not certified, and we do not sign Business Associate Agreements. Waver is not built for protected health information.
No independent audit or certification of our practices has been carried out.
What this means for you.If your organisation's security review requires a certified processor, Waver does not meet that bar today, and you should find that out from this page rather than three weeks into a questionnaire. If you are handling protected health information, regulated client files, or anything under a contractual obligation to use an audited vendor, that obligation is not satisfied by Waver.
What we do instead is the unglamorous list above it: encryption in transit and at rest, hashed passwords, named providers, contractual no-training terms, deletion you control, and two switches that let you turn the retention off entirely. That is a real security posture. It is not an audited one, and we are not going to describe it as though it were.
If that changes, this section changes with it — on the day the report exists, not in anticipation of it.
Getting your data out, or gone
No support ticket, no retention offer, no three-step email confirmation designed to make you give up. Two paths, depending on how much you want gone.
Delete it in the app, on any device. With Cloud Sync on, the deletion propagates to your other devices. With Cloud Sync off, the note only ever existed on the device that made it, so deleting it there is genuinely the end of it — there was never a server copy to chase.
Go to the delete account page, type DELETE to confirm, and it is done. Cached data on the device is cleared immediately. Stored notes, recordings, custom styles and settings are permanently removed from our servers within 30 days.
The retention detail, your rights of access and export, and how to reach us about any of it are all set out in the Privacy Policy.
Questions
No. Waver is a cloud transcriber and there is no on-device mode. Your audio is sent over encrypted HTTPS to a third-party transcription service in every configuration. Privacy Mode governs what happens to your content — that it is never used to improve models — not whether it travels. Any voice product claiming both cloud accuracy and on-device-only processing is worth a second look.
Privacy Mode on and Cloud Sync off: nothing is kept. Your audio is transcribed and the text is returned to your device, no note is stored on our servers, and nothing is used to improve models. It means nothing is retained. It does not mean nothing is transmitted — the transcription round trip still happens.
Because it changes what the recogniser hears rather than fixing the text afterwards. Your dictionary is passed as decoder context in the same request as the audio, so an unusual surname or an internal product name is a candidate the model is already weighing while it decodes — instead of a find-and-replace applied to a transcript that already got it wrong. The trade is real and worth stating: your dictionary contains names of real people and real projects, and it leaves your device with the recording. If a term is too sensitive to send, do not add it.
Not by the AI providers: under the terms Waver operates on, Google and Groq do not train on API content. Whether Waver uses your content to improve the product is what Privacy Mode controls — on, it never is. These are two separate promises from two separate parties, which is why there are two answers rather than one reassuring sentence.
No. Waver holds no formal security or compliance certification of any kind. There is no SOC 2 Type I or Type II report, no ISO 27001, no HIPAA compliance and no Business Associate Agreement. If your organisation's procurement requires a certified processor, Waver does not meet that requirement today, and we would rather you learn that here than three weeks into a security review.
No. We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information or your content. Data goes to three categories of third party and no others: the AI providers that transcribe and transform it, the payment processor that handles subscriptions, and anyone we are legally compelled to disclose to.
Delete it in the app. If Cloud Sync is on, the deletion propagates to your other devices; if it is off, the note only ever existed on that device, so deleting it there is the end of it.
Go to the delete account page, type DELETE to confirm, and your account is closed. Cached data on the device is cleared immediately, and stored notes, recordings and settings are permanently removed from our servers within 30 days. It cannot be undone, and an active subscription is cancelled with no refund for the remaining period.
Yes. You can export your notes at any time. Do the export first — account deletion is permanent and there is no copy for us to restore afterwards.
No. It captures your microphone and system audio locally and no bot joins the call, but the recording is transcribed through the same pipeline as everything else, and the same two switches apply to it. Recording other people has its own rules where you live, and those are yours to follow.
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