PRIVACY · UPDATED JULY 2026
Wispr Flow privacy: where your voice actually goes.
Before you let a dictation app listen all day, two questions matter: who else hears your voice, and who else sees your screen. Here's what's documented — with dates and sources — and what "private" looks like when it's verifiable instead of promised.
What happens to your audio
Per Wispr Flow's own help center (as of July 2026), your audio is streamed to their cloud for transcription, and the text is passed to third-party inference providers for the cleanup pass. Your account, your history, and your words all live on their infrastructure.
They do offer a "Privacy Mode" that limits data collection — but per their docs, it is off by default on consumer plans. So the default state of the product is: every time you speak, your voice leaves your Mac.
The screen-context story
In November 2025, a user publicly documented Wispr Flow capturing screen context periodically. After posting about it, their account was banned; the CTO later apologized publicly. The episode was widely discussed on Reddit and Hacker News at the time.
As of July 2026, their documentation describes capturing "limited text near your cursor" rather than screenshots. That is narrower — but it is still screen content, sent to their cloud, in a product whose privacy-preserving mode is off by default. Privacy concerns also recur in their reviews: Trustpilot sits at 2.7/5 as of July 2026.
The pattern to notice: none of this is a scandal that got fixed — it's the architecture. Cloud transcription requires your audio. Context-aware cleanup wants your screen. An account system requires knowing who you are. The features people like are the same features that collect.
What "local" means — and how to verify it yourself
Every dictation app now claims to care about privacy. Don't take anyone's word for it — including ours. You can watch what any app actually does on the network in under two minutes:
- Terminal: run
nettop(built into macOS) and dictate for 30 seconds. Sustained upstream traffic while you talk means your audio is leaving. - Little Snitch: the Objective Development firewall shows every connection in real time, per app and per host. Dictate and watch.
- Airplane mode: turn Wi-Fi off and dictate. If the app errors out, it was never local.
LockedIn Flow has no server to talk to: Parakeet TDT v3 runs on the Apple Neural Engine,
and cleanup runs on-device via Apple's FoundationModels framework. After the one-time ~600 MB
model download, nettop shows nothing — because there is nothing to send.
No account, no telemetry, and history is encrypted locally.
Side by side
| LockedIn Flow | Wispr Flow | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | Never leaves device | Their cloud |
| Transcripts | Encrypted on your Mac | Their cloud |
| Screen content | Never captured, never sent | "Limited text near your cursor" (their docs) |
| Account | None | Required |
| Telemetry | None | Present |
| Privacy mode | The only mode | Off by default on consumer plans |
| Verifiably offline | nettop shows zero traffic | Requires a connection |
The honest trade-off
Wispr Flow's cloud buys real things: Windows, iOS, and Android support, 100+ languages, and settings that sync across devices. LockedIn Flow is macOS-only (Apple Silicon) and focused on European languages. If cross-platform matters more than privacy, Wispr Flow is the honest pick. If you live on a Mac and want dictation where "private" is something you can check rather than something you're asked to believe — that's why we exist.
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Everything unlocked for 14 days. Run nettop while you talk — we welcome the scrutiny.
Download for macOSClaims about Wispr Flow verified against their help center, Trustpilot (2.7/5), and public Reddit/Hacker News discussions as of July 26, 2026. If something here is outdated, tell us: feedback@lockedinflow.com