What VV can and cannot protect

Last updated 7 September 2026

The threat model, in plain English

Security pages tend to say "we take security seriously" and stop. This one lists who could see what.

Someone with your laptop

If a person has your unlocked Mac, they can see whatever VV has kept: the history of what you have dictated, and any audio VV is still holding, until you delete it. Two things limit that. First, the retention setting: you choose in Settings how long audio is kept, from three days to never deleting them, and you can clear history at any time. Second, the usual macOS protections apply, because VV stores nothing outside your user account; FileVault and your login password protect VV's data the same way they protect your documents.

Someone watching your network

For standard dictation they see nothing, because there is nothing to see: recognition happens on the Mac and no audio or text is sent. They would see a connection when the app downloads the speech model on first run, when you buy or move a plan, when the licence is checked, and, only if you have set one up, when a cloud transform sends text to the provider you chose. All of those connections use TLS.

Vaitly, the company

If you have an account, we know the email address on it and which plan it holds. From every install, including free ones with no account, we receive anonymous usage counts tied to a device identity: roughly, how many words were dictated this week, so the free allowance of 1,000 words can be enforced. We never receive dictated text, audio, or the names of the apps you dictate into. There is no mechanism in the app that could send them, which is a stronger statement than a policy promising not to.

Where things are stored

History, audio and the speech model live in VV's own data folder under Library/Application Support in your home folder. They are ordinary files on your Mac's disk, under your user account, so they inherit whatever protection the disk has: FileVault encryption on every Apple Silicon Mac, and your login password. Nothing is stored in iCloud, nothing is synced between devices, and removing the app and that folder removes everything.

Audio retention is yours to set

Settings → Advanced (Auto-Delete Recordings) lets you choose how long audio recordings are kept: after three days, two weeks, three months, or never. You can keep them for a period so you can replay a dictation and correct the text, or keep none at all so the audio is discarded the moment the text is typed. History entries can be deleted one at a time or cleared in bulk. This is the single most useful control for the "someone with my laptop" case, so if that worries you, set retention to the shortest option.

The one optional boundary: cloud transforms

Transforms rewrite text after it is recognised: tidy this up, make it an email, translate it. By default they use Apple Intelligence or a local Ollama model, both on the Mac. You can instead configure a cloud provider with your own key. If you do, three things hold: only text is sent, never audio; the transform is labelled as cloud in the app so you know before you use it; and nothing is sent unless you invoke that transform. Standard dictation is unaffected. If you never configure a provider, no text leaves the Mac for any reason.

Code signing and notarisation

Every build of VV is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate issued to Vaitly Limited and submitted to Apple for notarisation, with the hardened runtime enabled. When you open the app, macOS verifies the signature and the notarisation ticket before it runs. This means the app you launch is the one we built, has not been altered on the way to you, and cannot load unsigned code into itself. If Gatekeeper warns you about a copy of VV, that copy is not ours: download again from the download page and tell us.

Updates

Honest answer: there is no in-app updater yet. Updates are downloaded from the download page and installed the same way as the first copy, by dragging to Applications. The version you are running is shown in the app; the current release is 1.0.0. An in-app update check is planned, and when it ships it will use the same signed and notarised builds.

What the licence check sends

The app holds a signed licence and an anonymous device identity. When it checks in, it sends those and receives back whether the plan is valid and how many words remain on the free tier. That is the whole exchange: no dictated content, no audio, no file or app names. A Pro plan covers 2 devices, and the device identity is what lets you move it between them from Settings → Account.

Reporting a security problem

Email [email protected] with what you found and how to reproduce it. We acknowledge every report within one working day, keep you informed while we work on it, and thank you in the changelog if you would like. Please give us a reasonable window to fix it before you publish. We do not run a paid bounty programme at this stage.

What we are not

VV has no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA certification, and we do not claim any. We have not yet published a penetration-test report. We make no claim that VV is suitable for medical, legal or other regulated work; whether it meets your obligations is a judgement for you and your organisation, and we would rather you made it with the facts above than with a badge. As those things change, this page will change with them.

Limits and the privacy boundary

Nothing on this page makes VV "completely secure", because nothing is. What it does is keep the sensitive part, your voice and the text it becomes, on hardware you control, and make every exception visible and optional. The privacy policy covers the legal side; on-device recognition covers the technical one.

Compared with cloud dictation

A cloud dictation service has to protect your audio on its servers, in transit, and in the hands of its staff and subprocessors, and you have to trust that it does. VV's approach is to have no audio to protect on any server in the first place. See how VV compares with the alternatives.