Privacy: what leaves your Mac and what stays
Telltake edits video by editing its transcript. Two steps use cloud services, both only when you ask for them and only with your own accounts. Everything else happens on your Mac. This page states exactly what is sent, what is kept, and how to stop.
Nothing leaves without your agreement
Cloud processing is off until you open Cloud settings…, read the disclosure and choose Agree. The agreement is stored on this Mac and covers later requests until you revoke it. Saving a key, opening a project, importing clips and confirming a sequence send nothing. Each upload is started by a button you press (Transcribe with Doubao…, Start analysis / Generate rough cut…) and confirmed in a dialog that says what will be sent.
What is sent, to whom
| Step | Recipient | What is sent | What is not sent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transcription | Doubao speech service (ByteDance / Volcengine, openspeech.bytedance.com), under your Doubao key | The audio of each confirmed clip, extracted on your Mac and encoded as 16-bit PCM WAV (native sample rate, or 16 kHz mono when the clip would exceed 100 MB), one request per clip, with a fixed user id easycut, punctuation on, speaker identification off | Video frames, file names, project names, your name, other clips |
| AI Rough Cut | OpenAI Responses API (api.openai.com), under your OpenAI key, model GPT-5.6 Sol | The transcript text of the confirmed sequence, one line per row, each prefixed with a row number, clip number and start/end time; the fixed editing instructions | Audio, video, file names, project names, anything from other projects |
| Key validation | OpenAI, under your key | The key itself, to check it can use GPT-5.6 Sol | Any recording or transcript |
OpenAI requests are sent with store: false, so the provider is asked not to retain them for its dashboard. Doubao receives the audio inside the request itself; the app creates no hosted file and therefore has nothing it could delete afterwards. Neither statement is a promise about provider log retention. What each provider keeps, for how long, and where, is governed by that provider's own terms and your agreement with it. Telltake cannot recall or delete content once it has been sent.
Charges for both services go to your own provider accounts. AI usage & cost… in the review window shows the saved per-request usage and a list-price estimate; it is not your invoice.
What stays on your Mac
- Your video is never uploaded. It is read for import checks, playback, preview and export only.
- Your keys are stored in the login Keychain, service
com.easycut.cloud.openai.v1, one item per provider. They are never written to a project, a log or a diagnostics report. - Your agreement is stored in the Keychain with the version you agreed to; a revocation marker is also written at
~/Library/Application Support/Easycut/cloud-processing-denied, so a revocation survives even if the Keychain is unavailable. - The project (
Name.easycut) holdsstate.sqlitewith the transcript, word timing, the raw provider responses kept as evidence, the AI proposals and their reasons, your edits and history, preview approvals and export records;cache/holds extracted audio that can be deleted and is recreated when needed;exports/is optional. Original clips are referenced by path and fingerprint, not copied. Back up project… copies the project data only. - Exports are written where you choose, never over an existing file.
- Diagnostics are written only when you choose Save Diagnostics… from the Help menu. The report contains error codes and where they happened; no transcript text, file paths or provider responses. Telltake has no telemetry, analytics or crash reporting.
How to stop, revoke or delete
- Revoke cloud processing in Cloud settings blocks every new upload and AI request and tries to cancel requests in progress. Queued work does not resume if you agree again later; you start it again yourself. Content already sent cannot be recalled.
- Remove key and Remove Doubao key delete the keys from the Keychain.
- Stop transcription keeps the clips already transcribed and sends nothing more.
- To delete your data, delete the
.easycutproject and any backups and exports you made. Telltake never deletes a project itself. - To ask a provider to delete what it received, use that provider's own account tools and terms; Telltake cannot do it for you.
Development and evaluation data
The people who record footage used to develop Telltake give purpose-specific consent; editing consent is not consent to evaluation or model improvement, and a held-out evaluation set is kept apart from development. No recording, transcript or provider response is in this repository, and the terms in LICENSE grant no rights to them. Test fixtures are generated tone and colour.
Where this is enforced in the code
Sources/EasycutCloud/CloudAccess.swift (agreement and revocation), KeychainCloudSettings.swift and RevocationProtectedSettings.swift (storage), DoubaoTranscriptionClient.swift and OpenAITextCleanupClient.swift (exactly what each request contains), Sources/EasycutMedia/DoubaoAudioPreparer.swift (the audio that is sent), and Sources/EasycutMac/ReviewDiagnostics.swift (what a diagnostics report may contain). Tests in Tests/EasycutCloudTests check that revocation stops queued and in-flight work and that no request is sent without agreement and a key.
This page is generated from docs/privacy.md in the Telltake source; the document is the text of record.