Privacy Policy

This website has no microphone

There is no record button and no audio demo on this site. The page never asks for microphone access, and it never records or sends any audio. Everything below about audio applies to the Android app only.

What this website collects

When you sign up for the beta, we take the channel you chose to be contacted on (WhatsApp or email) and the one value that goes with it: your WhatsApp number or your email address, whichever you picked. The channel you did not pick is never stored, and never even sent.

After you sign up we ask optional research questions, and every one of them can be skipped: your name, your country, what you would dictate for, how you write Arabic today, how often you write in Arabic, which devices you write on, what price you would find fair, your line of work, the first thing you would dictate, and whether you would take a research call.

We also record which language of the page you signed up from, the campaign tag in the link you arrived on if there was one (the src parameter), and the address of the page that referred you if your browser sent it.

Why we collect it, and where it is stored

Contact details are used for one thing: to reach you when Hams is ready for you to try. The research answers are used to decide what to build first and to shape the product around what people actually need.

All of it is stored in a database on Supabase, our database provider. Your browser never talks to that database directly: your answers travel over an encrypted HTTPS connection to our own site server (hosted on Vercel), and the server is what writes them to Supabase.

Page analytics

We use Vercel Web Analytics to see whether the page is working. The events our own code sends are: page viewed, language changed, the page's audio demo played, paused, finished, replayed or failed to play, a signup link pressed, and a form step reached or failed. Each event carries the language of the page, which link you pressed, which contact channel you chose (WhatsApp or email, never the number or address itself), and an error code if something failed.

Separately from those events, Vercel Web Analytics collects a set of its own on every page view: the page path you opened, the address of the page that referred you, your country (country level, not a precise location), your device type, operating system and browser, and any campaign parameters (the ones starting with utm_) present in the link. That is part of the service itself rather than something we send.

What is never sent, by us or by that service: your number, your email, your name, or any of your research answers. There are no advertising cookies, and no tracking that follows you across other sites.

The Android app: your audio

When you press the microphone in the app, the recording is sent over an encrypted HTTPS connection to Hams's own transcription server to be turned into text. The audio is processed in memory and discarded as soon as your transcript comes back: neither the recording nor the text is stored on our side.

The resulting text comes back to your device and is placed in the field you were dictating into.

The Android app: text cleanup

If text cleanup is turned on, the transcribed text (text only, never the audio) is sent to Google's Gemini model to be tidied up: punctuation, filler removal, and resolving a correction you spoke mid-sentence, without changing the dialect or the meaning. It runs either from Hams's server or from your own phone, depending on a setting you choose in the app.

You can turn cleanup off in the app's settings, and then no text is sent to Google at all.

Your own server address

An advanced setting in the app lets you point transcription at a different server address of your own. If you do, your audio goes to the address you configured rather than to Hams's server, and that operator's privacy policy applies to it instead of this one.

Accessibility service

The Android app uses an Accessibility Service to detect when the keyboard is on screen so it can show the dictation bubble, and to place the resulting text at the right spot in the field you are focused on. To find that spot, the service reads the contents and cursor position of the field you are dictating into, on your device only, never sent to us or to anyone else. The service does not run on password fields, and it does not read, collect, or transmit anything else on your screen.

Clipboard

Normally the app writes the text straight into the field and never touches the clipboard at all. If the field does not accept a direct write, the app places the text on your device's clipboard, pastes it, and a second later restores whatever was there before (or clears it, if the previous contents could not be read, which is what happens on Android 10 and later).

But if there is no focused editable field, or it is a password field, or the paste itself fails: the text is deliberately left on the clipboard for you to paste yourself, you get a notification saying so, and nothing is restored. In that case your dictated words stay on the clipboard until something else replaces them, where any app that reads the clipboard can see them.

All of that happens on your device, and clipboard contents are never sent to us.

Dictation history

Your dictation history, meaning what you have dictated before, is stored only on your own device and never on ours. You can delete any entry from within the app at any time, and uninstalling the app removes all of it.

How long we keep things

Audio and transcripts that pass through the Hams server are not retained: they are processed in memory and that is all.

Your signup and research answers are kept until you ask us to delete them at zeinatwork@gmail.com, and then we delete your row entirely.

No ads, no data selling

Hams carries no advertising, and we do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone for advertising. The only parties that receive anything are the ones named above: Supabase for storage, Vercel for hosting and page analytics, and Google Gemini for text when cleanup is on.

Your controls

You can revoke microphone access or the Accessibility Service permission at any time from Android settings, and the app stops immediately.

You can turn text cleanup off in the app's settings if you would rather no text reached Google.

You can delete entries from your on-device dictation history within the app.

You can ask us to delete your signup data entirely at zeinatwork@gmail.com.

Children

Hams is not directed at anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone in that age group.

Changes to this policy

If we make a material change to this policy we will update the date above. Continuing to use Hams after an update means you accept the new version.

Contact

Hams is built and published by Walid Zein, its sole developer. For any privacy question, or a request to delete your data, write to us at zeinatwork@gmail.com.