Heard Privacy Policy
Heard: Who Really Listened is made by SoHo Creative LLC, the company behind the Communication Dynamics Lab. This page says what the app does with your information, in the same plain language the app itself uses. Every sentence here describes how the app is actually built.
The short version
The conversation is yours. The recording never leaves your iPhone. Before anything is scored, names are shortened right on the phone, and only that shortened text goes out, once, to be scored. There are no accounts, no ads, no tracking, and nobody sees a report unless the person it belongs to shares it.
What stays on your iPhone
The recording. Audio is captured on your iPhone and stays on your iPhone. It is never uploaded, streamed, or sent anywhere, on any path.
The transcript. Transcription happens on the phone using Apple's on-device speech recognition. The first time, the phone downloads Apple's transcription model. That is a download to your phone, not an upload of your audio.
Your reports and your scoring history. Built on the phone, stored on the phone, opened on the phone.
Because these files live in the app's own storage, they ride along in your iPhone backup if you keep one. That backup is yours, handled by Apple's systems, not ours.
What leaves the phone, and why
One thing leaves the phone: the text of the conversation, after names have been shortened on the device. Each person becomes a first name and last initial, and last names inside the dialogue are shortened too. Prefer full anonymity? The app can label the two of you Speaker A and Speaker B instead.
That shortened text goes to our server, which passes it to Claude, the AI service from Anthropic that scores it, and streams the scores straight back to your phone.
Our server keeps no audio, no transcripts, and no reports. It exists to confirm purchases, count credits, and pass the scoring request along.
Anthropic processes the text under its commercial terms: inputs are not used to train its models by default, and they are kept for a limited period under those terms before deletion. We do not claim zero retention, because that would not be true.
Buying credits
Purchases run through Apple. We never see your name, your card, or any payment details.
When you buy a pack, your phone sends Apple's signed receipt to our server, which checks it and credits your balance. What our server keeps: the receipt's transaction number, your credit balance, and a record of each credit spent, all tied to a random token your phone created. The token is a string of random characters. It is not your name, your email, or your Apple ID. Refunds handled by Apple remove the matching credits.
No accounts, no tracking
There is no sign-up and no sign-in. The app carries no ads, no third-party analytics, and no trackers, and we do not sell or share anyone's information.
Reports are private to the person they are about. No leaderboards, no manager view, and nothing is shared unless that person shares it themselves.
Consent comes first
The app will not score a recording until you confirm that everyone recorded agreed to be recorded. That confirmation is part of the product, not fine print. Get agreement out loud, every time.
Deleting things
Delete a conversation in the app and its recording and transcript are removed from your phone.
The app keeps its own scoring record on your phone, the counts with names already shortened, so a conversation you already spent a credit on is never charged a second time.
Delete the app and everything it stored on your phone goes with it. Your credit balance lives on our server against the random token, so on the same iPhone it usually survives a reinstall.
Want a server record removed, or have a question about any of this? Email us and a human reads it.
Children
Heard is built for people practicing real conversations and is not directed at children.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version appears at this address with a new date.