Briefcast is built to keep your work on your computer.
What stays on your computer
Everything you make. Recordings, screenshots, documents, whiteboards, mindmaps, boards and your annotations are stored only in your Briefcast folder. There are no accounts, no cloud storage and no uploads.
Captions and voice typing run on your own computer, using speech recognition built into Briefcast. Your audio is never sent anywhere.
Audio clean-up, conversions, thumbnails and every other kind of processing also happen locally.
The optional anonymous statistics
To understand which features are used and to fix crashes, Briefcast sends anonymous usage statistics and crash reports. It's on by default, and a notice appears the first time you open Briefcast with a Turn off button. You can change your mind any time in Settings → Privacy; turning it off takes effect immediately.
What is sent:
- which features are used, such as "recording finished", with its length and type;
- crash details: the error and where in Briefcast's code it happened;
- the app version and operating system;
- a random ID for this installation, which isn't linked to you and is deleted when you turn statistics off.
What is never sent: your files, file names, file contents, recordings, documents, anything you type, or your computer's name. Crash reports have every file path removed before they leave your computer.
The phone camera
When you use your phone as a camera, the video goes directly from your phone to your computer over your own Wi-Fi. It never passes through the internet or any server. Each pairing uses a new private key carried in the QR code, so other devices on the network can't connect.
Sharing and emailing documents
When you email or share a document from Docs, Briefcast saves the file on your computer and hands it to the app you pick (your mail app, a chat app, the Windows share window) or puts it on your clipboard. Briefcast itself uploads nothing; what happens next is up to that app. Choosing a web mail service or a chat app's web version opens it in your browser with the message pre-filled.
Looking up references
When you add a reference to a document by its DOI or arXiv ID, Briefcast asks doi.org for that work's citation details (title, authors, journal). The request contains only the identifier you typed, nothing about your document. References you add from BibTeX or a .bib file never leave your computer. Importing a PDF into Docs also happens entirely on your computer: the file, its fonts and its pages are read and rebuilt locally and are never uploaded.
Updates
When it starts, Briefcast asks GitHub whether a newer version exists. That request carries no information about you or your files, and updates are only installed when you click Install and restart.
The full privacy policy is at withbriefs.com/privacy.
