Privacy Policy

Last updated 2026-11-14. HearAura is an iOS app for joining Auracast™ broadcast audio with hearing aids.

What stays on your iPhone

• Captions. Live captions are transcribed entirely on-device (Apple Speech with on-device recognition, or the offline Whisper model). The audio and the resulting text never leave your phone. Saved Meeting Mode transcripts are stored only in the app on your device.
• Hearing-aid connection. HearAura talks to your hearing aids directly over Bluetooth to command Auracast joins and volume. That link is between your phone and your aids; nothing about it is sent to us.
• Follow-ups and kept text. A kept moment is the caption text that was already on your screen; HearAura never stores audio. Follow-ups, kept moments, and any text messages or conversation text you choose to hand over for a person are stored only in the app on your iPhone, and you can erase them there. Suggestions and the read of someone's messages are made by Apple's on-device model on iPhones with Apple Intelligence; nothing is sent to us or to anyone else.
• Text messages. HearAura cannot read your Messages; iOS does not allow it. It only sees a message you paste, a screenshot you pick (its text is read on your iPhone and the picture is not kept), or a message that a Shortcuts automation you set up passes to it. Keeping messages is off until you turn it on.
• Calendar and Reminders. If you turn on calendar checks, HearAura reads your calendar on your iPhone to warn you about overlaps. It adds an event or a reminder only when you tap the button that says so.
• Apple Watch microphone. When you start captions from Apple Watch and your iPhone can't use its own microphone, the Watch sends what it hears to your own paired iPhone, which turns it into captions. The sound goes only between your two devices and is not recorded or kept.
• Glasses and second screens. When a display is plugged in, HearAura shows the captions on it. With the optional "Send captions as notifications" setting, each caption sentence is posted as a notification on your iPhone so that glasses which mirror notifications can show it; it also appears on your Lock Screen and Apple Watch, goes to whatever accessory you have allowed to receive your notifications, and is removed when captions stop.
• Voices. The optional "Tell voices apart" setting labels caption lines Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 within one conversation. It runs on your iPhone, does not identify anyone, and stores nothing about anyone's voice.
• Favorites, recents, and settings. Stored locally on your device.
• Diagnostic reports. iOS may hand the app a crash and performance summary (Apple's MetricKit) about once a day. HearAura writes it to your iPhone and leaves it there. It is never uploaded; the only way it moves is if you open Settings → Diagnostics and share it yourself, to a recipient you choose.

What uses the network (only when you choose it)

• Venue directory. When you open the Venues map, the app requests nearby venue listings from the HearAura venue API. If you grant location access, your approximate location is used to sort venues by distance; it is used for that request and not stored by us with any identifier.
• Venue reports. If you report that a venue's broadcast worked or didn't, we store that anonymous report (venue, worked/failed, optional hearing-aid brand) to improve the directory. No identifier is attached.
• Broadcast captions. If a venue publishes captions for its broadcast, the app fetches that public text feed for the broadcast you joined. This is venue-published text, not your microphone.
• Channels. "Channels" conversation audio streams directly between nearby phones over your local network (peer-to-peer). It does not travel over the internet or through our servers.
• Mail. If you add a mailbox to Follow-ups, your iPhone connects directly to your mail provider (for example iCloud or Gmail) with an app-specific password you create there, and reads recent messages on your iPhone to look for things to follow up. We run no mail server and never see your mail or your password, which is stored in the iPhone's Keychain and erased when you remove the mailbox. Nothing is marked read, moved or deleted.
• Voice model download. Turning on "Tell voices apart" downloads a speaker model once from Hugging Face, the service that hosts it. That request tells Hugging Face your IP address, as any download does; no audio, text or identifier is sent.
• Device compatibility results. The Device check screen tells you what your hearing aids can do. It works entirely offline. If — and only if — you tap "Send this result anonymously", the app posts a brand word chosen from a fixed list in the app (for example "resound" or "other") plus four yes/no capability flags, your iOS major version, and the app version. Your device's name, your location, and any identifier are deliberately excluded, and the screen shows you the exact text before you send it. We publish nothing that could identify a person; the purpose is to answer "do brand X hearing aids work with Auracast apps?" with real counts.

What we do not do

• No user accounts or sign-in.
• No third-party advertising, analytics, or tracking.
• No selling or sharing of personal data.
• No microphone audio or caption text sent off your devices. (Sound from your Apple Watch goes to your own iPhone, and Channels audio goes to the nearby phones in your room, as described above.)
• No automatic or background reporting of any kind. Diagnostic and compatibility information moves only when you tap a button that says so.

Permissions

Bluetooth (connect to your hearing aids), Microphone and Speech Recognition on iPhone and Microphone on Apple Watch (on-device captions and channel audio), Local Network (channels and the optional offline caption relay), Camera (scan Auracast QR codes), Location (sort venues by distance), Calendar and Reminders (overlap warnings and adding an item you tap), and Notifications (the optional morning summary and message alerts). Each is used only for the feature it names, and you can decline any of them.

Children

HearAura is a general-audience accessibility tool and is not directed at children under 13.

Contact

Questions about privacy: privacy@hearaura.app.

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