Mermer collects nothing.

Who this is from

Mermer is developed and published by Richard Nelson, an independent developer. "Mermer", "we" and "the app" below all mean the same thing: the Mermer app on your iPhone.

What Mermer accesses on your device

Mermer asks for permission to use the microphone. iOS shows you that request, and you can withdraw it at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.

The microphone is used only while a recording is actually running, which you start and stop yourself. iOS shows its own recording indicator throughout. Mermer does not listen in the background, has no wake word, and cannot start a recording on its own.

What Mermer stores, and where

Everything Mermer keeps is stored locally on your device, inside the app's own private container, and is included in your device backups exactly as any other app's data is.

• Your recordings — the audio files themselves, as ordinary .m4a files.
• Transcripts — the text of each recording, with timings, saved alongside the audio.
• Speaker names — any name you type in place of "Speaker 1", stored with that recording.
• Remembered voices — see the section below.
• One setting — whether you like timestamps shown.

None of this is transmitted anywhere. Deleting a recording in the app deletes its audio and its transcript together. Deleting the app removes all of it.

Remembered voices

Mermer can optionally remember a voice so that it labels that person by name in future recordings. This is the most sensitive thing the app does, so it is worth being precise about it.

• It only happens when you ask. No voice is ever remembered automatically. You tap a speaker, give them a name, and explicitly choose to remember that voice.
• What is stored is not a recording. It is a voice embedding — a fixed list of numbers derived from the audio, the way a fingerprint hash is derived from a fingerprint. It cannot be played, and it cannot be turned back into audio or into anything you said.
• It stays on your device, in the app's private container, and is never uploaded, shared or synced by us.
• You can delete it. The Remembered Voices screen lists every voice you have saved and lets you rename or delete any of them. Deleting one removes the stored numbers permanently, and Mermer stops recognising that voice.

Because a voice belongs to a person, please only remember the voice of someone who knows you are doing it. The same goes for recording in the first place — see "Recording other people" below.

Transcription happens on your iPhone

Mermer transcribes using Apple's on-device speech model, part of iOS itself. Your audio is handed to that model on the device and the text comes back on the device. It is not sent to Apple, to us, or to anyone else for transcription.

Speaker separation works the same way: the models that tell voices apart are included inside the app, so that step needs no network access either.

Network activity

Mermer makes no network requests of its own. It contains no code that connects to the internet.

One kind of network activity can still occur. Apple's speech model is a component of iOS that is downloaded on demand, and the first time you ask for a transcript iOS may fetch it. That download goes from Apple to your device, is performed by iOS rather than by us, and is shared with every other app on the phone that uses the same model. Nothing is uploaded in the process — no audio, no text, and nothing about you.

Recording other people

Mermer is a tool for recording conversations, and the laws about recording other people differ from place to place. Whether and how you may record someone is your responsibility as the person doing the recording. We would add the obvious non-legal point too: tell people they are being recorded.

What Mermer does not do

• No accounts, sign-in, or user profiles.
• No servers or backends operated by us — there are none.
• No analytics, telemetry, or usage tracking of any kind.
• No crash reporting.
• No third-party SDKs, advertising libraries or trackers.
• No advertising, and no advertising identifier.
• No cloud transcription, and no AI service anywhere off the device.
• No selling or sharing of data, because there is no data to sell.
• No tracking of you across other apps or websites.
• No in-app purchases or payment processing.

Mermer's App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected", and that is a complete description rather than a summary.

Sharing is yours to initiate

Mermer can share a recording or a transcript through the standard iOS share sheet. That happens only when you choose it, and where it goes — Messages, Mail, Files, another app — is your choice. Once you have sent something somewhere else, that destination's own privacy policy applies to it, not this one.

Children

Mermer is rated 4+. Because it collects no information from anyone, it collects no information from children either.

Your rights

Data-protection laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export and delete the personal data a company holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to produce or erase.

The data Mermer keeps on your own device is already entirely under your control: delete a recording, delete a remembered voice, or delete the app to remove everything at once.

Changes to this policy

If Mermer's behaviour ever changes in a way that affects this policy, this page will be updated and the effective date at the top will change. Since the app has no analytics, the honest way to see what changed is to read this page — it is deliberately short enough to re-read.

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