Journalists: source protection is an architecture question

Last updated 11 October 2026

The specific risk

Most privacy arguments are about commercial data use. For reporting, the question is different and older: who else holds your notes, and under what legal process can they be required to produce them?

A cloud dictation service holds audio and transcripts on its infrastructure. That vendor is subject to its jurisdiction's process, may receive an order it cannot tell you about, and may hold data longer than its marketing implies. None of that requires bad faith on anyone's part.

On-device recognition means there is no third-party copy. Your notes are on your machine, subject to your jurisdiction and your own protections. That is not invulnerability — it is the removal of a party from the chain.

Where dictation fits reporting

• Notes straight after an interview. The most valuable use. Impressions, the room, what was said off the record, what the source seemed unwilling to say. All of it decays within the hour.
• Colour and detail. What a place looked like. Speaking it captures sensory detail that typing edits out.
• The draft. A first pass at speaking speed, structured afterwards by keyboard.
• Filing from the field. Copy dictated into a laptop with no connection, sent when there is one.
• Chronologies. Long investigations live or die on a timeline nobody has time to maintain.

The setup

1. Verify the architecture yourself Install, complete first run, turn the network off, dictate. Text appearing means local. Do not take a marketing page's word for it, including ours.
2. Test the rewriting offline too If the app tidies your dictation using a cloud model, the text of your notes is being transmitted even though the audio was not.
3. Set retention short A local history is useful and is also a store of your notes. On a laptop that travels through borders, shorter is better.
4. Disk encryption, obviously The local history is on the disk. Full-disk encryption — FileVault on a Mac, BitLocker on Windows — is what protects it.
5. Think about backups Your dictation history is in your backups. Know where those go and who holds them.
6. Consider a separate machine or account for sensitive work Beyond dictation, but the same logic.

What it does not protect

Being precise here matters more than usual, because overconfidence in a tool is its own risk.

• Being overheard. You are speaking your notes aloud. In a shared newsroom, a café, a hotel, a car — the sentence is in the room. This is the most likely failure and no software addresses it.
• An unencrypted or seized laptop. On-device means on your device. Disk encryption and a strong password are what stand between a local history and whoever has the machine.
• Where you file. Dictating into a cloud CMS puts the text in that CMS.
• Your phone. VV runs on a Mac or a Windows PC; there is no phone app. Notes dictated on a phone use that phone's dictation, which is a separate question.
• Metadata about your machine. Licence checks and update requests happen. They carry no note content, but they are network activity from your IP address.

Practical points

That last row deserves emphasis. Dictation errors are grammatical and plausible, which is precisely the kind that survives a quick read. Anything going inside quotation marks should be checked against the recording or the shorthand, not against your memory of what you dictated.