Privacy Policy
Effective Date: March 26, 2026
1. Data Sovereignty (The “Local First” Promise)
Babel Player is designed as a Local-Only application.
- No Cloud Uploads: All video processing, transcription (STT), and voice synthesis (TTS) happen entirely on your device’s hardware (GPU/NPU/CPU).
- No User Accounts: We do not require sign-ups, emails, or passwords.
- No “Improvement” Data: We do not collect your usage data to train our models.
2. Network Activity
The application will only access the internet for the following explicit user-initiated actions:
- Model Downloads: When you explicitly click to download a voice model or optimization pack (e.g., from GitHub or Hugging Face).
- Updates: To check for new versions of the player (can be disabled in Settings).
3. Telemetry & Analytics
- Application Telemetry: Basic crash reporting may be active via the .NET runtime/Avalonia framework. We are actively fundraising to purchase a commercial license to disable this completely.
- User Tracking: We use Zero marketing trackers, pixels, or cookies.
4. Persistence
- Speaker Registry: Character voice mappings are stored locally in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\BabelPlayer\. This data never leaves your machine. - Media Metadata: Subtitles and translation caches are stored next to your media files or in your local temp folder.
5. User-Directed Cloud Inference (Optional)
Babel Player offers optional features that allow you to use third-party Cloud APIs (e.g., ElevenLabs, OpenAI) for higher-fidelity translation or voice synthesis.
- Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): These features ONLY function if you explicitly provide your own personal API Key in the settings.
- Direct Connection: When active, Babel Player establishes a direct encrypted connection between your device and the third-party provider. Your data does not pass through Babel Player’s servers.
- Third-Party Privacy: By using these features, you acknowledge that your text/audio data is subject to the privacy policy of the provider you have chosen (e.g., OpenAI’s data retention policy).
- No Key Logging: Your API keys are stored locally on your device using OS-level encryption (Windows DPAPI). We do not sync or collect your keys.