Privacy policy

Who we are

Autino is a writing assistant for Windows, made by Ismael Rakei (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what the Autino app, the Autino server and this website do with your information. If you have a question, contact us using the link at the bottom of this page.

What stays on your PC

These things are kept on your computer and are not sent to us:

• Your settings and your chat history.
• A random device ID, made when you first run Autino, which tells installs apart on our server.
• Spelling checks. They run offline on your PC.
• Your sign-in token. It is held in memory while Autino runs and is never written to disk.

What Autino reads

Autino only reads the field you are typing in, and only when you use the keyboard shortcut or turn on live checking, which is off until you switch it on. It never reads password fields, browser address bars or games, and it skips password managers, terminals and remote desktop apps by default. You can change the list of skipped apps in Settings.

Grammar checks

With the Auto engine, or with live checking set to Spelling and grammar, the paragraph being checked and its language are sent over the internet to LanguageTool’s server (api.languagetool.org, or a server you choose in Settings). Autino does not store it. LanguageTool’s own privacy policy applies to what it does with it.

Choose Offline, or Spelling only for live checking, and nothing leaves your PC.

Autino AI, rewriting and voice typing

These features only act when you use them. When you send a chat message, ask for a rewrite or hold the voice shortcut, your text or voice clip is sent to the Autino server. The server passes it to an AI service provider to produce the answer or transcript and sends the result back. Autino does not keep your text, the replies or the audio, and does not use them to train models. The AI service provider handles the content under its own terms while it processes the request.

Your account

You sign up and sign in with Clerk, our sign-in provider. Clerk collects and stores your email address, name, password and verification details, and its privacy policy applies to that. We receive your Clerk user ID, email address and name.

On our server we keep:

• Your user ID, email address, name, plan, and the times you signed up and were last seen.
• Whether your account is active or suspended, and an internal note if we added one.
• A usage record for each AI request: the time, the feature used, the size of the request (tokens or seconds of audio), the estimated cost and your device ID. It never contains what you wrote or said.
• If you pay for Plus: a record of each payment with the amount, the period bought, M-Pesa or e-Mola, its status and dates. It does not contain your phone number.

Payments

When you pay for Plus, in the app or on our payment page, your name, email address and the phone number you type are sent to Payzeno, our payment provider, and from there to M-Pesa or e-Mola to send the payment request to your phone. They handle that information under their own privacy policies. We never see your PIN or your mobile money balance.

If you are on the Free plan, the app may show you an offer from us when you open it. It is chosen on our server from your plan only, and we do not track whether you open it.

Why we use it

• To run Autino and sign you in.
• To apply each plan’s monthly allowance and to stop abuse.
• To keep the service working and to understand how much it costs to run.
• To tell us when someone new signs up. That message contains the new person’s name and email address and goes only to us.

We do not sell your information and we do not show ads.

Who handles it

• Clerk, for sign-up and sign-in.
• Payzeno, M-Pesa (Vodacom) and e-Mola (Movitel), to take payments for Plus.
• An AI service provider, to process the text and audio you send to Autino AI and voice typing.
• LanguageTool, for grammar checks, as described above.
• Cloudflare, which carries traffic to our server and hosts the installer download.
• Our server host, which runs the Autino server and this website.

We share information with these providers only to provide the features above, and we do not give it to anyone else unless the law requires it.

How long we keep it

We keep your account details and usage records while your account exists.

You can delete your account yourself in the app: Settings, then Account, then Delete account. Your Clerk account is deleted at once, and on our server your name, email address and activity are removed and your usage records are kept only as anonymous totals. You can also ask us to do it, usually within 30 days.

Payment records are kept for as long as accounting and tax law requires, without your name, email address or phone number. Server backups are kept for up to 14 days and then deleted.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, or to stop using it for a purpose you object to. Where laws such as South Africa’s POPIA or the GDPR apply to you, these are your legal rights. Contact us and we will reply. You may also complain to your data protection authority.

Security

Traffic between the app and our server is encrypted. Our keys for the AI service and for sign-in stay on the server, never in the app. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise it, but we keep access limited and update the software we run.

This website

This website does not use tracking cookies or analytics. When you load a page or download the installer, our host and Cloudflare see your IP address and the page or file you asked for, as any web server does.

Changes

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top. If a change affects how your information is used, we will also tell you in the app or on this website.