Comment by catoc
2 years ago
What a great blog about a fantastic looking side project! Engaged I went on reading, and stumbled on rewind.ai, that too looks great! Privacy obviously being a crucial issue for something as potentially invasive - continuous automatic screen and audio recording - questions came up browsing the ‘Privacy first’ section:
“Encrypt your data using FileVault - Apple FileVault works with Rewind. With it enabled your data is encrypted.”
Is there anything Rewind does to make Apple FileVault ‘work with Rewind’? Or is this the general disk encryption that works for everything and anything? Serious question. I want to use rewind but this may be interpreted as gratuitous.
Same feeling when reading “only relevant text-based data is sent to the cloud and is encrypted in transit.”
Does ‘Encrypted in transit’ refer to standard TLS encryption? Again, serious question. Rewind looks great, I just need to be able to trust it.
The Rewind website states: “No cloud integration required It all just works automatically. No need to connect to a bunch of different services like Gmail, Dropbox, or Slack.”
But reading the details in the official Privacy Policy at https://www.rewind.ai/privacy says:
“[We collect:] Information Generated by OpenAI. As part of Rewind AI’s integration with OpenAI, we may also collect the outputs generated by OpenAI, such as the audio transcription summaries of your audio recordings and any other data generated by the OpenAI integration”
So “no cloud integration is required”, but my audio is shared with OpenAI !?
While at https://www.rewind.ai/privacy-first it says: “What happens when you search in Rewind? All recording data stays local.”
Which is it please? I want to trust Rewind because it looks great, but these incongruities in explaining what is happing with user data make me hesitate.
The OpenAI part is only if you use our "Ask Rewind" feature. We have a separate disclosure there. Here's more detail: https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/7791703-ask-rewind-s-priv...
Audio is locally transcribed on your machine. And you have full control over when you want to record audio (ie, only have it turn on with meetings), and when it comes to screen capture Rewind can exclude apps you select (such as 1Password, incognito windows, etc)
All that being said, we are also working on letting you toggle to using a local LLM. Our CEO @dsiroker did a demo of our Windows app with Llama 2 on stage with Intel's CEO at their recent conference: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1704188923336085657
That’s the whole point of the product right is to ask for what’s in the “history”? Otherwise is just a screen recording app that I can activate with cmd shift 5.
Rewind’s privacy policies are incredibly misleading. It’s a huge red flag for me.
Their most public statements only apply if you use the product in a very restricted and clearly unintended fashion.
Thanks for flagging, looks like we need to update that page - we have our own encryption as well. Here's more: https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/7242593-is-the-rewind-dat...
Question on requirements - what about disk space for all these recordings, what does that look like?