Privacy Policy — Read The Stupid Text

Effective date: 3 September 2026

Read The Stupid Text (“the app”) reads text aloud. It ships as a Windows tray utility and an Android app. This policy explains how the app handles your data on both platforms.

The short version

Read The Stupid Text does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data. It has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising, and no telemetry that leaves your device. Everything the app does happens locally.

What the app processes, and where

• Text you select, copy, type, paste, or send via the hotkey is read aloud and held only in memory for as long as it takes to speak it. It is not permanently logged or sent anywhere.
• Uploaded files (.txt, .pdf, .docx) are opened and parsed locally to extract their text. The file itself is never transmitted or copied anywhere by the app.
• Camera scans (Android): a photo you take is read by Google’s on-device ML Kit text recognition, which runs entirely on your phone. The photo is processed to extract text and is not uploaded, saved permanently, or shared — it exists only to be read aloud.
• Speech synthesis is performed entirely on your device, using a neural voice model bundled inside the app. No text or audio is sent to any server or third party, on either platform.
• The app’s activity log (an optional diagnostic view) lives in memory, shows recent read activity, and is cleared when the app closes.
• Settings you choose (reading speed, selected voice, and platform toggles such as auto-read and launch-at-startup) are stored locally on your device. They never leave it.
• Windows only — on-disk diagnostic logs: the Windows app additionally writes two small local log files per day (system events and a per-read history) to help diagnose problems, kept for 7 days and then deleted automatically. Anything resembling a URL, email address, password, card number, or file path is automatically replaced with a short description (e.g. “an email address”) before it’s written. These files stay on your machine and are never transmitted anywhere.

Network use

None. The app does not call any server, download anything after installation, or transmit data of any kind. Both the Windows and Android apps work fully offline.

The Android app’s package declares the standard INTERNET permission because some bundled system libraries include it by default in their own packaging. The app itself makes no use of this permission to send or receive data.

Permissions

Windows declares the runFullTrust capability, required so it can place a system-tray icon, register a global hotkey, read selected/copied text from other apps (via UI Automation and the Windows clipboard), and run its on-device text-to-speech engine. It is not used to collect or transmit data.

Android requests the Camera permission, used only when you tap the scan action, so the app can point your camera at text to read it — nothing is captured otherwise. Both platforms use the standard OS file picker to let you choose a document to read; the app only opens the file you explicitly select.

Third-party components

The app bundles a small set of open-source, on-device components that never transmit data:

• sherpa-onnx and the Supertonic voice model — the offline neural text-to-speech engine, used on both platforms.
• Google ML Kit Text Recognition (Android only) — the on-device model used to read text out of a scanned photo. It runs locally; nothing is sent to Google or anyone else.

Children’s privacy

The app collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be published at this same URL with a new effective date.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be raised by opening an issue at the GitHub repository.