Privacy Policy

The short version

HiFAi has no accounts and no tracking. Your podcasts, downloads and listening stay on your iPhone. Ad detection runs on your iPhone. The only thing HiFAi sends us is anonymous information about ads, to help everyone skip them, and you can turn that off.

What stays on your iPhone

The podcasts you follow, the episodes you download, what you’ve played and where you stopped, your settings, and the ads you mark are stored only on your iPhone. HiFAi has no accounts and we never receive this information.

How ads are found (on your iPhone)

After an episode downloads, HiFAi analyzes its audio on your iPhone to find inserted ads. To do this it:

• makes an audio fingerprint of the episode (a compact summary of its sound, not the audio itself) to spot audio that repeats across episodes;
• tells apart the voices in the episode (the podcast’s hosts and guests versus voices heard only briefly) using a speaker-recognition model that runs on your iPhone;
• transcribes short stretches with Apple’s on-device speech recognition, and asks HiFAi’s own AI checker (the open Qwen 3 model, running on your iPhone) whether a stretch is promoting something or is part of the show. It does not use Apple Intelligence.

All of this happens on your iPhone. Episode audio, transcripts and voice analysis are never sent to us or anyone else. The AI checker’s model file (about 0.9 GB) is downloaded once from Hugging Face, which sees your internet address like any website does; nothing about you or what you listen to is sent with it.

What HiFAi sends: anonymous ad information

With Help improve ad detection on (Settings › Ad skipping; it’s on by default), HiFAi sends our server information about ads, only to improve ad finding and to share ads so other listeners skip them too:

• the audio fingerprints of ads it found or you marked, and of stretches you said aren’t ads (never audio);
• where in the episode they were, and the episode’s length;
• the show and episode as scrambled keys (a one-way code, not their names or web addresses);
• a random ID created by the app (not linked to you, your Apple ID or your device) and the app’s version.

Test versions of HiFAi (TestFlight) also send show and episode names and what was played and skipped, so we can check the ad detection. Versions on the App Store never do.

Turn off Help improve ad detection and HiFAi stops sending this. HiFAi still downloads the list of ads other listeners shared for the shows you follow (just fingerprints, by scrambled show key).

Our server

The ad information is kept on a server we run (hosted by DigitalOcean in the United States) and used only for ad detection. We don’t sell or share it, and we don’t use it to identify anyone. Server backups are kept for 14 days.

Podcasts, search and backup

Podcast feeds, episodes and artwork are downloaded directly from the podcasts’ own servers, which see your internet address like any website does. Search uses Apple’s public podcast directory. To make it easy to get your shows back after reinstalling, the list of podcasts you follow is saved in your iCloud Keychain, under Apple’s privacy terms; we never receive it.

No tracking or advertising

HiFAi contains no advertising, analytics or tracking tools, and does not track you across apps or websites.

Children

HiFAi does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we will update this page and the effective date above.

Contact

Questions? Email mail@quantiph.ai.