Hear — Where your API key goes

Hear has no servers. The Gemini API key you enter is stored on this device and is sent only to Google's Gemini API. The developer cannot receive or see it.

What you can verify

• Storage — iOS: the Keychain (encrypted); with a paired Apple Watch and settings sync on, a copy also lives in the Watch's secure store (device-to-device, no server). Android: AES-256/GCM under an Android Keystore-managed key (hardware-backed where the device supports it), app-private storage, excluded from cloud backup.
• The only connection that carries the key — generativelanguage.googleapis.com (Google Gemini API). Live interpreting sends it as the WebSocket URL's ?key= parameter; the iOS AI Brief request sends it in the x-goog-api-key header. Outside a session the key is used only when you generate an AI Brief yourself on iOS (Android has no such feature yet).
• Connections that never carry the key — pages the in-app browser loads, Google AI Studio opened by "get a free key", the iOS remote feature flags (a public GitHub Gist file), and this page.
• The key never reaches the developer — the app does carry Firebase crash reporting and usage statistics (see the privacy policy), but neither the key, audio nor transcripts are ever part of them. There are no ad SDKs.
• Check it yourself — put a network proxy (Charles, Proxyman, mitmproxy) on the device and start interpreting. On iOS, trusting the proxy certificate shows request contents: the only requests containing your key (AIza…) go to generativelanguage.googleapis.com. Release builds on Android don't trust user-installed certificates, so contents stay sealed (the connection fails instead), but the hosts the app connects to are still visible.

Using your key safely — 3 steps

• 1. Make a key just for Hear in Google AI Studio and don't share it with other apps or scripts. If anything goes wrong, revoking that one key is enough.
• 2. Don't attach billing (free tier). A free-tier key cannot generate charges even if abused. Optionally restrict it to the Generative Language API in the Google Cloud console.
• 3. Revoke any time. Deleting the key in Google AI Studio invalidates it everywhere at once; "Delete key" in the app removes it from the device (and a paired Watch).

Related: Privacy Policy — iOS · Privacy Policy — Android · Support

Questions: developer@1xp.com