Last updated: 30 August 2026
Shabadu is a client for shabadoo, a coordinator that each user runs on their own machines. The app talks only to a server the user operates. It has no backend of its own.
Nothing. The developer operates no servers that receive data from this app, and no analytics, tracking, advertising or crash-reporting services are embedded in it.
The app sends requests only to the coordinator address you supplied when pairing, over HTTPS. Depending on what you do in the app, that includes:
That server is yours. This policy does not govern it — how it stores or logs what it receives is determined by whoever operates it, which is you.
The app can show the conversation a session has had: what you asked it and what it answered, including the tool calls it made. That is read from the conversation history your own coordinator keeps for that project folder.
This is a wider read than the terminal output described above, and it is worth being plain about it. The terminal view shows a few hundred lines that were about to scroll away. The conversation history is the complete record for that folder — every session ever run in it, kept for as long as you keep it — and whatever went into those conversations is in it: the contents of files that were read, notes and memory the sessions kept, and anything you pasted into a prompt.
It is read only from the coordinator you paired with, only for the session you opened, and only while you are looking at it. Nothing about it is sent anywhere else, stored by the developer, or retained by the app after you leave the screen.
The app can record a meeting through your device's microphone. Recording only happens while you have started it, and iOS shows its microphone indicator for the whole time — including while the screen is locked.
The audio never leaves your device. It is transcribed here, by Apple's on-device speech recognition, and no recording is uploaded anywhere by this app.
The recording is deleted 30 days after it has been transcribed, and the transcript is kept. Until a recording has been transcribed it is not deleted at any age, because until then it is the only record of what was said. You can also delete either at any time.
The transcript is a separate thing, and it moves only when you say so: you choose a session to deliver it to, and it is sent to your own coordinator's inbox for that session. Nothing is delivered automatically.
Because there is one microphone and no separate recording of the far end of a call, a transcript cannot say who spoke, and the app does not claim to. Every line is marked as unattributed.
Recording other people may require their knowledge or consent where you live. The app makes a recording visible while it happens; the decision to record is yours.
The app sends nothing to any third party. There is no analytics, no advertising, and no speech or transcription service: an earlier version could open a voice connection to ElevenLabs, and that feature and its dependency have been removed entirely.
Shabadu is a developer tool and is not directed at children.
Material changes to this policy will be reflected here with a new date.
Questions about this policy, and requests concerning your data, go to privacy@shabadu.us.
For support, bug reports, or anything that benefits from being answered in public, the issue tracker is the better channel: github.com/alexj212/shabadoo/issues.