Privacy

Thype is a Thai transliteration keyboard. It converts Roman letters you type into Thai script using a dictionary and language models that ship inside the app itself. Two things are saved as you use it:

Both files are private to Thype and are removed when you delete the app. On a Mac they live in ~/Library/Application Support/Thype/. Neither is backed up or synced anywhere: Thype has no account system, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no advertising or tracking SDKs of any kind.

Your typing never touches the network, on either platform. The dictionary, the translation glossary and the language model are bundled inside the app and run entirely offline, so no word you type is ever sent anywhere to be converted. The iPhone keyboard contains no networking code at all and works in Airplane Mode exactly as it does otherwise.

Thype makes exactly two kinds of request, both from the app rather than the keyboard, and neither carries anything you have typed with the keyboard.

The first is feedback, and only when you ask for it. If you write a message under Send Feedback and press Send, that message is sent to us along with the app version, the operating system version, your device model and your language, so that a problem can be acted on. There is no account, no email address and no advertising identifier attached to it, and we cannot reply to it. Nothing is sent if you never open that screen. Messages are stored for a year and then deleted automatically.

The second is on the Mac only: it checks for its own updates. It is distributed from this site rather than the Mac App Store, so there is no App Store to tell it a fix is available - it asks this site directly when it launches and once a day after that, and downloads a new version only if you agree to it.

The update request carries nothing about you or your typing. It asks for a small file listing the current version. Like any request to a website it reveals your IP address and which version you are running, and nothing further - Thype does not send the system profile information its update framework is capable of sending.

iOS asks whether to grant Thype Full Access. Thype uses that permission for one purpose: to read and write the two files above in a shared container, so that the keyboard and the Thype app see the same personal dictionary and the same history.

Thype does not use Full Access to send your keystrokes anywhere, and it cannot - the keyboard contains no networking code at all.

You may leave Full Access off. The keyboard is fully functional without it; the only difference is that words you add in the Thype app will not reach the keyboard, and the keyboard’s learned history is kept in its own separate container instead of the shared one.

The Mac version is not a normal input method - recent versions of macOS no longer let anyone but Apple provide one - so it works differently, and it asks for a permission that sounds far more alarming than what it actually does. This section says exactly what it does with it.

While Thype is running, the system hands it the keys you press, and it reads a small amount of text immediately around your cursor in whatever app you are typing into. It needs both to do its job: the keys are the Roman letters it is converting, and the nearby words are what let it choose between Thai spellings that sound identical. Nothing about that is unusual for a keyboard - it is the same information the iPhone keyboard sees - but on a Mac it arrives through a permission you have to grant by hand.

What happens to it is the point. Keys and surrounding text are used to work out candidates and then discarded. Nothing is written to disk except the same history file described above, and nothing is transmitted: the two requests described above are the only ones Thype makes, and neither one carries what you type.

Thype also stops watching entirely in these cases:

• Password fields, and anything else using the macOS secure input mode. Here Thype is not deciding to look away - the system stops delivering keystrokes to it at all.
• Any app you add to the disable list in Thype’s settings.
• Whenever a non-Latin keyboard layout is selected, since there is nothing for it to convert.

macOS asks for Accessibility permission, and that single grant covers both reading keystrokes and reading the text around your cursor. You can withdraw it at any time in System Settings under Privacy & Security, and Thype stops working the moment you do. It requires no other permission: it never asks for your files, your microphone, your camera or your contacts, and it does not appear under Input Monitoring because the kind of tap it uses is governed by Accessibility instead.

Everything above is about the app. This page is a website, and it counts one thing: presses of the download buttons. When you press Download for Mac or Get it for iPhone, the press is recorded here before you are sent on to the file or to the App Store. It is the only way we can tell whether anyone is downloading Thype at all.

What is kept is the platform, the time, the country the request came from, and the site you arrived from. Your IP address is not stored. So that one person pressing twice is not counted as two people, the IP address and browser are combined into a one-way fingerprint that cannot be turned back into either, and the day is part of it, so it does not follow you from one day to the next.

There are no cookies, no analytics scripts and no third parties on this site - the fonts, video and images are all served from here, and nothing about your visit is shared with anyone. Reading these pages records nothing. Only the download buttons do.

Thype is safe for all ages. It collects nothing from anyone, including children under 13, except a feedback message someone writes and chooses to send.

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be published at this address and the date above will be revised.

Questions about privacy in Thype: nawathome@gmail.com