An open conversation about secure transcription
Summary
- Good Tape’s infrastructure is built around one principle: trust.
- All data is processed and stored exclusively within the EU, with full GDPR compliance.
- Files are encrypted, temporary, and deleted once they’re no longer needed.
- The architecture uses stateless design and AI hardware optimized for both speed and sustainability.
- Transparency, sovereignty, and environmental responsibility are at the core of everything we build.
The people behind the privacy
When we talk about security at Good Tape, it’s not just a checklist or a paragraph in a privacy policy. It’s something we build into every part of our system.
To understand what that means, we sat down with two of the people behind the infrastructure: Jakob Steinn, our Tech Lead and Co-founder, and Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason, our Product and Backend Team Lead.
Together, they unpack what makes secure transcription possible, why privacy should never be an afterthought, and how Good Tape’s European-first mindset shapes every decision.
From newsroom problem to global platform
Jakob started his career as a web developer at Zetland, a Danish media outlet known for investigative journalism. That’s where the first version of Good Tape was born.
“It started as a small tool to help journalists,” Jakob explains. “Manual transcription was slowing everything down. I found Whisper, OpenAI’s transcription model, and built something on top of it. It worked so well that it became clear this wasn’t just a newsroom problem—it was a global one.”
Ýmir joined soon after, bringing a deep background in backend development, AI infrastructure, and system scalability. Together, they represent two halves of the same mission: make transcription fast, secure, and effortless.
The European-first approach
One of the biggest decisions early on was where to store and process user data. For many startups, the answer is simple: the cheapest and fastest option, often run by a US cloud provider.
Good Tape took a different path.
“All of our data is processed and stored within the EU,” says Ýmir. “That’s a conscious choice. It costs more, it’s more complex, but it’s the right thing to do.”
This European-first approach is rooted in sovereignty and compliance. GDPR isn’t a marketing term for Good Tape, it’s a framework that defines how every file, transcript, and temporary copy is handled.
“We wanted users to know exactly where their data lives,” Jakob adds. “And that it never leaves European soil.”
Trust through GDPR
Good Tape’s commitment to GDPR is about more than following rules. It’s about earning global trust.
“Our users are journalists, lawyers, researchers, consultants,” says Jakob. “They work with sensitive material. GDPR is one of the strictest privacy frameworks in the world, and following it gives users outside Europe confidence too.”
Ýmir agrees. “Even reporters in Taiwan or academics in the US use Good Tape because they know their data is safer here. The rules that protect European citizens protect everyone.”
In other words, GDPR is not a barrier, it’s a benefit.
Store nothing unless it’s necessary
When building Good Tape, the team made an early decision that still defines the product: only store what’s absolutely necessary, and nothing more.
“Most tech companies collect data because it’s easy,” says Ýmir. “But easy doesn’t mean right. From day one, we decided not to store anything we didn’t need. If we keep something, it’s because the user asked for it.”
This approach means that if you delete a file in Good Tape, it’s gone completely. No hidden copies, no backups quietly sitting somewhere.
“If you tell Good Tape to forget something, it forgets,” Jakob adds. “It’s that simple.”
How secure transcription works at Good Tape
Good Tape’s architecture is built on three main components:
- Vault – Secure storage for uploaded files.
- Web – The user interface where transcripts live.
- Machine – The AI pipeline that performs transcription.
Each part operates independently, creating natural isolation and reducing risk.
Here’s what happens when you upload a file:
- Your audio is encrypted and sent to Scaleway servers in France, one of Europe’s leading cloud providers.
- The file is stored securely in the Vault.
- It’s then temporarily sent to a compute node in Amsterdam, where transcription takes place using TPUs (Tensor Processing Units).
- Once the transcription is done, the temporary copy is deleted instantly.
- Only the final transcript remains, fully encrypted and under your control.
Every temporary link that’s generated expires quickly and can only be used once. Even if someone somehow intercepted it, it would be useless.
Deletion that’s real
Many companies promise “deletion,” but what they actually do is hide files from view while keeping them on their servers. Good Tape does it differently.
“When something is deleted, it’s deleted everywhere,” says Ýmir. “Vault, web, and machine. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
This is possible because Good Tape uses stateless systems, containers and nodes that don’t keep data once a job is finished.
“The best way to protect data is to make sure it doesn’t live longer than it needs to,” Jakob explains. “Our system is designed to forget.”
Stateless by design
The Good Tape infrastructure is built on Kubernetes, a system that’s perfect for stateless design.
In a stateless setup, nothing depends on permanent storage. Each transcription job starts fresh, processes the file, and ends when it’s done. No residual data remains on the server.
This design makes the system faster, safer, and easier to maintain. It also means fewer attack surfaces, no permanent files sitting in one place waiting to be compromised.
“The most secure data,” Ýmir says, “is data that doesn’t exist anymore.”
The shift from GPUs to TPUs
Speed and sustainability go hand in hand at Good Tape. The team made a major shift from traditional GPUs to Google’s TPUs, which are purpose-built for AI tasks.
Jakob explains, “A one-hour interview used to take about ten minutes to process on GPUs. With TPUs, we can do it in one or two minutes.”
The change was not just about speed. TPUs are also more energy-efficient, reducing the environmental footprint of each transcription.
“We care about privacy, but we also care about responsibility,” Ýmir adds. “Technology should be both fast and sustainable.”
Responsible AI in practice
AI isn’t neutral. It has an environmental cost. Running massive models consumes electricity, hardware, and cooling resources.
At Good Tape, the team treats sustainability as part of security. Energy efficiency reduces costs, improves performance, and ensures that the company’s growth doesn’t come at the planet’s expense.
“The goal is not just to be the fastest,” says Jakob. “It’s to be the smartest with how we use resources.”
Good Tape is continuously exploring ways to make AI transcription both accurate and sustainable.
Why hardware sovereignty matters
Even with strong European infrastructure, most AI hardware is still US-owned. Google’s TPUs, for example, power much of the world’s AI computing, including parts of Good Tape’s backend.
Jakob and Ýmir both hope to see more European alternatives in the future.
“Hardware sovereignty will become a big topic,” Ýmir predicts. “Where your data is processed, and what company owns the chip that processes it, matters just as much as where the server sits.”
Until then, Good Tape focuses on transparency. Users know exactly which providers handle their data and where. Nothing is hidden.
Everything is temporary
If there’s one idea that defines Good Tape’s architecture, it’s this: everything is temporary.
Every file, every link, every container has a short life span. By the time a transcription is complete, all temporary data is already gone.
This approach isn’t just efficient, it’s safe. Even if someone tried to access old data, it would no longer exist.
“Security through simplicity,” Jakob calls it. “If we don’t need it, we delete it. That’s our rule.”
Building trust, one transcript at a time
At the end of the conversation, Jakob and Ýmir return to what drives them: trust.
“We’re a small team,” Jakob says. “We’re not a giant corporation. That’s our strength. We can care about every single decision, every single user.”
Ýmir nods. “When people trust us with their recordings, that’s not something we take lightly. We treat every file as if it were our own.”
Good Tape’s mission is to save the world from manual transcription, but its foundation is something deeper: a belief that speed and security can coexist, and that privacy should never be compromised for convenience.
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