Open This One Settings Screen Before You Trust Me
I am going to ask you to do something before you trust a single word I say about privacy. Open the settings, find the screen called Apps and Personalization, and just look at it. It takes two minutes, and it will tell you more about whether this app is for you than anything I can write.
Here is what you will see, and what each part means.
The receipts, not the promises
The screen opens on the thing most apps never show you: a count of what the app has actually stored. It tells you how many writing samples it has collected, from how many apps, and how recently it updated them. Not a vague "we respect your privacy." A number, with your apps attached to it.
Below that come the top phrases it has learned. This is the part that makes people pause, because it is specific. It is not "your writing style," it is the actual fragments: "review the edits", "by end of day", "let's sync on". You will recognize them, because they are yours. That recognition is the point. A privacy feature you can read is worth more than one you have to trust, and there is no trusting required when the exact phrases are sitting on the screen in front of you.
The honest number
The screen also shows something called the history-aware rate, and I want to explain it carefully, because it is the most honest number in the whole app and it is easy to misread.
The rate is the share of suggestions that were generated with your writing history available to the model, plus the share of those you accepted. It is not a claim that the model changed because of your history. It is a receipt for when your history was actually in the prompt. Some apps would dress this up as "your AI learned your style and got 40% better." WriteAmp shows you the raw mechanism instead: here is how often your history was in the loop, and here is how often you took the suggestion when it was.
A black-box personalization feature asks you to trust that your data is being used well. This screen removes the trust from the equation. You can see the phrases, the counts, and the rate, and decide for yourself whether the trade is working.
The controls that actually control
The best part of the screen is what you can do from it. This is not a read-only dashboard. It is the control room.
That last one is the one I care about most. A one-tap wipe is not a small feature. It is the difference between a tool that stores your data and a tool that borrows it. When you wipe, the app does not keep a copy for later, because there is no later. The samples are gone.
Why I built the screen
Here is the story behind it. I got tired of writing tools that claimed to personalize while hiding exactly what they learned. The pattern is always the same: a settings toggle that says "personalization" and nothing underneath it, no way to see what was collected, no way to remove it, just a promise and a black box. I wrote a whole post about why the black box is the problem, and this screen is the answer to it.
The design principle is simple. If a feature uses your data, you should be able to see exactly what it used, when it used it, and how often you benefited. If the tool cannot show you that, it is not respecting you, it is just hoping you do not ask. WriteAmp is built so you never have to ask, because the answer is on the screen.
What to do now
If you have WriteAmp installed, open that screen and read it. If the phrases look right and the controls feel honest, keep going, and let the app keep learning, because that is how the suggestions start to sound like you. If anything on the screen surprises you, I want to know, because a surprise on that screen is a bug in my thinking, not in your settings.
The download is free for 30 days, and the screen is there from day one, with every feature on. You do not have to take my word for how personalization works. You can read the receipts yourself, and that is exactly how it should be.
Sources
- WriteAmp homepage: the Apps and Personalization settings described in the post
- WriteAmp privacy page: what the app stores, and what it never sends anywhere
On macOS 26+ Macs, Apple Intelligence mode stays free even after the trial ends — you always keep a working path to suggestions.
Written by Amit Ashwini, who builds WriteAmp and runs its marketing. More: why the Tab key beats the chat box · mini, midi, and max compared · benchmark methodology.