Proof of Deletion: What a Deletion Record Can Show

Author: Hushscript | Published: July 14, 2026 | Last reviewed: July 21, 2026

“Proof of deletion” is what people type into a search bar after asking a transcription tool to delete their audio and wanting something more solid than a privacy policy’s promise. Here’s the honest answer before the rest of this post: no transcription service, Hushscript included, can hand you cryptographic proof that a file no longer exists anywhere on its infrastructure. What Hushscript gives you instead is a deletion receipt: a downloadable, timestamped record of what was removed and when. Understanding the difference between those two claims is worth five minutes before you rely on either one.

Why nobody can really offer “proof”

Proving a negative (that a specific file exists nowhere, on no drive, in no backup, anywhere on a company’s infrastructure) isn’t something any vendor can demonstrate to an outside party. A vendor’s own claim of deletion always comes down to trusting the vendor’s word, checkable at most against their own internal logs. That’s true of Hushscript exactly as much as it’s true of any other transcription service; the honest move is naming that limit instead of dressing a policy statement up as proof. What Hushscript can do, and does automatically, is generate a specific, timestamped record every time something is deleted: a materially different, and more checkable, claim than a general privacy promise.

NIST’s media-sanitization guidance makes the same scoping problem visible at an infrastructure level: sanitization depends on the medium, method, verification, and disposition process. A user-facing receipt cannot independently inspect all of those layers. It can accurately record the application action Hushscript performed, which is the narrower claim this article uses.

What a deletion receipt actually contains

Dedicated transcript, AI artifact, and account deletion flows return a downloadable JSON receipt recording what was removed and when.

Retention windows: deletion on a schedule

Not every transcript gets deleted by hand. Set an account-wide default, either keeping everything until you delete it yourself or auto-removing it after 7, 30, 90, or 365 days, and Hushscript follows that schedule without you having to remember to act. Any single transcript can also carry its own auto-delete date that overrides the account default, for the one file that needs a shorter shelf life than everything else, or the one you want to keep past when the rest would clear out. Automatic retention removes the transcript but does not currently leave a downloadable receipt; use the dedicated single-transcript deletion flow when you need one for your files.

Your audio isn’t waiting on any of this

Retention windows govern the saved transcript text. Your audio follows a separate, simpler rule: it’s deleted the moment the transcript is ready, on every job, on every mode, before retention settings ever become relevant. There’s no window to configure for the audio because there’s no waiting period to configure; it’s already gone by the time you’d be setting one.

A worked example

A legal assistant handling client-related recordings sets a 30-day account default, so old transcripts clear out on their own without anyone having to track and delete them by hand. One transcript, tied to a case still under review, needs to stick around longer, so they set a per-transcript override for that file alone, keeping it past the 30-day mark while everything else on the account still clears on schedule. When the case eventually closes, they delete that transcript manually and download the receipt: a timestamped record they can attach to the case file, showing exactly when it happened.

What the record can’t tell you

A deletion receipt is an account of what Hushscript did on its own side, timestamped and specific. It is not an independently audited certification and cannot speak for a processor’s systems. Transcription audio is handled without retention and deleted from Hushscript after transcription, but the receipt itself records only the Hushscript deletion named in the file. If your situation requires independently certified deletion, that is a stronger, different guarantee than this receipt provides.

Where this lives

Retention windows, per-transcript overrides, and deletion receipts are all covered in more depth on the private transcription page, alongside private mode for the recordings that shouldn’t be saved at all. The about page has the full picture of who operates Hushscript and how to reach us if you have a specific deletion question. For why the audio itself never waits around in the first place, see why we delete your audio after every transcription.