Data License Agreement

Last updated October 23, 2026

This Data License Agreement ("Agreement") sets out the rights you grant Phonetico in the voice recordings, transcriptions, conversation audio, and related data you contribute through the Platform ("Contributions"), and the choices you have over how they are used. It is part of our Terms of Service, which define "Phonetico," "we," "us," "our," and the "Platform," and it should be read with our Privacy Policy.

Your voice is yours. This Agreement does not transfer ownership of your voice or identity. It grants us a license to use your Contributions to build and evaluate language technology, on the terms below.

1. Scope

This Agreement covers every Contribution you make through the Platform, whether as practice, as a volunteer, or as a paid contributor, and whether it is a recording, a transcription, or conversation audio.

2. Contribution paths

Your Contributions fall into one of these paths, and the license depends on the path:

  • Practice. Work you do before you choose a path, so you can learn the task.
  • Volunteer. Work you donate without payment under an open license.
  • Paid. Work for which we pay you when it passes review.
  • Tester. Work made only to check that the Platform functions.

3. The license you grant

3.1 Paid Contributions. For Contributions you make as a paid contributor, you grant Phonetico a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, reproduce, process, adapt, and create derivative works from the Contribution, and to use it to develop, train, fine-tune, test, evaluate, and benchmark speech recognition, speech synthesis, and other language and machine-learning models, and to license these rights to our research and commercial partners. Your payment is the consideration for this license.

3.2 Volunteer and practice Contributions. Contributions you make as a volunteer, and all practice Contributions, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under CC-BY 4.0, anyone may use, share, and adapt the Contribution for any purpose, including commercial purposes, provided they credit Phonetico. A CC-BY 4.0 license is irrevocable once granted. We do not pay for volunteer or practice Contributions. A volunteer may become a paid contributor at any time, and work done after that change falls under Section 3.1.

3.3 Tester Contributions. Contributions marked as tester work are used only to verify that the Platform functions, and are marked for deletion after those checks. We do not use them to build datasets or models and do not pay for them.

3.4 Transcriptions and review work. When you transcribe or review audio, the text and corrections you produce are Contributions under this Agreement. They are licensed on the path you are working under: under Section 3.1 for paid work, and under CC-BY 4.0 for volunteer and practice work. The Transcriber Agreement sets the other terms of that work.

4. Consent scopes

Within the paid path, the uses you permit are described as scopes. You accept a consent template that sets which scopes apply:

  • Internal use. Your Contributions are used only inside Phonetico, to build and improve our own models.
  • Commercial licensing. Anonymized datasets built from your Contributions may be licensed to our commercial and research partners.
  • Open dataset. Anonymized datasets built from your Contributions may be published under an open license such as CC-BY 4.0.

The consent you accept tells you which scopes apply before you contribute. Volunteer and practice Contributions always fall under the open-dataset outcome through CC-BY 4.0.

5. What you keep

You keep ownership of your voice and identity. You keep the right to use your own voice for any purpose, and to contribute to other platforms. Nothing in this Agreement is exclusive to us.

6. Withdrawal, deletion, and irrevocability

You may stop contributing at any time and may ask us to delete your personal account data, as the Privacy Policy describes. The effect on your Contributions depends on how they have been used:

  • Not yet shared. Contributions that have not been licensed to a partner, published, or used to train a model are removed from future datasets when you withdraw, and we remove the personal identifiers tied to them.
  • Already licensed or published. We cannot recall Contributions that have already been licensed to a partner or published under an open license. CC-BY 4.0 is irrevocable by design, and we cannot retrieve copies others already hold.
  • Already used to train a model. Data that has already been used to train a model cannot be removed from that model.

Withdrawing stops future use. It does not undo lawful past use, and it does not affect the validity of datasets already built.

7. Anonymization

Before a Contribution is included in a dataset or shared outside Phonetico, we remove direct identifiers such as your name, email, and phone, and we replace any reference to you as the speaker with a code that does not identify you. Datasets we share contain the audio or text, the language, the prompt, duration, and quality measures, and may contain demographic data such as age range and gender in anonymized form. We never include your name, email, phone, exact account identifiers, or payout information. A voice recording can still be recognizable to someone who already knows your voice, which anonymization cannot prevent.

8. Attribution

When Contributions are used under CC-BY 4.0, the required credit is to "Phonetico," not to you. Your personal identity is never disclosed in attribution.

9. Compensation

Compensation for paid Contributions is governed by the Terms of Service, Sections 6 and 7, and the active rate card. This Agreement does not promise any particular amount.

10. Contact