Privacy Policy

Phonetico is a company registered in Minnesota, United States, with operations in the United States, Canada, and Ethiopia ("Phonetico," "we," "us," or "our"). This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have. It covers our contributor platform, the Phonetico app, our developer and API products, our Telegram transcription bot, and our websites (together, the "Services").

Your voice is biometric data. We treat recordings and the data derived from them as sensitive, and Section 10 describes how we handle them.

1. Who this policy covers

This policy applies to:

• Contributors, who record speech, transcribe audio, or take part in recorded conversations;
• App users, who transcribe speech on their iPhone with the Phonetico app;
• Developers and customers, who use our API and developer portal to transcribe audio or synthesize speech;
• Telegram bot users, who send voice messages to @Phonetico_aiBot to have them transcribed;
• Website visitors, who browse our public sites.

When a developer or customer sends us data about other people through the API, that developer is the controller of the data and decides why it is processed. For that data we act as a processor on the developer's behalf, as the Developer Data Processing Terms describe, and this policy governs only the personal information we hold as a controller.

2. The information we collect

2.1 From contributors.

• Account information: email address, phone number, country, and a password, which we never store in readable form.
• Profile and demographics: display name, region, the languages you speak, and optional demographic details such as age range and gender, which help us balance datasets.
• Voice recordings and transcripts: the audio you record, the text you transcribe, and metadata such as duration, sample rate, prompt text, language, and quality measures.
• Conversations: audio and metadata from recorded conversations, and the identity of the participants to each other and to us.
• Identity verification: for payouts, your legal name, a government-issued identity document such as the Ethiopian Fayda, your year of birth, and payment details.
• Payment information: the mobile-money or bank details needed to pay you, and your payout history. We do not store full card numbers.
• Consent records: the consent text you accepted, its version, what you agreed to, and the time, together with a per-recording snapshot of your consent at the moment each recording was made.

2.2 From App users.

The App transcribes your audio on your iPhone; the audio is never kept and never sent to us. Transcripts you save stay on the device, or in your own iCloud account if you use iCloud, and we never receive them. The App sends us only:

• A device identifier, so your trial and purchases stay with your iPhone. It is not linked to your name or your Apple ID.
• Trial and purchases: how much transcription you have used, so the trial and your plan work, and what Apple tells us about your purchases, so we can unlock what you bought. Apple handles payment.
• Usage analytics: how you use the App, with basic device and app information, and crash and performance reports. Never audio, transcript text, or file names. Where the law requires your consent, we collect them only if you agree; elsewhere, until you turn them off in the App's settings. We record your choice and your country, which decides whether we must ask you first.
• Diagnostics you send: when you choose to send diagnostics to support, information about the App and your device that helps us find the problem.

2.3 From developers and customers.

• Account and billing: name, email, organization, the contents of API keys you create (their names, scopes, spend limits, and allowed networks), your prepaid balance, and payment records held by our payment processor.
• Security credentials: passkeys, two-step verification settings, recovery codes, and session and webhook information.
• API inputs and outputs: the audio you send for transcription, the text and any reference voice clips you send for synthesis, the voices you save, and the transcripts and synthesized audio we return. Section 8 explains how long these are kept, and Section 5.2 whether they are used for training.

2.4 From Telegram bot users.

• From Telegram: your Telegram user ID, your username or first name, and the title of the chat a voice message came from.
• What you send and receive: the voice message and the transcript we return.
• Settings and usage: your language and reply-mode choices, the groups where you turned on automatic transcription of your own voice messages, and how many messages you sent each day.

2.5 From everyone.

• Device and usage data: IP address, device and browser type, pages and features used, timestamps, and error reports. We use the IP address for security and rate limiting and do not keep it as part of any dataset.

3. How we use information

We use personal information to:

• create and run your account and provide the Services;
• process recordings, transcriptions, conversations, voice messages, and API calls;
• review quality, detect fraud and abuse, and keep the Services and their users safe;
• calculate and pay contributor earnings, and bill developers;
• build and evaluate speech recognition, speech synthesis, and related models, within the limits Sections 5 and 10 set;
• communicate with you about your account, your work, and changes to the Services;
• understand and improve how the Services perform; and
• meet our legal obligations and enforce our agreements.

4. Our legal bases

Where the law requires a legal basis to process personal information, we rely on one or more of these: performance of our agreement with you; your consent, for example for specific uses of your voice; our legitimate interests in running, securing, and improving the Services; and compliance with legal obligations.

5. How your data is used to build models

5.1 Contributors. How your contributions may be used depends on the contribution path and consent you accept. The Data License Agreement sets out each path in full, including which uses cannot be undone once data has been shared or published.

5.2 Developers and customers. We do not use what you send through the API or the developer portal, or what we return, to train or improve our models unless your account turns training on. The Developer Terms, Section 5.3, set out what training covers, what it never covers, and how to turn it off.

5.3 App users. We never receive your recordings or transcripts from the App, so they are never used to train our models.

5.4 Telegram bot users. We do not use the voice messages you send to the bot, or their transcripts, to train or improve our models.

5.5 Aggregated and de-identified data. We create aggregated and de-identified data and statistics from the Services and how they are used, such as usage counts, durations, languages, and quality and performance measures. This data does not identify you. We may use and share it for our business purposes, including analytics, benchmarking, research, and improving the Services. Reducing data to aggregated or de-identified form does not change the commitments that apply to your voice recordings and other personal information, which remain governed by your consent, the Data License Agreement, and Sections 5.2 to 5.4.

6. How we share information

We do not sell your personal information.

We share personal information only in these ways:

• Service providers. We use trusted providers to run the Services, for example card payment processing, mobile-money and bank payouts, email delivery, and infrastructure. They may use the data only to perform their work for us and must protect it. Apple handles purchases made in the App. The Telegram bot works through Telegram, whose own privacy policy governs what Telegram does with your messages.
• Research partners and customers. With the consent you gave, we may license anonymized datasets to research and commercial partners, or publish them under an open license. What a dataset contains, and what it never contains, is set out in the Data License Agreement, Section 7.
• Legal and safety. We may disclose information where the law requires it, to respond to a valid legal request, or to protect the rights, safety, and property of our contributors, our users, the public, or us. Where we are allowed to, we will tell you about a legal request for your data.
• Business transfers. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction. The recipient must honor this policy, and we will give notice before your information becomes subject to a different policy.

7. How we protect information

We keep your voice recordings apart from the information that identifies you, so that no one system holds both. We protect information with encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, strong sign-in options, and records of sensitive actions. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we work to protect your information and will notify you and the authorities of a breach where the law requires.

8. How long we keep information

We keep personal information for as long as we need it for the purposes in this policy, and then delete or anonymize it. In particular:

• Account and profile data is kept while your account is open and for a limited period afterward, then deleted or anonymized.
• Contributor recordings and transcripts are kept for the purposes and the period the consent you accepted allows. Consent records and audit logs are kept as long as we need them as legal evidence, which may be indefinitely.
• Identity-verification documents are kept only as long as needed for payment and legal compliance, then deleted.
• Developer API and portal data. Audio you send for transcription, and a reference voice clip sent with a speech request, are deleted when the request or job ends. Transcripts and synthesized speech are kept for the retention you choose in the developer portal: none, or a period of up to one year, and any single request can keep nothing. When nothing is kept, a job's result stays for up to 24 hours so you can fetch it, and a request that returns its result directly keeps nothing after it ends. For each reference voice clip we keep a fingerprint for abuse detection, from which the clip cannot be recreated. A voice you save is kept, with its clip and transcript, until you delete it or close your account.
• App data. Usage analytics are kept for 13 months, then reduced to aggregate counts that do not identify a device. The device key and the record of your trial and purchases are kept while you use the App, so your purchases keep working, and billing records as long as the law requires.
• Telegram bot data. Voice messages, their transcripts, and the username and chat title that came with them are deleted within 24 hours. Your settings and daily counts are kept while you use the bot; email us to delete them.
• Abuse monitoring. Whatever you choose above, we may keep what is sent to the API, the developer portal, and the Telegram bot, and what they return, for up to 30 days to detect and investigate abuse of the Services, and longer only where the law requires it. We do not use it to train or improve our models.
• Billing and tax records are kept for the period the law requires.

9. Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of these rights over your personal information: to access it, to correct it, to delete it, to receive a portable copy, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to withdraw consent. You will not be treated unfairly for exercising a right.

To exercise a right, use the controls in your account, the developer portal, or the App's settings, where you can turn usage analytics off at any time, or email [email protected]. We may need to verify your identity first. We will respond within the time the law allows.

Some limits apply. We keep consent records and audit logs as legal evidence. Withdrawing consent stops future use; it does not undo lawful past use. For contributions, the Data License Agreement, Section 6, sets out what cannot be recalled once it has been licensed, published, or used to train a model.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to your local data protection authority.

10. Voice and biometric data

Your voice recordings, and data derived from them, can be biometric information. We collect them only for the purposes you consent to, and we do not use them to identify you as an individual. We never sell your recordings, transcripts, or voice data, and we never share them with advertising networks or data brokers. What a dataset built from contributions contains, and what it never contains, is set out in the Data License Agreement, Section 7.

11. Children

The contributor platform and the developer products are not directed to children under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information, except where a parent or legal guardian uses our guardian consent process on a minor's behalf. The App and the Telegram bot are not intended for anyone under 13. If we learn that we have collected a child's information without the consent the law requires, we will delete it.

12. International transfers

We operate in the United States, Canada, and Ethiopia, and we use service providers in other countries. Your personal information may be processed in a country other than your own, including the United States. Where the law requires a safeguard for such a transfer, we use an approved mechanism such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, and we take steps to protect your information wherever it is processed.

13. Cookies and analytics

Our websites and applications use cookies and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember your settings, keep the Services secure, and understand how they are used. You can control cookies through your browser and through the choices we offer. We do not use your recordings, transcripts, or voice data for advertising.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If a change is material, we will give notice by email or through the Services before it takes effect, and, where the change affects a use that needs your consent, we will ask for consent again. The date at the top of this page shows when the current version took effect.

15. Contact

• Privacy and data-rights requests: [email protected]
• General support: [email protected]
• Website: https://phonetico.ai

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom and wish to reach us about this policy, email [email protected] and we will route your request appropriately.