Tersa Cloud privacy policy

Tersa Cloud sends your voice to the cloud to turn it into text. This policy says what goes where, what is kept and for how long, and what never is.

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The short version

• Your audio, and the text it becomes, are processed in memory for one dictation and then discarded. Tersa’s servers do not store them.
• Each dictation goes to one speech-recognition provider. With Polished, the text also goes to one language-model provider. The app shows which provider served each dictation.
• We keep your account, your plan, and how many milliseconds of audio you used: not what you said.
• Dictations are processed in the United States.
• We do not sell your information, show you ads, or make voiceprints.

Who is responsible

Jean Baez, an individual doing business as Tersa (“Tersa”, “we”), is responsible for the personal information described here: its “controller”, in the words of the GDPR. Contact: [email protected].

This policy covers Tersa Cloud: the app and the Tersa service it connects to. This website is covered by the separate privacy page.

What we collect

Account. Your email address, and what Clerk, our sign-in provider, needs to sign you in and protect sign-in from abuse (such as your IP address and browser details). Clerk holds these. Our own database stores the account ID Clerk gives us, your plan and account creation date, plus trial activation and end dates, used and reserved allowance, and the trial-used marker. These records contain no audio or text and prevent billing changes or retries from resetting a trial.

Billing. When you buy Pro, Stripe collects your payment details, name, email, country or billing address and tax information. From Stripe we receive the IDs of your subscription and of your Stripe customer record, the plan, the status and the billing dates, never your card number. We retain purchase-attempt IDs and status so a retry can recover the same purchase. Activating a cardless trial does not send a payment request to Stripe.

Usage. For each dictation we record when it started and ended, how many milliseconds of audio Tersa’s service received, which provider and model served it and in which region, whether it finished, how long each step took, and for Polished how many tokens it used. These records hold no audio and no text. They count your allowance, and let us find faults and keep costs under control.

Service logs. Technical logs record your account ID, timings, sizes, error types and status codes. IP addresses are shortened to their first three parts. Logs never contain your audio, your text, your email address or your custom words.

Usage analytics. The app reports which features you use and how dictation performs (for example, that a setting changed, or how long a dictation took) to PostHog, under an ID made by hashing your account ID. This is on by default: switch it off in the app under Settings, Privacy, Share usage analytics. These reports never contain your audio, your text, your custom words, your email address or your IP address.

Crash reports. When something fails, the app and Tersa’s service send an error report, with their technical log lines, to Sentry, under the same hashed ID. In the app this is on by default: switch it off under Settings, Privacy, Send crash reports. The app removes the words of your recent dictations and your custom words from a report before it leaves your computer, and a report never contains your audio, your email address or your IP address.

Support. If you write to us, we keep the conversation for as long as we need it to help you.

What we never keep

Your audio and your text. While you dictate, your audio passes through Tersa’s service to the speech provider, and the text comes back the same way. Both exist only in the service’s memory for that one dictation and are discarded when it ends. They are not written to our database, our logs or our backups.

Your custom words. Words you add so Tersa spells them right are stored in the app on your computer, sent with each dictation to help recognition, and not stored on our servers.

Your history. The app’s History of what you dictated stays on your computer. You can clear it at any time.

Voiceprints. We do not identify speakers, and we create no voiceprint or other biometric identifier from your voice.

Who processes it

These providers process personal information for us. We will update this list, and announce a new provider here, before it receives any of your data.

We set up each speech and language-model provider so that it does not use your audio or text to train its models, and keeps them no longer than it needs to process the request, wherever the provider offers those settings. Each provider may use what it receives only to provide its service to us.

Each of them says how it handles your information in its own policy: Clerk, Stripe, Cloudflare, Sentry and PostHog.

Where it is processed

Tersa’s service runs on servers that Tersa operates in the United States, and its speech and language-model providers process dictations in the United States. If you use Tersa Cloud from elsewhere, including the EU or the UK, your audio and text are sent to the United States to be processed, and are not stored there.

Where the law requires a safeguard for sending personal information abroad, we rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or another mechanism the law recognises.

Why we use it

• To provide Tersa Cloud to you and bill you for it (to perform our contract with you).
• To keep the service secure, prevent abuse and control its costs (our legitimate interests).
• To keep the records the law requires, such as tax records, most of which Stripe keeps as merchant of record (legal obligation).
• To see how the app is used and to find and fix faults, through usage analytics and crash reports (our legitimate interests). You can switch both off in the app.

We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell it or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

How long we keep it

• Audio and text: not kept. Discarded when the dictation ends.
• Per-dictation usage records: 13 months, then deleted.
• Daily usage totals, your plan, trial dates and consumption, and your subscription and purchase-attempt status: while your account exists.
• Service logs: 14 days.
• Records that a notification from Stripe or Clerk arrived (its ID and type, not its contents): 90 days.
• Invoices and payment records: kept by Stripe, under its own policy.
• Usage analytics and crash reports: kept by PostHog and by Sentry for the periods their services set.

When you delete your account, its trial, usage and billing records on our side are deleted. We keep a content-free account revocation marker for two days to reject late requests; it is then deleted. Copies in our backups are deleted as those backups expire.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, receive a copy in a portable form, or object to or restrict how we use it. Write to [email protected] from the email address on your account. We answer within one month.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, you can also complain to your data protection authority. If you live in a US state with a privacy law, such as California, you have similar rights, and we will not treat you differently for using them.

Security

Connections between the app, Tersa’s service and the providers are encrypted. The providers’ keys exist only on Tersa’s servers, never in the app. Your sign-in tokens are kept in your system’s keychain, or only in memory on a computer that has none. Administration of the service is reachable only from a private network.

Children

Tersa Cloud is not meant for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has created an account, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Cookies

Tersa’s own pages set no cookies. The sign-in pages run by Clerk and the checkout run by Stripe set the cookies they need to sign you in and to take payment.

Changes to this policy

We will post any change to this policy here with a new effective date, and tell you by email or in the app before a change to how your information is used takes effect.

Contact

Jean Baez, doing business as Tersa. Email: [email protected].