Privacy Policy

Spoken Testimony — Last updated: April 2026

What We Collect

Spoken Testimony collects the following data when you use the app:

Audio recordings of your spoken testimony
Consent records confirming your agreement to be recorded
Demographic information (age range, gender identity, race/ethnicity, income bracket, education level) — all optional, all anonymized
Device metadata including timestamp, device identifier, and cryptographic signatures for evidence integrity
Approximate location (optional, off by default) — if enabled by the interviewer, GPS coordinates are truncated to neighborhood granularity (~1 km accuracy) on the device before upload. Precise location is never collected or stored.
Transcripts and summaries generated from your recordings

How We Use Your Data

To preserve and archive oral histories and spoken testimonies
To provide transcription and search capabilities for historians and researchers
To verify the authenticity and integrity of recordings through cryptographic signing
To generate anonymized demographic statistics about participants
To improve the app through anonymized crash reports and usage analytics (Firebase)

Data Storage & Security

All recordings are encrypted in transit using TLS. Audio files are stored in secure cloud storage with access restricted to authorized project staff. Cryptographic signatures ensure recordings cannot be tampered with after capture.

Your Rights

You may decline to answer any demographic question
You may request removal of your recording at any time by contacting the project administrators
Demographic information is never used to personally identify you

Web Site Analytics

The public pages of this web site (About, Privacy, Consent, Follow-Up, and Delete-Data pages) load a small tracking script from a self-hosted analytics tool called Umami. Umami runs on the same server as the rest of the project — no third party receives this data.

What Umami collects per visit:

The URL path you visited (e.g. /about)
The previous page’s URL, if you arrived via a link
Your browser type, language, screen size, and country (derived from IP, then the IP is discarded)

What Umami does not collect:

No cookies of any kind
No IP addresses are stored — the IP is only used in-memory to derive a daily-rotated salted hash for visitor counting, then thrown away
No browser fingerprinting
No personally identifying information
Nothing at all on the staff/admin dashboard — the tracker is only loaded on public pages

Third-Party Services

The mobile app uses the following third-party services:

Firebase (Google) — crash reporting, analytics, and performance monitoring
Twilio — SMS delivery for consent and follow-up links (when configured)

Children

Spoken Testimony is not intended for use by children under 18 years of age.

Contact

Spoken Testimony is part of the Open Testimony project. For questions about this privacy policy or to request data removal, contact the project administrators at info@open-testimony.org.