Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Pilcrow is operated by Pilcrow Software Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17432638, registered office 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX). We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can contact us at support@pilcrow.fm.

2. What we collect

• Account data: your name, email address, password (stored as a hash) and optional profile photo. If you sign in with Google or Microsoft, we receive your name, email address and account identifier from them instead of a password.
• Your content: audio you upload or record, transcripts and their segments, speaker names, tags, translations, AI-generated insights, your conversations with the assistant, project names and instructions, and the custom vocabulary and instructions in your settings.
• Billing data: your plan, and Stripe customer and subscription identifiers. Card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers.
• Usage data: monthly transcription-minute usage, request counts used for rate limiting, and messages you send to support.
• Technical data: sign-in session records including your IP address and browser user-agent, server logs, and error reports (see section 8).
• Waitlist data: the email address you submit to join the waitlist.

3. How we use it

• Providing the service (performance of our contract with you): hosting your content, transcribing and enriching it, running the assistant, processing payments, and sending transactional email such as verification, password-reset and account-deletion messages.
• Security and abuse prevention (legitimate interests): session management, rate limiting, and protecting the service and other users.
• Reliability (legitimate interests): monitoring errors and diagnosing failures.
• Legal compliance: keeping records we are required to keep, such as billing records for tax purposes.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising.

4. AI processing

When you upload a recording, the audio is transcribed by AssemblyAI on servers in the EU. Transcript and chat text is processed by OpenAI, Google or Anthropic models (depending on the feature, the language and your model choice) to generate titles, descriptions, tags, insights and translations, and to power the assistant. These providers process your content solely to provide the service to us: we use their services under terms that do not permit them to train their models on your content, and we do not train models on it either.

5. Who processes your data

We use service providers to run Pilcrow, and each receives only what its role requires: infrastructure and hosting providers (Amazon Web Services, Neon, Vercel, Trigger.dev and Upstash) store and move your content and account records; the AI providers listed in section 4 transcribe and process your content; Stripe processes payments; Resend delivers transactional email; and Sentry receives error reports (see section 8).

6. International transfers

Some of the providers above process data outside the UK and EEA, mainly in the United States. Where they do, transfers are protected by the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or by Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, as set out in each provider's data processing agreement.

7. How long we keep it

• Transcriptions and audio: until you delete them. Deleted transcriptions, including their audio files, are permanently erased within 30 days by a daily clean-up job.
• Everything else in your account: chat history, projects, settings, usage records and support messages are kept for the life of your account and deleted when the account is deleted.
• Sign-in sessions: these expire automatically seven days after they are last used.
• Waitlist email addresses: kept until used for an invite; we remove them on request.
• Error reports and server logs: retained for a limited period by our hosting and monitoring providers, then deleted.
• Billing records: retained as long as tax and accounting law requires, including after account deletion.

8. Error monitoring

We use Sentry to detect and diagnose errors. Error reports include technical details of what went wrong. A small sample of app sessions, and sessions in which an error occurs, may also be recorded as a replay to help us debug. Replays mask text and block media by default, so they capture the shape of the interface rather than your content.

9. Public share links

If you create a share link for a transcription, anyone who has the link can view the transcript, speaker names, translations and insights, and listen to the audio, without an account. Share links are excluded from search-engine indexing but should be treated as public. Revoking a link in the app disables it immediately.

10. Your rights

Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask us for access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data; ask us to restrict or object to processing; and take your data elsewhere (portability). Much of this is self-serve:

• Export: download an archive of your account data, including machine-readable JSON and your transcripts, from settings.
• Deletion: delete individual transcriptions or your whole account from settings; account deletion is confirmed by email.

For anything else, contact support@pilcrow.fm. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) or your local supervisory authority.

11. Cookies

Pilcrow sets only first-party cookies: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and preference cookies that remember interface choices such as theme, sidebar state and font. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Both the app and this marketing site use Vercel Analytics, which collects aggregate, cookieless visit statistics.

12. Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, audio is served through signed, time-limited URLs, passwords are stored hashed, and access to your content is scoped to your account. No system is perfectly secure; if you find a vulnerability, please tell us at support@pilcrow.fm.

13. Children

Pilcrow is not directed at children and must not be used by anyone under 16. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will delete it.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the service evolves. We will post changes here and update the date at the top; if a change is material we will email you before it takes effect.

15. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: support@pilcrow.fm.