Privacy policy

Last updated: October 2, 2026 — pilot phase

Our Stories makes friendly phone calls to older adults who have chosen to take part, and turns those conversations into a personal memoir for their family. This policy says what information we hold, why, and what we will never do with it.

What we collect

• Contact details — first name, phone number, preferred language and time zone, and the name of the person who recommended them, provided when a storyteller is added to the program.
• The people to tell — the name, relation, phone number and email of up to two people the family names for each storyteller, a family member or friend and a medical contact, with their choice of what they are told: a medical emergency, high distress, both or neither. When the companion hears the storyteller may need help, they are emailed according to those choices, and the operator is emailed every time.
• Text messages — the SMS conversation with us, including the storyteller's opt-in and any scheduling preferences they text us.
• Call recordings and transcripts — story calls are recorded and transcribed to produce the memoir. Every call says so at the start.
• Working notes — summaries of past conversations, so the companion remembers what a storyteller told it, and the memoir drafts built from their words.

How it is used

Only to run the service: to hold the conversations, schedule the calls the storyteller agreed to, and write their memoir. The memoir belongs to the storyteller — it is shared with their family when they say so, and nothing leaves their family circle without their separate, explicit consent. Separately, and only with a storyteller's own explicit opt-in, anonymized stories — text stripped of names, places, and identifying details, never voices — may one day be licensed to help fund the project; no such opt-in is requested during the pilot.

Text messaging

• A storyteller opts in by texting YES to our number. We do not send SMS to people who have not written to us first.
• Reply STOP at any time to opt out — this also cancels any scheduled call. Reply HELP or write to the address below for assistance. Message frequency varies; message and data rates may apply.
• No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties.

Who processes the data

We use a small number of service providers, strictly to operate the service: Telnyx (telephone calls and SMS), Deepgram (speech recognition, and in trials the speaking voice), Anthropic (the conversation companion), ElevenLabs (the speaking voice), Cartesia (an alternative speaking voice, used in trials), and Amazon Web Services (email — the operator's sign-in, the sign-in of the people a storyteller names, and the alerts to those people — and encrypted storage of recordings and backups, encrypted before anything reaches it). Our servers are hosted in the United States. These providers act on our instructions; none of them may use the data for their own purposes.

Visits to this website are counted by Umami, an analytics tool we run on our own server rather than a third party's. It sets no cookie, keeps no IP address and cannot tell who a visitor is: it records which pages were opened, from which kind of browser and which country. The token of a sign-in link and anything after a # in the address are left out of what it sees, and a browser asking not to be tracked is not.

Partners

A care organisation — an assisted living facility, a home health agency, a clinic — may apply to bring the people in its care to Our Stories. The application carries the applicant's name, work email, title and phone, and the organisation's name; the applicant confirms the email by a link before anything reaches us, an application never confirmed is deleted after seven days and a confirmed one never taken up after ninety. What an organisation's staff may see of a storyteller is agreed to by the storyteller separately from the calls, and can be refused while the calls go on.

What we never do

• We never sell personal information — not to anyone, not ever.
• We never share recordings, transcripts, or memoirs outside the storyteller's family circle without their separate, explicit consent.
• We never make the companion pretend to be human, and we never let a storyteller's voice say words they did not approve.

How it is protected

Storyteller data — names, phone numbers, messages, transcripts, summaries, memoir drafts, and the recordings themselves — is encrypted at rest with AES-256; a copy of the database or its backups is unreadable without a key that the copy does not contain. Phone numbers go one step further: they are never stored as digits at all, only as ciphertext plus a secret-keyed one-way code used to match incoming messages — so even a complete copy of the database identifies nobody. The database accepts connections only from our own application server, and the operator console requires a personal sign-in. Encryption at rest cannot protect against every attack — but it makes the most common kinds of data theft yield nothing.

Consent, scope by scope

A storyteller agrees to two things by texting YES from their own phone: the calls — being called, recorded and transcribed, and the companion remembering the last call for the next — and the memoir, the keepsake written from those calls for them and the people they name. Each can be withdrawn on its own: STOP by text, or a word to the companion on a call, stops the calls at once; the memoir can be refused while the calls go on, or the reverse. Every grant and every withdrawal is recorded with its moment, how it was given, and the exact wording that was answered.

Nothing else is ever assumed. Contributing anonymized stories to a research corpus, or to an archive, is a separate written step in the storyteller's own language, never asked for during the pilot. Once a story is made anonymous and mixed with other people's, it cannot be taken back, because nobody — not even us — can tell which words were theirs; the storyteller is told so in plain words before agreeing.

Deletion

Deletion on expiry is the rule; nothing is kept for want of a decision. The recording of a call is deleted thirty days after the call; a voicemail after a week. What a storyteller told us — transcripts, the life-story record, texts, the memoir draft and its audio — is kept while they take part and for thirty days after they withdraw, so that a STOP sent in a bad moment and a Y the week after find their companion still remembering them; then it is deleted, and the family is offered the memoir draft before it goes. After three months without a call answered or a text, the calls stop by themselves and the storyteller is told.

A storyteller (or someone they trust) can also ask for everything to be deleted at once. Deletion means deletion: every row, every recording from our storage with every stored version, and the copies our telephony provider held. Deleted records age out of the encrypted backups as those expire, within thirty-five days for the daily copies and a year for the monthly ones. What remains is a report that names nobody: what was removed, and that consent existed — which scopes, under which wording, granted and withdrawn when and how.

Contact

Our Stories
1220 Dougmar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA 95062
our.stories@edgy.world
(447) 525-8513

Questions, help, or deletion requests are all welcome at that address.