Privacy Policy

Effective October 4, 2026

CivicEar (“CivicEar,” “we” or “us”) turns recordings of public meetings into timestamped reports. CivicEar is operated by Andrew Cook in Maine. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with and the choices you have. It applies to civicear.com and the CivicEar service.

Information we collect

Account information: your name, email address, and the dates your account was created and last used. We store only a secure, one-way hash of your password, never the password itself.
Sign-in and security records: active sign-in sessions and a security log of sign-in events (the event, its time and a scrambled, keyed version of your IP address) used to protect accounts from password guessing.
What you put into CivicEar: the links to public meeting recordings you submit, your presets and watchlists (such as bills, names and keywords you follow), any instructions you add, and the transcripts, reports and processing records CivicEar creates for you.
Messages you send us: if you email us, we keep the message and your contact details so we can reply.
Payment information: when paid plans are offered, payments are handled by our payment processor, Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card number. We may receive your name, email, billing status and limited card details such as the brand and last four digits.

We do not use advertising, tracking or analytics cookies, and we do not sell your personal information.

Cookies

CivicEar uses only two cookies, both needed for the service to work: a sign-in cookie that keeps you logged in, and a “known device” cookie that stops someone else’s failed password guesses from locking you out. Neither is used for advertising or tracking.

How we use information

To create and secure your account and sign you in.
To retrieve and transcribe the public recordings you submit and to write, check and save your reports.
To show matches for your watchlists and keep your reports in your account.
To provide support, fix problems, prevent abuse and keep the service secure.
To handle billing when paid plans are offered.
To meet legal obligations.

Service providers we use

We use a small number of companies to run CivicEar. Each receives only what it needs for its task:

Cloudflare hosts the website and its database (your account, presets, transcripts and reports).
DigitalOcean hosts the server that processes recordings.
SearchAPI retrieves public captions and video details for YouTube links you submit.
Google (Gemini) transcribes recordings that have no captions, checks and corrects reports against the transcript, and writes the short summary.
OpenAI writes reports from transcripts.
Deepgram may transcribe audio from recordings hosted outside YouTube.
Stripe processes payments, when paid plans are offered.

The AI providers receive the meeting link or audio, the transcript, the report being checked, and the watchlist terms and instructions you set for that meeting. They do not receive your password. Where a provider offers a setting not to store our requests, we use it. These providers handle data under their own terms and privacy policies.

We may also disclose information if required by law, to protect the rights, safety or property of CivicEar, our users or others, or as part of a sale or transfer of the business, in which case this policy would continue to apply to your information.

Support access

To fix a problem you report, or one we detect, CivicEar’s operator may view your account’s reports, transcripts, presets and processing errors. We do this only for support, security and legal reasons.

Public meeting content

Transcripts and reports are made from public recordings and may include the names and words of people who spoke at those meetings. If you spoke at a meeting and believe a report misstates something about you, contact us and we will review it.

How long we keep information

Account information, presets, transcripts and reports are kept while your account is open, or until you ask us to delete them.
Audio and video downloaded for processing is temporary and is deleted once processing ends.
Sign-in sessions expire after 24 hours of inactivity or 7 days at most. Security logs are kept for 90 days.
Backups may hold copies for a limited time after deletion.
We keep billing records as long as the law requires.

Your choices and rights

You can ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, or delete your account and its content by emailing contact@civicear.com from the email address on your account. We respond promptly and normally within 30 days. Some states give residents additional privacy rights; we honor these requests for every user, wherever they live.

Security

Each account’s data is kept separate from every other account. Passwords are hashed, sign-in cookies are secure and HTTP-only, connections are encrypted, and repeated failed sign-ins are blocked. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information and will notify you if a breach affects it, as the law requires.

Children

CivicEar is for adults and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

Where information is processed

CivicEar is run from the United States. Our providers may process information in the United States and other countries where they operate.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as CivicEar changes. We will post the new version here with its effective date, and tell account holders about significant changes by email or in the app.

Contact

Questions or requests: contact@civicear.com.