Confidentiality when your recordings leave the building

Sending a recording is a disclosure

When you send a recording to a transcription provider, the material leaves your control. That is true whoever the provider is, and it is worth naming plainly rather than treating as an administrative detail.

The content is often sensitive by its nature. Privileged legal discussions. Medical consultations. Personnel matters. Commercially confidential meetings. Research interviews conducted under an ethics approval that made specific promises to participants.

The obligations you hold do not stop at your own perimeter. If you promised a participant that their interview would be handled a particular way, that promise now depends on your provider.

Questions worth asking any provider

Who has access to the file: a named, countable set of people, or an open pool.

Whether the work is subcontracted onward, and to whom. This is the question most often left unanswered and the most important one. Work passed to a marketplace of freelancers has left your provider's control as well as yours.

Where files are stored, and for how long.

Whether your material is used to train anything. Machine learning systems are trained on data, and audio is data.

How deletion happens, and whether it is verified.

Whether they will sign a confidentiality agreement before receiving anything at all.

Ask us these questions. Ask anyone else you are considering. A provider who cannot answer them concretely has answered them.

Why a small team is a smaller disclosure

We are three transcriptionists. Every file is handled by people we can name.

This is a structural fact about how we operate, not a claim about anyone else. A smaller number of people with access is a smaller surface, arithmetically. It is also why our standard turnaround is two to three days rather than same-day, and why we take a limited volume of work. The same constraint produces both.

It does mean we cannot absorb unlimited volume at short notice. We would rather tell you that than route your material to people we do not know.

Retention and deletion

Our default is automatic deletion from our systems thirty days after delivery. That window exists so corrections, clarifications or a re-delivery can be handled without asking you to send the material again.

It is configurable. Where a matter requires a shorter period, we can set seven days, or immediate deletion once you have downloaded the file. Tell us at the outset and it is applied from the start.

Deletion is a hard delete and is verified, including backups. A file that has been deleted is not sitting in an archive.

Your material is never used to train anything. That is a standing policy rather than a preference we apply case by case.

Written terms

Confidentiality undertakings can be put in place before any file is sent. We work with non-disclosure agreements, data processing agreements and business associate agreements. If your organisation has its own form, send it; if not, we can provide one.

Where an ethics approval or a client engagement imposes specific handling requirements, tell us what they are and we will confirm in writing whether we can meet them before you send anything.

If you are not certain what your own obligations require, ask us what we do and take that to whoever advises you. We would rather answer the question early than discover a constraint after the file has arrived.