Privacy Policy

Last updated 12 November 2026 · Optional analytics update

Parlova is built and operated by Jurie Wagener, an individual sole trader working from home in South Africa. SoleCreations is the developer's trading name, not a registered company or a separate legal entity. The individual operator is the "responsible party" for your personal information under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), and the "controller" under the GDPR for users in the EU and UK. This policy explains what we collect, why, who it's shared with, and what you can do about it.

1. What we collect

• Account details: your email address and your password. We store the password only as a secure one-way hash.
• What you submit: the recordings you upload and the YouTube links you paste.
• What we produce for you: transcripts, timestamps, speaker labels, AI summaries and to-do lists, plus anything you save in settings, such as special words and speaker names.
• Usage: how many minutes you've transcribed, your jobs and their status, and your plan. For each finished transcription we keep a usage record: the date, the recording's title, its length, the minutes it used, and whether speaker separation was on.
• Billing: your subscription status, plan, renewal date and Polar customer ID. We never see or store your card details; Polar and its payment processor handle them.
• Purchase agreements: your account reference, acceptance time, selected plan, billing interval, product and subscription references, and a copy of the policies and purchase statements you accepted. These records demonstrate agreement and help resolve billing disputes; they do not contain recordings, transcripts or card details.
• Technical: your IP address and basic request logs. We use these to keep the service secure, for example to limit sign-in attempts and sign-ups.
• Developer tools: the names you give access tokens, when each was last used, and — when you sign in the command-line tool — your computer's name, which we show on the approval page and use to name the token it gets.

Optional product analytics

If you select Allow analytics, we use PostHog to understand visits, sign-ups, feature use, transcription outcomes and speed, export formats, plan changes, errors and page performance. Events use a random visitor reference or a pseudonymous account reference, rather than your name or email. We classify referral sources (for example, Google or Reddit), device type, operating system and browser into broad categories.

Analytics do not include your recordings, transcripts, summaries, file names, submitted links, search text, speaker names, vocabulary, passwords, access tokens or payment details. We do not record your screen, keystrokes or session replay. We do not send your IP address to PostHog or use it to derive your location. Security logs remain separate.

Analytics are optional and off until you choose. Rejecting them does not change your plan, limits, price or access. Use Analytics preferences in any page footer to change your choice. When signed in, your choice also controls optional analytics for account activity, including API usage, transcription outcomes and subscription updates. We honour supported Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals by disabling browser analytics.

2. Why we use it

• To provide the service you signed up for: transcribing, storing your history, applying your plan's limits and running your subscription.
• To keep Parlova safe: preventing abuse, fraud and attacks.
• To meet legal obligations, such as keeping billing records.
• With your consent, to improve Parlova: optional product analytics help us understand adoption, usability, performance and reliability.
• To answer you when you contact us.

We don't use your information for advertising, and we don't sell it or rent it to anyone.

3. Who we share it with

Only service providers we need to run Parlova, and only what each one needs:

• Railway hosts the app and its database.
• Transcription and AI processing providers receive your audio and transcript content as needed to create transcripts and summaries. We configure processing to use only providers that don't store your content or train on it.
• Polar, and its payment processor Stripe, handle checkout, subscriptions, invoices and tax. Polar is the merchant of record for payments.
• PostHog: receives the limited optional analytics described above, in its US Cloud service, only with your consent. See PostHog’s privacy policy.
• YouTube: when you paste a YouTube link, our server downloads that video's audio from YouTube.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect people's safety or our legal rights.

4. Where your data goes

Our service providers run servers outside South Africa, mainly in the United States and Europe. Under section 72 of POPIA, we only send personal information abroad to providers that are bound to protect it to a standard similar to POPIA's.

5. How long we keep it

• Uploaded recordings: we convert your upload to compressed audio straight away and discard the original file. Once the transcript is ready, the audio is deleted. If a job fails or you stop it, we keep the compressed audio so you can press "Try again", until you delete that job or it expires with your history (below).
• Audio downloaded from YouTube: deleted from our server as soon as the job finishes, whether it succeeds or fails.
• Transcripts and summaries: kept for 7 days on Free and 90 days on Plus, then deleted automatically. On Pro they're kept until you delete them. You can delete any transcript yourself at any time.
• Usage records: kept while your account exists, so your usage history and limits stay accurate even after you delete a recording. Deleting your account removes the detailed history. To prevent repeated free trials, we retain a keyed fingerprint of your normalised email address and minimal allowance counters, including reservations for work already running. These are pseudonymous personal information, not anonymous data; they contain no readable email, recording titles, audio or transcripts. Returning with the same email does not reset your used Free allowance or today’s limit. We retain these counters while the one-time Free offer operates, review their necessity annually, and remove them when no longer needed. You can contact us about this retention or object to this processing.
• Your account: kept until you delete it. Deleting your account permanently removes your transcripts, detailed usage history and settings. Cancel renewing subscriptions first. We check outstanding payments and close your billing customer before completing deletion; if billing cannot be verified, your account remains available and we explain how to retry. Deletion ends remaining paid access and does not automatically issue a refund. The limited retention exceptions below still apply.
• Purchase agreements: retained for up to three years after each acceptance, including after account deletion, to establish the contract and resolve disputes. Expired agreement records are removed during routine housekeeping. We retain the account reference, not your account email, in these records.
• Billing records: kept by Polar for as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Optional analytics: undelivered events are discarded within seven days. Withdrawing consent removes queued account events and stops new collection; a request already in transit may finish. Withdrawal does not automatically erase previously delivered events. Contact us to request access or deletion. Deleting your Parlova account also queues a request for us to remove its previously delivered analytics from PostHog; this provider step is handled separately, rather than immediately in the app. We keep only the pseudonymous references until that request is completed. We also retain these references for up to 181 days to reject old analytics cookies and prevent tracking from restarting after deletion. Our free PostHog plan has a one-year event retention period. PostHog deletes expired events in batches, so removal may happen later. Pseudonymous person profiles are kept until deleted; we handle access and deletion requests through the provider.
• Server logs: kept for a short time for security and troubleshooting.

6. Your rights

You can ask us to give you a copy of your personal information, correct it, delete it, or stop using it for a particular purpose. You can also object to how we process it. Much of this you can do yourself: download your transcripts, delete them, change your password, or delete your account in Account settings. For anything else, email jurie24102@gmail.com. We'll reply within 30 days.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, you can complain to South Africa's Information Regulator (inforegulator.org.za). In the EU or UK you can complain to your local data protection authority.

7. Cookies and local storage

The sign-in cookie is necessary to provide your account. A separate first-party cookie remembers your analytics choice for up to 180 days. If you allow analytics, it also contains a random visitor reference; rejecting analytics removes that reference. Your browser stores your preferences, including a copy of the analytics choice so open tabs stay in sync, and choices such as theme and transcription options. We do not store advertising identifiers. Signing out clears the analytics cookie so the next account using that browser is not linked to yours.

8. Security

Connections to Parlova are encrypted (HTTPS). Passwords are hashed, access to our systems is restricted, and audio is deleted once it's no longer needed. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we'll tell you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.

9. Recordings of other people

Your recordings may contain other people's voices and personal information. You're responsible for having their consent where the law requires it. We process that information only to provide the service to you.

10. Children

Parlova isn't meant for anyone under 18, and we don't knowingly collect children's personal information. If you think a child has signed up, contact us and we'll delete the account.

11. Changes

If we change this policy in a significant way, we'll let you know by email or in the app before the change takes effect.

12. Contact

Jurie Wagener, trading as SoleCreations, South Africa. Email jurie24102@gmail.com. Use this email to contact the individual operator about privacy and personal-information requests.