Privacy policy

Policies of this kind are usually sorted by subject. Collection sits in one place, disclosure in another, security somewhere near the end, and a reader who wants to know what actually becomes of their voice has to assemble the answer out of five separate sections. We have sorted this one by time instead, because time is the thing that matters when the material is speech.

Six numbered stages follow. Stage zero is the position before anybody records anything, which is the part of this document that governs you simply for reading the site or writing to the mailbox. Stages one to five trace a single recording through capture, transcription, structuring, hand-over and destruction. Each carries the same short panel, and the panel always answers the same three questions in the same order.

The three questions

Why it carries a version number

A retention rule is easy to hold before somebody asks for the feature that breaks it, and much harder to soften once it has been published with a version number against it. The number and the effective date in the header above are there so that any weakening of a stage is visible as a change rather than as a quiet edit, and section 22 sets out the notice that has to come with one.

AMARA AI PTY LTD is the entity behind every commitment below. It is a proprietary company incorporated under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), with its home jurisdiction in New South Wales, ACN 696 682 827 and ABN 73 696 682 827. Throughout this document, "we" and "us" refer to that company and "you" refers to whoever is reading.

Amara AI is simply the shortened form of the corporate name that we use in writing and on this website. Correspondence about anything in this document reaches hello@amaraai.cc, which is a mailbox with a person behind it.

A different company shares the name

An older and entirely separate business trades as AmaraAI from amaraai.com. Their privacy practices are their own and are governed by their own policy, not by this one. Should you have meant to reach them, nothing on this page describes what they do with your information, and we have no ability to look anything up on your behalf.

The governing statute is the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), and the operative rules inside it are the thirteen Australian Privacy Principles set out in Schedule 1. Those principles are the yardstick applied at every stage that follows, and where a stage engages one of them by number, the number is given so that you can read the principle yourself rather than take our summary of it.

Turnover, and why it changes nothing here

The Act carves out many businesses with an annual turnover of three million dollars or less. A company at our size could point at that carve-out and publish very little. We would rather be measured against the principles in full, so this document is written as though the exemption were unavailable to us, and every commitment in it is offered on that footing.

Australian Privacy Principle 1 asks for a policy that is current, clear and easy to obtain. This page is that policy. It carries no charge, sits behind no account, and appears in the footer of every page on the site.

Other statutes that touch the stages

• Spam Act 2003 (Cth). Commercial electronic messages need consent, an accurate sender identity and a working unsubscribe facility. Section 11 covers what we send, which today amounts to replies.
• State and territory recording law. Listening to or recording a private conversation is regulated by the surveillance devices legislation of each jurisdiction, and those statutes are not identical to one another. Stage one sets them out.
• Schedule 2 to the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024. Since 10 June 2025 there has been a statutory cause of action for serious invasion of privacy, available where the invasion was intentional or reckless and where somebody in your position would reasonably have expected privacy. It runs against any defendant, ourselves included, and it does not depend on anything in this document.

Everything described in this section is happening right now, as you read. No recording exists, none has ever existed, and the only personal information in play is whatever your browser reveals by fetching a page and whatever you decide to type into an email.

Fetching a page

These pages are static files. They arrive without an account, a login, a script that identifies you or a request for anything about you. The hosting platform that serves them keeps ordinary connection records for a short operational window: the requesting address, the page path, the response code, a timestamp and the browser string. That material belongs to the host, is used for delivery and abuse prevention, and is not copied into anything we keep.

Two typefaces are fetched from Google's font service, which necessarily discloses your network address to Google at the moment of the request. Refusing that request costs you nothing but a substituted typeface. The cookie notice covers this in detail, along with the storage this site declines to use.

Writing to the mailbox

An email carries whatever you put in it, plus the sending address and the routing headers your provider attaches. We read it, answer it, and keep the thread only while it is live. Nothing about a message is added to a marketing list, scored, enriched against an outside dataset or passed to anybody for their own purposes.

Sensitive information at this stage

The Act treats a defined class of material as sensitive, including health information, biometric material used for identification, and a person's beliefs, memberships and origins. Nothing on this site invites any of it. Should such material arrive unbidden in an email, section 12 explains what becomes of it.

From here the document follows the recording itself. Stages one to five describe how sound is handled from the moment a microphone opens to the moment nothing of it survives.

Capture begins because somebody deliberately started it. There is no standing listener, no calendar trigger that arms a microphone in advance of a meeting and no spoken activation phrase. While sound is being taken in, the interface says so plainly and keeps saying so, and ending capture is a single action that takes effect at once.

What a voice actually carries

Speech is unusually dense material. Alongside the words it carries hesitation, accent, health signals a doctor might notice, who spoke over whom, and the sound of the voice itself. That last property is why voice sits close to biometrics, and we would rather be direct about it than let the closeness go unmentioned.

The Act treats biometric material as sensitive where it is used for automated recognition of a person. Audio is never put to that use here, so captured sound remains personal information rather than becoming a biometric identifier. Handling it with the caution owed to sensitive material is a choice we make anyway, because the distinction is legal rather than moral.

Consent, and who has actually given it

Pressing record is an act of consent by exactly one person. Everybody else present has agreed to nothing at all, and no interface design changes that fact. Our position is that the obligation to tell a room belongs to the operator, and the product makes telling them the easy path rather than a skippable one. There is no discreet mode and no minimised indicator, at any price.

Where the rule differs by jurisdiction

Whether a participant may record a private conversation without the agreement of everybody else depends on where the conversation happens.

That table is an orientation, not a legal opinion, and the statutes contain qualifications the column cannot hold. Meetings that cross borders raise the obvious question of which rule governs, and the safe answer is almost always the strictest one in play.

Converting speech into text is the single step that outgrows a handset, and therefore the single step where sound travels beyond the device that captured it. It is the part of this document that deserves the least hand-waving.

Segments of audio move over an encrypted connection to a transcription service for one narrowly defined purpose, which is producing the text of that meeting. Nothing about that transfer licenses retention, quality sampling, human listening or model improvement, and the contractual terms with the supplier say so in those words before a single recording moves.

Leaving Australia

Australian Privacy Principle 8 governs disclosure to a recipient outside the country, and its structure matters: taking reasonable steps to ensure the overseas recipient complies is our obligation, and under section 16C an act by that recipient that would breach the principles is generally treated as ours. We do not intend to lean on the exceptions in APP 8.2 as a way of moving that responsibility off our own books.

Where that work happens outside Australia, this page names the destination country and the supplier performing it. Regions are not countries, and a policy that says its processing happens "in the cloud" has told you nothing you can act on.

A transcript is the raw material, not the product. Reading one takes roughly as long as attending the meeting again, which is why the useful work happens here: language processing turns the wall of speech into a short document with parts.

A finished note carries a summary, the decisions reached, the tasks and who accepted them, the questions nobody resolved, and a small number of verbatim lines where exact words matter. Quoted material is marked as quoted so that the boundary between record and paraphrase stays visible. Everything else is discarded on purpose, because a note that preserves every utterance is only a transcript with better formatting.

Accuracy, honestly

Australian Privacy Principle 10 asks that personal information be accurate, complete and current, having regard to the purpose. Summarisation cannot fully deliver that, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest move. Emphasis gets invented, secondary points get dropped, and names get mangled. A note is a draft for somebody who was in the room, and it is not a minute, a transcript of record or evidence of what was agreed.

Automated processing, but no decision about you

Machine processing happens at this stage and nowhere else in the chain does it touch a person's interests. No output ranks participants, rates their engagement, scores their sentiment, measures their share of talking or feeds any assessment of an individual. Turning a conversation into a performance metric changes how people speak in conversations, and we do not intend to be the cause of that change.

The note belongs to you the instant it exists, and it lands in whatever you already use for written material. Plain text and Markdown come first because both will still open in three decades using software nobody has written yet.

There is no library on our side for you to return to. A searchable collection of everything you have ever said is a pleasant feature and a permanent hazard, and avoiding it is the reason the rest of this design looks the way it does.

Custody changes hands

Once a note has landed in your system, we cannot open it, retrieve it, correct it or destroy it, and a request to us about its contents will get an honest answer that it is beyond our reach. Handling it from that point is yours, including any obligation you carry towards the other people described in it.

This is the stage the other five exist to protect. Once a note has been produced, the sound it came from serves no remaining purpose, and material kept without a purpose is simply a hazard waiting for a bad week.

Australian Privacy Principle 11.2 requires destruction or de-identification once information is no longer needed for a permitted purpose. Most products treat that as a rule about drafting a retention schedule. We have treated it as a rule about architecture, so the schedule collapses to a single line: audio is destroyed on completion of the note, and its retention period is zero rather than a number.

Retention, stated as clocks

What destruction means when we use the word

Removal from live systems happens immediately, not on a nightly sweep. Any copy inside a backup image falls away as that image expires on its normal rotation, and is never restored selectively to bring something back. There is no debug archive, no retained sample for tuning and no corpus quietly assembled out of what people said.

One consequence deserves stating plainly, because it is a real cost rather than a talking point: a better transcription model arriving next year cannot be run across your meetings from this year, because those recordings no longer exist anywhere.

A timeline is only meaningful if it also says where the path stops. These are the destinations a recording handled by this design is never routed to, and each is written as an undertaking rather than as reassurance.

• No voice template. No speaker embedding, voice signature or comparable biometric representation is derived, stored or matched against anything. Distinguishing two speakers inside one meeting is a far narrower operation, and whatever supports it dies with the recording.
• No training on your speech. Not silently, not as a default, not as the price of a free tier. Should we ever want it, we would ask for that specific permission separately, and a refusal would leave everything else working exactly as before.
• No hosted archive. There is no index of your meetings on our side to search, subpoena, sell or lose.
• No advertising anything. No profile, no segment, no identifier and no third-party pixel exists in this company, because nothing here is funded by advertising.
• No sale of personal information, in any form. Information about you is not a product line here, and it will not become one.

Most voice tools handle the other participants in a meeting by declining to think about them. One person accepts a set of terms, the rest are captured, and their words come to rest on the systems of a company they have never heard of under a document they were never shown.

Software cannot fix that, and we are not going to claim it can. What we can do is refuse to make it worse, and give the people concerned somewhere to go.

Where to go if you were in the room

Your voice and your words are personal information about you, and the principles apply to us for as long as we hold any of it. Write to hello@amaraai.cc and we will deal with you as a person with rights, not as somebody else's data. Two things will usually be true of the answer.

• By the time your message reaches us there is often nothing left to act on, because the design destroys audio at the point the note is produced. That is a real answer, and we will say so rather than dress it up.
• The note itself is held by the person who ran the session. We cannot reach into their storage, so a request about the note's contents has to go to them, and we will say that plainly instead of passing you between addresses.

Australian Privacy Principle 5 requires that a person be told when their information is collected. In this design that notice is given in the room, by the operator, at the time, which is why the interface is built to make announcing capture the easiest available behaviour.

Outside the recording chain there is a small amount of ordinary material, and it is worth setting out precisely so that nothing looks hidden by omission.

Staying unnamed

Australian Privacy Principle 2 gives you the option of dealing with an organisation anonymously or under a pseudonym where that is lawful and practicable. Reading this site requires no name whatsoever. Correspondence can arrive from an address that identifies nobody, and general questions can be answered that way without difficulty. A request to reach information we hold about a named person is the obvious exception, since answering it means knowing which person we are talking about.

Material we did not ask for

Australian Privacy Principle 4 covers information that arrives unsolicited. If we could not lawfully have collected something ourselves, and it is not in a Commonwealth record, we destroy it or strip its identifying content as soon as that is practicable. Audio attachments are the live example: a recording of a meeting sent to us for context contains other people who consented to you rather than to this company, so it is deleted rather than opened.

Identifiers issued by government

Australian Privacy Principle 9 restricts an organisation's use of identifiers assigned by government agencies. We do not ask for a tax file number, a Medicare number, a driver licence number or a passport number, we do not adopt any of them as our own reference for a person, and there is no stage in the chain above at which one would be needed.

Keeping the small material right

Where we hold an email address or a name because you wrote to us, Australian Privacy Principle 10 asks that it be accurate and current. Tell us it is wrong and we will correct it, which in practice is a two-minute exercise on both sides.

Suppliers are named by role, because a policy that gestures at unnamed partners is asking to be trusted about the one thing a reader most wants to check.

Lawful demands

A warrant, subpoena, notice or comparable instrument gets a careful reading rather than an automatic handover. We produce what is genuinely required and nothing beyond it, and we tell the person concerned unless telling them is itself unlawful. The lifecycle above is the more useful protection here: an instrument can only compel production of what still exists.

If the company changes hands

Should the business be sold or merged, information would transfer as part of it, and the acquirer would be bound by this document until people were notified of anything different. The commitments about audio, voice templates and training are the ones most likely to look inconvenient to a new owner, which is exactly why they are written down with a version number.

Australian Privacy Principle 11.1 asks for reasonable steps against misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, and what counts as reasonable scales with what is actually held.

• Transport is encrypted end to end, for pages, for mail and for any audio segment in stage two.
• Accounts are individual, protected by multi-factor authentication, and never shared between people.
• Access follows need rather than seniority, and is removed when the need stops.
• Devices used for company work carry full-disk encryption and automatic locking.
• Suppliers are chosen partly on what their own terms permit them to do with what passes through.

The strongest control in this list is not on it. Data that has already been destroyed cannot be exfiltrated, mishandled or produced under compulsion, and the timeline in this document is therefore the security measure that does the most work.

Australian Privacy Principle 12 gives you a right of access to the personal information an organisation holds about you. Australian Privacy Principle 13 gives you a right to have it corrected when it is wrong, misleading, incomplete or out of date. Both apply to us.

Making the request

Send an email to hello@amaraai.cc headed Privacy request, and say which of the two you want. There is no form to complete and no particular wording required.

Establishing that it is you

We ask only for what the request needs. Where a message arrives from the address that already appears in our records, replying to that same address is usually verification enough. Nobody is asked to send identity documents for a routine request, since collecting a passport scan to answer a question about an email address would create more risk than it removes.

Timing and cost

Access and correction requests are completed within thirty days. Neither carries a charge, and a right you have to pay to exercise is not much of a right.

Refusals

The Act permits refusal in defined circumstances, including where granting access would unreasonably affect somebody else's privacy or where the information relates to anticipated legal proceedings. If we refuse, you get written reasons, the specific ground relied on, and the complaint route in section 20. Where part of a request can be met, we meet that part instead of declining the whole.

When correction is impossible rather than refused

A note that has already been exported sits in your storage, and a transcript from a destroyed recording no longer exists to be amended. In both cases the honest answer is that correction is beyond our reach, not that it has been declined, and we will say which of the two applies.

Deletion of data we hold about you can be requested at any moment, for any reason, and without explaining why. Email hello@amaraai.cc with Delete my data as the subject.

We will delete your data within thirty days and write back to confirm what went. In practice, for somebody who has only ever corresponded with us, that means the message thread itself and the address it came from. There are no analytics records to purge, because none were ever gathered.

The narrow exception

One thing survives a deletion request, and it is deliberately small: a bare record that a request was received and answered on a given date, without the content of the correspondence. Evidencing compliance is why that record exists, and a company unable to show that it honoured a request has not really honoured it.

Where an account is involved

Deletion removes the account, its settings and anything held server-side, and the confirmation states precisely what went. Audio is ordinarily gone already, since stage five removes it on completion of the note rather than on request, and notes exported to your own systems remain yours to delete where they now live.

Amara AI is a working tool for adults who sit in meetings, and this site addresses people evaluating it. Neither is designed for, marketed to or intended for children.

Australian law fixes no single age at which a person can consent to the handling of their own information. The assessment turns on whether the individual has the capacity to understand what is being agreed, and regulatory guidance takes fifteen as a workable presumption of capacity where an individual assessment is not practical. We follow that approach.

We do not seek information about children, and no part of the chain in this document is built to receive it. Should information about a child reach us anyway, in an email or inside a recording made by somebody else, we remove it once we realise, and a parent or guardian who tells us about it will get an answer rather than a process. That answer is often that nothing of it remains, because of stage five.

Part IIIC of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) establishes the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. It bites when unauthorised access, unauthorised disclosure or loss of personal information is likely to result in serious harm to somebody, and it obliges an organisation to tell both the Commissioner and the people affected.

What we do, in order

1. Contain. Close the exposure first, before working out how large it is.
2. Assess. Reach a conclusion on likely serious harm as fast as the facts allow, and in any case inside the thirty days the Act permits for an assessment.
3. Notify. Where the threshold is met, a statement goes to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and to each affected person as soon as practicable.
4. Repair. Fix the cause, and describe the fix in the notification rather than in a later summary nobody reads.

What a notification would say

Our identity and contact details, when it happened and when we found out, which information was involved, what harm we think is plausible, what we have done about it, and what we suggest you do. Written in the same register as this page, and not in the language of a press release.

Telling us about something

Anybody who believes information here has been exposed, including somebody who discovered it accidentally, should email hello@amaraai.cc with Security in the subject. Reports are answered the same or the next working day. Good-faith research that stops at proving a problem exists, without going further into anybody's information, will never be met with a legal threat from us.

Capture on a phone means a mobile app, and a mobile app carries two more disclosure documents that have to agree with this one. Both travel with the app, and any divergence between them and this page should be treated as an error worth writing to us about.

Apple, and App Tracking Transparency

App Tracking Transparency governs whether an app may follow a person across apps and websites belonging to other companies. This design does none of that, so the advertising identifier is not requested and the tracking permission prompt does not appear. An app that never tracks has no reason to ask, and asking anyway would be its own small dishonesty. The App Privacy labels declare the data types involved, with audio shown as processed rather than stored, and no data type linked to an identity for advertising.

Google, and the Play Data Safety form

The Data Safety declaration states that audio is collected for the transcription function, that it is encrypted while travelling, that it is not retained after the note is produced, that it is not shared for advertising or analytics, and that a deletion route exists through the address in section 23. Play requires that the form match actual behaviour, and this page is the description it is matched against.

First, to us

Email hello@amaraai.cc with Privacy complaint as the subject, set out what happened, and say what outcome you want. We confirm receipt inside five working days and answer in full inside thirty. If something genuinely takes longer, you get the reason and a date rather than silence.

Then, to the Commissioner

An answer you find unsatisfactory, or no answer at all, can be taken to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The Commissioner can investigate, make determinations and require an organisation to act.

• Post: GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001
• Telephone: 1300 363 992
• Online: oaic.gov.au

In the ordinary course the Commissioner asks that a complaint be put to the organisation first, with a month allowed for a reply, though that expectation can be set aside where the circumstances justify it. Bringing a complaint costs nothing, and representation is a choice rather than a requirement.

What we undertake not to do

Nobody will be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement as the price of having a privacy complaint dealt with, and making one will never be treated as a breach of our terms of use. Retaliating against a complainant would be both wrong and, under section 13 of the Act, a step towards an interference with privacy in its own right.

The law that binds this company is Australian, which is why the document is written to it. Other regimes may nonetheless reach a reader elsewhere, and silence on that point should not be read as refusal.

Europe and the United Kingdom

Where European or United Kingdom data protection law applies to something we do, the familiar entitlements come with it: seeing your information, having errors put right, having it erased, restricting or objecting to processing, receiving it in a portable form, and taking the matter to your own supervisory authority. Consent, where it is ever the basis for something, can be withdrawn whenever you like, and withdrawing it does not unpick what was lawful beforehand. Tell us which regime you are invoking and we will apply that timetable rather than the Australian one.

The United States

Several state privacy statutes create rights to know, correct, delete and opt out of information being sold or traded for advertising. Nothing here is sold or traded, no advertising identifier is in use, and there is consequently no such flow for an opt-out to interrupt. A Global Privacy Control signal from your browser is respected, though on a site that stores nothing there is nothing for it to change. The header some browsers once sent to express a similar preference is treated the same way.

Anywhere else

If a right exists where you live, describe it when you write. We would rather deal with the substance of a request than argue about whether a statute technically reaches us.

This policy will change as the company does. Whenever it does, the version number and effective date shown in the header of this page move with it, and the current text always replaces whatever came before.

A change that reduces your rights, widens what we collect, or weakens any stage of the timeline gets advance notice: a dated line on this page for at least thirty days beforehand, and a notice inside the product the next time it is opened. Nothing material is applied retrospectively.

The lifecycle commitments carry a stronger promise than the rest, because they are the reason to trust the design rather than the prose. Retaining audio past the production of a note, deriving a voice template, or training on user speech would each be announced on its own, with its own notice period, and would require fresh permission rather than being read into anybody's continued use.

Earlier revisions do not stay online under addresses of their own, though every one of them is retained. Name the date you care about and we will send you the text that was in force on it.

Everything in this document routes to one address, and the subject line decides how it is handled.

Email: hello@amaraai.cc

Entity: AMARA AI PTY LTD, a proprietary company of New South Wales, ACN 696 682 827, ABN 73 696 682 827.

No street address is printed on this website. Documents requiring formal service go to the registered office held on file for ACN 696 682 827 by ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission), which is the record with legal effect and is authoritative in a way that a line of footer text is not.

Dealing with us is optional. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner can be approached directly at GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001, on 1300 363 992, or through oaic.gov.au.