Privacy policy

Dotrew Limited is the data controller for Penmora.

• Company: Dotrew Limited
• Trading name: Penmora
• Company number: 17212604
• ICO registration number: ZC150080
• Registered office: The Old Workshop, Longfrey Cottage Dorking Road, Chilworth, Guildford, Surrey, GU4 8RH
• Email: hello@penmora.com

We do not have a formal Data Protection Officer. Send any data protection enquiry to the email above.

• Your recordings are yours. We keep your voice and your words exactly as you said them.
• Penmora uses AI to write down what you said, to suggest your next question, and to keep track of the people and places you mention. The AI never writes your story for you and never speaks for you.
• Your stories are never used to train AI, by us or by anyone we work with.
• Your stories are private to you unless you choose to share them with people you invite.
• We never sell your data and we never use it for advertising.
• You can see, correct, download and delete what you have recorded, and close your account, at any time.

If you join the waiting list: your email address, anything you choose to tell us about why you are interested, and when you signed up.

When you have an account:

• your name, email address and a scrambled form of your password (we never store the password itself);
• your settings and preferences;
• the choices you made when you signed up, including your consents, with the date and the wording you agreed to.

When you record or type your stories:

• your audio recordings;
• the written version of each recording;
• anything you type instead of speaking;
• any corrections or changes you make;
• photos you add;
• the people, places and pets you mention, and how they relate to you, taken from what you said;
• short descriptions on those people and place cards, written only from what you said;
• which questions Penmora offered you, which you answered and which you skipped;
• dates, times and lengths of recordings, and basic information about your device.

When you invite someone to read your stories: their name and email address, so we can send the invitation, and what you have chosen to share with them.

If you are invited as a reader: your name, email address and sign-in details, which stories have been shared with you, and any photos you send to the storyteller.

Technical information: IP address, browser and device type, pages and screens used, error reports, and security logs.

If you email us: your message and our reply.

We want to be plain about this, because it matters.

Writing down what you said. Your recordings are sent to a speech-to-text service to produce the written version. The written version keeps your words: we remove only ums, ahs and false starts. If we are unsure of a word, we keep it. The original recording is never changed.

Suggesting your next question. Penmora's interviewer, Pen, reads what you have recorded, in this sitting and earlier ones, so that it can suggest a good next question and avoid asking you about something you have already told it. Pen only ever asks questions. It never writes any part of your story. Some subjects, such as a loss you have not come back to yourself, Pen is designed never to bring up.

People and places. Penmora notes the people, places and pets you mention and how they connect to you, so it can show them on your own pages and ask about them. It only records what you actually said. You can correct or remove any of it.

Pen's notebook. Pen keeps short working notes about the people, places and themes in your stories, so it can ask better questions and avoid asking you something you have already told it. Every note points back to your own words, and is checked against them. The notes are for Pen's use and yours: you can read them, correct them or remove them, and they never appear in your book or anywhere as your words.

Your book. If you make a book, it is built from what you recorded or typed. You can keep your own words just as you said them, change them yourself, or ask Penmora's AI editor to turn them into flowing prose. The AI editor works only from what you recorded: it can tidy, shorten and reorder, but it never adds anything you did not say, never exaggerates, and never changes the feeling of what you said. You see and approve the result before anything is printed. Your original recordings and words are never changed by any of this, and you can always go back to them.

Everything above is done only to give you the service you asked for. None of it is used for marketing, advertising, selling data or training AI. We do not make any decision about you by computer alone that has legal or similarly serious effects.

UK data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use of personal data. We rely on:

• Contract: to run your account and provide the recording, transcription, question, organising, sharing, download and book features you signed up for.
• Explicit consent: life stories often touch on health, beliefs, family or other personal matters, which the law calls special category data. We ask for your explicit consent before you record, and you can withdraw it at any time.
• Consent: for the waiting list, and for the optional research permission described in section 6.
• Legitimate interests: to keep the website and app secure, prevent misuse, fix faults, reply to messages and keep proper records.
• Legal obligation: to keep records we are required to keep, such as for tax.

When you sign up, we may ask whether you are happy for us to read your recordings and written versions to check how well Penmora is doing its job: whether Pen's questions were good ones, and whether the written versions read as they should.

This is us reading your material to improve Penmora. It is not training an AI model on it. It is separate from your main consent, it is entirely optional, and saying no changes nothing about how the app works for you. You can change your mind at any time in the app, under More, then Help improve Penmora, or by emailing us.

Your stories will mention other people. We process what you say about them only as part of your story, to provide the service to you. We record who they are to you and what you said, and nothing more. They stay private to you and to anyone you choose to share with.

Please think before recording or sharing very private information about someone who is alive.

If you are mentioned in someone's stories and want to ask us about it, email hello@penmora.com.

We never sell personal data. We share it only with companies that help us run Penmora, under contracts that require them to protect it and use it only on our behalf. None of them may use your stories to train AI.

They are:

• App hosting and storage: runs the app's database, sign-in and private storage, in the UK.
• Speech-to-text: turns your recordings into text, in the EU.
• AI services: suggest Pen's questions, note the people and places you mention, and keep Pen's notebook, in the UK or EU.
• Backup storage: keeps encrypted copies of your data, in the UK.
• Email: sends service emails from the app (in the EU), and handles our own business email, including messages to hello@penmora.com (in the UK and EU).
• Error reporting: tells us when the app goes wrong, with story content removed before anything is sent, in the EU.
• App distribution: the Apple App Store, which delivers the app to your phone.
• Website services: host the website and waiting-list form, manage the website's address, protect our forms from bots, and count visits without cookies. Some of these operate worldwide, including in the US, under approved safeguards.

If you would like to know which company provides any of these, email hello@penmora.com.

We may also share information with our accountants for invoicing and tax, and with legal or regulatory bodies where the law requires it.

A small number of trusted contractors may need limited access to our systems for their work. Access is restricted to what they need and is never a general right to read your stories.

Your account, recordings and stories are stored in the UK (London). Some processing, such as speech-to-text and AI, happens in the EU, which UK law recognises as giving equivalent protection. The website is hosted by a provider that may process visitor data in the US, under approved safeguards.

Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Your recordings and stories can only be opened through your own account or by people you have chosen to share with. Our backups are encrypted before they leave our systems.

• Recordings and stories: for as long as your account is open, unless you delete them sooner.
• Deleting and closing: when you delete a recording or close your account, it is hidden straight away and kept for 30 days in case of a mistake. You can ask for it back during that time. After 30 days it is permanently deleted. Encrypted backups are cleared on a rolling basis, so a deleted item can remain in a backup for up to about 90 days before it disappears.
• Waiting list: until six months after launch, or until you ask us to remove you.
• Emails with us: usually two years from our last contact.
• Technical logs: usually 30 to 90 days, longer only to investigate a security or misuse problem.
• Accounting records: six years, as HMRC requires.

You can ask us to:

• tell you whether we hold data about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything inaccurate;
• delete your data;
• restrict or object to how we use it;
• give you your data in a form you can take elsewhere.

Much of this you can do yourself in the app: correct your words, remove recordings, download your stories and close your account.

Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing it does not undo what we did while you had agreed.

Email hello@penmora.com to use any of these rights. We usually reply within one month. If a request is complex, the law lets us take up to two further months, and we will tell you why.

Penmora is for adults. You must be 18 or over to create an account. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you think a child has given us personal data, email hello@penmora.com and we will deal with it.

We use cookies only where they are needed to run the website or app. Our website analytics do not use cookies. We do not use advertising cookies. Read more in our cookie policy at /cookies.

If we change how we handle personal data in a way that matters, we will tell you before it takes effect, by email, on the website or in the app. We will not make significant changes quietly. The date at the top shows when this policy last changed.

For questions, requests or complaints, email hello@penmora.com, or write to Dotrew Limited at the registered office above. We will acknowledge a complaint within 30 days and look into it properly.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). We would welcome the chance to put things right first, but you do not have to contact us before going to the ICO.