Voice Recording Retention and Destruction Policy

The short version

Vochella stores short voice recordings only when a therapist and family have agreed to it. Every recording is kept for 90 days and then the file is permanently deleted. If you withdraw consent or close the account, deletion happens sooner. We never build a voiceprint, and we never use a recording to identify who is speaking.

This page is the public retention schedule and destruction guideline that laws such as the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act ask companies to publish. It supplements our Privacy Policy. Where the two differ about voice recordings, this page is the more specific and controls.

What voice data we collect, and why

Speech therapy is about how someone says things, so hearing them matters. With consent, Vochella may store four kinds of recordings:

• Home practice clips. A few seconds of a word or phrase captured during a practice game, so the treating therapist can listen and decide how the sound is coming along.
• In-session recordings. Audio a therapist records during an appointment on their own device, used to write that session's note.
• Homework submissions. An audio or video clip a family sends to the therapist between visits.
• Therapist voice notes. Short spoken feedback a therapist leaves on a submission.

Recordings are used for care only: listening, planning the next session, and showing progress. They are never sold, never used for advertising, and never used to train any model.

No voiceprints, no identification by voice

A recording of someone's voice is not the same thing as a voiceprint. We keep the recording; we do not turn it into anything that could be used to recognize a person by their voice.

• We do not create, store, or compare voiceprints, speaker models, or any other biometric identifier derived from a voice.
• We do not use speaker recognition or speaker identification of any kind.
• Some practice games send a clip to a speech-to-text service (Amazon Transcribe, under our Business Associate Agreement) to produce a short text guess of the word that was said. The staged copy of the audio, the transcript file, and the job are deleted as soon as the text comes back. The text guess is a triage hint for the therapist, not a score and not a clinical finding. Vochella never grades speech automatically; a therapist's listen is the evaluation.

Consent comes first

No recording is stored until the required written consents are on file for the person being recorded. Our servers check this on every upload, so a device or app that skips the consent screen still cannot store audio.

• Recording consent covering collection and storage, and a separate consent covering use in therapy.
• All-party notice where the therapist practises in a US state that requires it.
• Verifiable parental consent for anyone under 13, confirmed by a parent or guardian before any recording is stored. If we cannot confirm a date of birth, we treat the person as under 13 and require it.

Retention schedule

Every recording gets a deletion date the moment it is stored: 90 days after capture. The date is not extended because a clip was flagged, reviewed, or left unreviewed.

Playback links to a recording expire on their own within an hour, so an old link cannot be used to reach a file after it is gone.

Clinical records are kept longer, but not the audio

Therapists are required by their regulators to keep clinical records for years: session notes, goals, practice results, and the written record that a recording once existed. Those are kept for at least 7 years in the United States and 10 years in Canada from the last contact, and longer for minors (until the person has reached the age of majority plus that period).

The audio file itself is not part of that longer record. When a recording is destroyed, we keep a dated entry showing that it was destroyed, with no audio attached. Withdrawing recording consent removes the audio; it does not remove the therapist's notes or the practice results, which stay under the therapist's custodianship as required by clinical record-keeping law.

How recordings are destroyed

• An automated job runs every night and permanently deletes every file past its deletion date from encrypted storage. This is a real deletion of the file, not a hidden flag.
• Only after the storage system confirms the file is gone do we mark the record as destroyed and remove the playback link. If a deletion fails, the file stays scheduled and is retried the next night, so we never record a destruction that did not happen.
• The same job sweeps for stray files with no matching record (for example, an upload that was interrupted) and deletes any that are older than 90 days.
• Copies staged for speech-to-text are deleted within the same request, before any result is returned.
• When an account is closed, every recording under that account is deleted regardless of how much of the 90 days remains.

Who can access a recording

Recordings live in a private, encrypted storage area with no public links. Access is limited to:

• The treating therapist for the person recorded, through a link that expires within an hour.
• The family account that made the recording, for its own clips.
• Automated Vochella systems that store, deliver, and delete files. Vochella staff do not listen to recordings in the ordinary course of business.

Files are hosted encrypted by our infrastructure provider under a Business Associate Agreement. We do not disclose recordings to any other third party except the speech-to-text service described above, which also operates under a Business Associate Agreement and keeps nothing.

How to withdraw consent

You can withdraw recording consent at any time and do not need to give a reason.

• In the app: open Privacy & Security and choose "Withdraw consent" next to the recording permission. Withdrawal is logged, takes effect immediately for new recordings, and marks every existing recording for deletion on the next nightly run.
• By email: write to privacy@vochella.com from the email on the account and we will record the withdrawal for you. Parents and guardians with questions about a child's recordings can also write to childrens-privacy@vochella.com.

Withdrawing consent stops all recording features for that person until consent is given again. It does not affect the rest of their care.

Changes to this policy

If we shorten or lengthen the schedule, or change how recordings are destroyed, we will update the version and date above and, for changes that affect existing recordings, ask for consent again before applying them.

Contact our Privacy Officer

Questions about this schedule, a deletion request, or anything else about how a recording is handled: