Privacy

PenBliss is operated by NEOVIA SAS, Bureau 3, 9 rue de Condé, 33000 Bordeaux, France, RCS Bordeaux 990 188 724, which is responsible for your data. If you want to reach a person about anything on this page, write to privacy@penbliss.com and a person will answer. The company’s full details are in the legal notice.

• Your recordings. The audio of you answering questions, exactly as you spoke it.
• Your answers in writing, where you typed them instead.
• The transcripts made from those recordings.
• An index of your life — the people, places, dates and turns of phrase drawn out of your answers so the book can be accurate and sound like you. We call this the dossier.
• The book: the outline, the chapters, and every earlier draft of them.
• Your account: name, email address, the language you chose, what you have paid for.

We do not track you across other websites, we do not sell anything to advertisers, and there is no advertising in this product.

A life story is not ordinary personal data. Answer three hundred questions honestly and you will have told us about your health, your family, your religion or absence of one, your politics, your griefs — categories the law protects specially, and rightly.

We ask for this because you want a book made of it, and that is the only reason we hold it. By recording answers you are asking us to process what you tell us for that purpose. You can withdraw that at any time, and clause 08 says what happens when you do.

You control how far it goes. The interview will not raise the hardest subjects unless you allow it, and any question can be skipped without giving a reason.

No human at PenBliss reads your answers as a matter of course. We look at an individual account only when you ask us to for support, or where we are compelled by law.

Your material passes through these companies, and no others:

• A transcription provider turns your recordings into words. Which one depends on this instance — currently Deepgram, unless the operator has chosen otherwise. Audio is sent, transcribed, and returned; it is not used to train their systems.
• A language model provider reads your answers to index them and to write chapters — currently Anthropic. Your material is sent for that purpose only and is not used to train their models.
• An email provider delivers the few letters we send: confirming your address, and any custody invitation you ask for.
• Our hosting and database providers, who store the above.

Some of these are outside the European Economic Area. Where that is so, transfers are made under the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

You may nominate a person who can carry the interview on and take the book out if you no longer can. That is the one circumstance in which another human is given access to your recordings and your book, and it happens only because you arranged it in advance.

Nothing happens when you name them. They receive a letter saying they have been named, and a link that does nothing until they accept it. You can withdraw it at any moment, and withdrawal takes effect on their very next click.

Audio is never served from an address that works without signing in. Every request is checked against the same rule as the book itself: you, or the person you named, and nobody else. If a code is printed in your book, it carries a pointer and no audio — somebody who finds the book on a train still has to be you to hear anything.

For as long as you have an account, because the point of the thing is that it lasts. We are not going to quietly delete somebody’s grandmother after eighteen months of inactivity.

If you close your account we delete your recordings, transcripts, dossier and book within thirty days. Backups age out within a further ninety. We keep only what tax and accounting law requires us to keep about the payment itself.

• A copy of everything, in a form you can use elsewhere — the book, the transcripts and the original audio.
• Correction of anything wrong. The interview is built for this: any answer can be edited, any chapter rewritten.
• Deletion, of a single answer or of all of it.
• To stop, and to withdraw your agreement to our holding any of it.
• To complain to your data protection authority. In France that is the CNIL. We would rather you told us first, but you are not obliged to.

Write to privacy@penbliss.com. We answer within thirty days and usually much sooner. We will not make you explain why.

You can also delete a single answer, your recordings, the book or the whole account yourself, in the app or on the website. How, and what each one removes, is on the page about deleting your account or data.

You must be eighteen to hold an account. A younger person’s story can be recorded by a parent or guardian who holds the account and is responsible for what is recorded.

If we change this in a way that affects what happens to your material, we will tell you by email before it takes effect — not by quietly changing the date at the top.