podsink.
Chapters

Privacy and data minimisation

With podsink you record people's voices, often their faces too, and usually they're people who opened your link because they trust you. That's why we take privacy and the GDPR very seriously, and why everything podsink runs is hosted in the EU. Data minimisation is part of that. We process as little personal data as we can, because data we never collect can't leak or be misused.

Where your data lives

We rent our infrastructure from Hetzner and OVHcloud, and all of it is in the EU. Only we administer it. Recordings sit there in object storage for as long as the retention period lasts, encrypted with a key only we hold, one the provider doesn't store. Server logs, too, are processed only by us and in the EU, with no third party involved. Live audio and video never go to a third party.

If you book a paid plan through our checkout, your email address and billing data go to Paddle. Paddle is the merchant of record, so it handles payment, invoicing and taxes as a controller in its own right, and it has no access to your recordings. Paddle is based in the United Kingdom, which the EU Commission has found to have an adequate level of data protection.

Encrypted on the way

Everything between your browser and our servers travels over HTTPS, including the upload of your recording. Live audio and video are encrypted on the way too, through WebRTC with DTLS-SRTP.

We'd like both to be end-to-end encrypted as well, so that only the people in the room could read them. They aren't, because then our server couldn't do two things it does for you. For Live Listen it mixes everyone's voices into a single stream, and it can only do that with the audio in the clear. And from the uploaded pieces of your recording it builds the files for your download, lining up picture and sound as it goes, so it has to be able to read them. Encryption therefore runs as far as our own server, not all the way to the others in the room. That server runs on infrastructure only we administer, it doesn't keep the live streams anywhere, and it passes nothing to anyone else.

Data minimisation in practice

You invite your guests through your own calendar (how scheduling works). podsink puts the invitation together in your browser, but you add the guests and send it from your calendar. That way it comes from you personally, and podsink never sees your guests' addresses.

Guests don't need an account. When they join, they give a display name, and it doesn't have to identify them. A first name is fine, so is a nickname.

Your own account holds your email address and, if you want, a display name. You sign in with a magic link or a passkey, so there's no password for us to store in the first place.

Anyone listening through Live Listen needs no account and gets no cookies and no persistent identifier. We don't collect anything about listeners beyond the technical connection data.

podsink doesn't use any tracking or analytics services. There's exactly one cookie, and it keeps you signed in.

Recordings stay only as long as your plan allows: 3 days after the session ends on Free, 7 on Pro and Max. Then they're deleted automatically, and the chat and the display names go with them (how long recordings stay).

The privacy policy covers which legal basis applies to what, how long logs and backups are kept, and what rights you have.