Tally Privacy Policy

Effective date: 13 December 2024

A couple things before we begin:

First, when you use Tally you’re subject to its Terms of Use, so please read that document in addition to this one.
Second, Tally is currently in private testing and under active development, which means lots of things about it could change by the time we release it to the public. Having said that, our general stance on privacy as explained here is unlikely to change because, well, it’s what we actually believe. In any event, if this document does change, we’ll notify you if you have registered for a Tally account.

Our philosophy

The world has enough places to share things. Frankly, we think there’s a whole lot of oversharing going on. Tally is designed to be a private place for you and others that you explicitly choose to connect with. Whatever you do on Tally will only be visible to you and the people you’ve connected with in the app.
We try to collect as few data about you as is necessary to make Tally work. We don’t really want to know anything about you, and the less we know the better. (No offense. We’re sure you’re very nice in person IRL.)
Your content and data belong to you. For legal reasons, you agree to grant us sufficient rights to your content so we can make Tally work the way its designed to. (For example, making a copy of something to back it up.) But those are the only rights we want or need.
We don’t sell your data to any third parties because we think that’s gross.
When we need to integrate with third-party services to operate Tally, we make an effort to choose those that share our philosophy, meaning they collect as few data as possible, and anonymize it so that it isn’t personally identifiable.

When you first create a Tally account, we collect your first name, last name, and email address from your sign-in provider (e.g., Sign In With Apple).
When you use Tally to record audio for yourself or someone else, we keep a copy of that audio on our servers so you will still have access to it if you lose your phone while fleeing a pack of ravenous wolves, buy a new phone, and then log back into your Tally account. We don’t analyze your audio in any way except to collect aggregate data like the total number of minutes of audio recorded by all Tally users.
If you send a question or photo to someone to prompt them to record a response, we keep a copy of that question or photo on our servers for the same reason we keep a copy of the audio you record. We don’t analyze your questions or photos in any way.

We use your data only to make Tally operate as advertised. As explained above, we don’t want to know anything more about you than we absolutely have to, and we have no intention of ever selling any data we collect to a third party.
If we dream up a nifty feature in the future that requires us to analyze your data (i.e., audio, questions, and photos) more than we do today (which is not at all), we won’t do so unless you give us permission.

We only share data with third parties that are necessary to operate Tally. We’ve integrated TelemetryDeck for analytics, and they anonymize all the data they collect. We’re currently using Firebase for our server platform, so Google is probably tracking your IP address and whatever else they can get away with. But by using Tally you’re not sharing anything more with Google than you’re already sharing with them in a million other ways by using the Internet. More to the point, when we have been given a choice about how to configure Firebase, we’ve configured it to collect as little data from you as possible.

If you decide you no longer want to be a Tally user, you can use the app to delete your account and we’ll delete your data from our servers. There’s one caveat: if you choose to give a copy of your data to another person you’ve connected with on Tally (e.g., you record an audio response to a question they send you), they get to keep that copy even after your account is deleted.

We like children. So much so, that several of us have created our own. But we don’t like children using Tally, because as our Terms of Use make clear, you need to be at least 13 years old to create a Tally account.
Having said that, if you (a person at least 13 years old) choose to use Tally to record audio of a child, then we technically keep a copy of that audio for as long as you have it in your account. However, there’s no way for us to know that the person you recorded is a child short of analyzing the audio itself, which we do not do.

We like Europeans. ~~So much so, that several of us have created our own.~~ But at the moment, Tally is for users in the US only, as noted in our Terms of Use. For present purposes, that means we make no guarantees that Tally complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), although given our general philosophy, we hope we’re abiding by its spirit even if not its every letter.

If you have any questions or comments about this policy, you can contact us at: