Privacy Policy

Voco is operated by Joshua Stannard trading as Voco, a sole trader in England. Our business address is 9 Silk Mill Avenue, Leeds, LS16 6EA, United Kingdom. We are the controller for account, website, billing, support, and marketing data described in this notice.

For privacy questions or rights requests, email privacy@voco.church. General enquiries may be sent to hello@voco.church.

For live-service content, the subscribing church or organisation normally decides why Voco is used and what is spoken. That organisation is the controller and Voco is its processor. Voco processes live audio, transcripts, translations, and reader activity on the organisation's documented instructions to provide the service.

Our Data Processing Agreement forms part of the customer agreement when personal data is processed through Voco.

Account and organisation data

• Admin email, authentication identifier, account role, and support messages.
• Organisation name, public church URL, settings, selected languages, events, and team membership.
• Subscription status, plan, invoices, and payment identifiers. Voco does not store full card details.
• Optional onboarding details such as role, congregation size, website, and how you heard about Voco.

Live-service content

• Live audio streamed transiently for speech recognition.
• Transcript segments and translations saved against an event.
• Configured vocabulary and language choices.

Attendee reader activity

Attendees do not create accounts. Voco records a random browser identifier, event joined, selected language, first and last activity, approximate listening duration, and whether the same browser has returned. This helps deliver the reader and gives the church aggregated service insights. A browser is not necessarily one person, and Voco does not infer nationality, ethnicity, immigration status, or religion from language selection.

Website, acquisition, and technical data

Depending on your cookie choice, this may include pages viewed, interactions, advertising or campaign identifiers, referring page, approximate location derived from IP, device/browser details, and conversion events. Security logs may include IP address, user agent, timestamps, and requested routes.

Public business contact data

For limited church outreach, Voco may record an organisation name, corporate or role-based email address, country/region, public source URL, source description, and suppression status. Sources may include an organisation's website, official registers, and church or denominational directories.

• Contract: to create accounts, authenticate admins, run live services, provide transcripts and translations, support customers, and manage subscriptions.
• Legal obligation: for tax, accounting, fraud prevention, and responding to lawful requests.
• Legitimate interests: to secure and improve Voco, diagnose faults, understand aggregate product use, communicate with customers, and send carefully targeted introductions to corporate organisations where permitted. We balance these interests against people's rights.
• Consent: for optional website analytics, advertising measurement, retargeting, and similar tracking. Refusing optional tracking does not prevent use of Voco.
• Church instructions: where Voco acts as processor, the church is responsible for identifying its own lawful basis and giving appropriate information to speakers and attendees.

Voco does not retain raw sermon audio after real-time transcription. Audio is streamed to a specialist speech processor and handled transiently to produce text. Voco stores the resulting text, not an audio recording.

Voco does not sell Customer Content, publish it as a dataset, or use sermons, transcripts, or translations to train Voco models or general-purpose AI models. Specialist API and business-service providers process content to provide their contracted function. Some may retain limited security or abuse-monitoring records under their business terms. Voco does not intentionally opt Customer Content into optional general model-improvement programmes.

Controlled product logic chooses the evidence and action for pastoral dashboard suggestions. An AI language service may warm limited wording, but it is not permitted to invent statistics, identify attendees, infer nationality, or make unsupported cultural claims.

Voco uses carefully selected provider categories only where needed to operate the service:

• cloud hosting, database, authentication, and realtime delivery;
• speech recognition, translation, and limited AI language processing;
• secure payment processing and invoicing;
• transactional email and customer support;
• security, error monitoring, and operational communications; and
• with consent, website analytics and advertising measurement providers.

Voco does not sell personal data. Customer Content is not disclosed to advertisers. A current named sub-processor list is available to customers under the DPA by emailing privacy@voco.church.

Voco is based in the UK and serves organisations internationally. Some providers may process data in the UK, EEA, United States, or other countries. Where personal data is transferred from the UK or EEA without an applicable adequacy decision, Voco uses an appropriate transfer mechanism such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, the UK Addendum to EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with supplementary safeguards where required.

• Raw sermon audio: not retained by Voco after live transcription.
• Transcripts and translations: automatically deleted after 90 days, or earlier if an authorised admin deletes the event.
• Anonymous reader and service analytics: retained for up to 24 months, then automatically deleted or aggregated so they no longer relate to a browser identifier.
• Translation diagnostics: retained for up to 90 days.
• Account data: retained while the account is active. Following a confirmed closure request, operational account data is deleted within 30 days.
• Billing and tax records: retained as required by law, normally for up to seven years.
• Outreach records: active campaign data is normally retained for no more than 12 months. Minimal suppression data is kept as long as needed to ensure we do not contact an opted-out address again.
• Security and crawler logs: normally retained for 30 days, unless needed to investigate abuse, protect the service, or comply with law.

To close an account, an owner should email privacy@voco.church from the account email. Legal, billing, fraud-prevention, and suppression records may be retained after closure where necessary.

• Necessary storage: authentication, security, language/currency presentation, and your cookie choice.
• Optional analytics: Google Analytics measures website use and conversions only after acceptance.
• Optional advertising: Google advertising tools and Meta Pixel/Conversions API may measure campaigns and help create retargeting or similar/lookalike audiences after acceptance. This can include campaign identifiers, browser/device information, IP address, conversion details, and a securely hashed account email for matching.

Attendee reader pages do not load Voco's marketing analytics or advertising tools. Choosing “Necessary only” prevents optional browser tags and server-side advertising conversion events. You can change your choice at any time through Cookie settings. Withdrawal does not affect processing that was lawful before withdrawal.

Voco may send a single relevant introduction to a publicly listed organisational address only where legally permitted. We do not conceal our identity, explain the public source, provide a valid opt-out, do not add the address to a newsletter, and do not send automated follow-ups unless the recipient asks to continue.

We screen against our suppression list. We do not rely on this approach for sole traders, personal addresses, or other individual subscribers unless consent or another applicable PECR permission exists. You can object at any time by replying “remove” or emailing privacy@voco.church.

Admin account holders must be 18 or older. Children may use an attendee reader without creating an account. Voco does not ask attendees for their name, email, age, or phone number. The church remains responsible for deciding whether and how children use the reader and for giving any notices or obtaining any permissions required in its jurisdiction.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, or obtain a copy of personal data, and to object to certain processing. You can withdraw consent at any time. Objection to direct marketing is absolute.

Email privacy@voco.church. We normally respond within one month. If your request concerns data controlled by a church, we may refer it to that church and assist them. UK users may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

We may update this notice as Voco develops or the law changes. Material changes affecting account users will be notified by email or in the service before they take effect. The current effective date appears above.