United States Notice

1. Our position on the United States

FairTalk Pty Ltd, based in Western Australia, offers FairTalk only to adults (18 or over) living in Australia and New Zealand. It is not offered, marketed or priced for people in the United States, and our Terms of Service say so. This notice is not an invitation to use FairTalk from there. We do not check where people live, but we may close the account of anyone we learn lives in the United States.

United States law might still matter to you if you were recorded or mentioned in a conversation, or if a FairTalk user records while visiting the United States. This notice adds to our Privacy Policy, Acceptable Use Policy and Trust Centre. It is not legal advice, and apart from our HIPAA position in section 2 it does not say which laws apply.

2. HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (United States), known as HIPAA, is a federal law about health information. It applies to covered entities and to the business associates that handle health information for them.

• FairTalk is not a covered entity (a health plan, health care clearinghouse or health care provider) and is not a business associate. We offer it to individuals for personal use, not to covered entities, and we do not agree to handle information on behalf of one.
• We do not sign business associate agreements, have none with our providers, and hold no HIPAA attestation.
• FairTalk must not be used with patient information. Health professionals and organisations must not use it in clinical work or to record a patient or client, as the Acceptable Use Policy also says.

What you say in FairTalk is not protected health information under HIPAA, and HIPAA’s rules do not apply to it, even when it is about your health. Other laws, such as consumer protection law and some state health privacy laws, may still apply to it. The Privacy Policy describes how we handle it.

3. Not therapy, and no licensed professional

FairTalk is a self-guided communication tool. It is not therapy, psychotherapy, counselling, mediation, or mental or behavioural health care, and it does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition.

An AI model writes the analysis, the suggested resolutions and the private coaching, the app’s name for AI-written communication suggestions. These are general suggestions and can be wrong. They are not professional advice and not a substitute for a licensed professional. No licensed professional writes or reviews them. Nobody at FairTalk reviews a conversation in normal operation, and nothing checks one for signs of danger.

Do not use FairTalk in a crisis or where there is violence, abuse or fear. In the United States, call 911 in an emergency, call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call the National Domestic Violence Hotline on 1 800 799 7233.

4. Recording a conversation

Some states require everyone in a private conversation to agree before it is recorded. In several, recording without that agreement is a crime and can lead to a civil claim.

FairTalk’s rule is the same everywhere: record only when every person who can be heard knows the conversation is being recorded, transcribed and analysed by AI, and has agreed to that each time.

• A linked person (someone with their own FairTalk account who has accepted a link with the person recording) must approve the session request on their own device before recording can start.
• A person who is not on FairTalk is shown a short on-screen notice and asked to confirm their own agreement, separately from the account holder. Both confirmations are given on the account holder’s device. We store that both were given and when, but we cannot check who gave the second one, so we rely on the account holder.

This is our own rule, and we do not say it meets the legal test for consent in any state. The Acceptable Use Policy also prohibits secret recording and recording a phone or video call. If you record, you are responsible for following the recording law where you are and for making sure each person really did agree.

If you were recorded without agreeing, email contact@fairtalk.com.au and ask us to remove the conversation. You do not need an account, and we answer within 30 days (section 10). The Acceptable Use Policy explains what the person who recorded it is told if you ask us to remove it.

5. What we do with voice

• FairTalk records the microphone only, and never stores the audio. A transcription provider turns it into text in the United States today.
• Our transcription provider, Deepgram, receives each recording with an instruction not to use it to train its models, and states that it keeps such a recording only while processing it.
• Deepgram separates the speakers (“Speaker 0”, “Speaker 1”) so the transcript shows who said what, which means its software tells the voices in that recording apart. We keep only the labelled text. The person who recorded checks a short opening preview to confirm which label is which speaker, and the app then replaces the labels with the names it has: the account holder’s first name and a linked person’s display name. A speaker with no account keeps a label.
• FairTalk itself does not create or keep voiceprints, identify anyone by their voice, analyse tone of voice or infer emotion from how a voice sounds. We keep no audio, so we have nothing to match a voice against from one session to the next. The AI works from the words only.

This describes what happens. It does not say how any biometric information law would classify speaker separation or the naming of speakers.

6. Health-related and other sensitive information

Difficult conversations often include very personal information: health (including mental, sexual and reproductive health), relationships, sexuality, beliefs, money or criminal matters. It can be about the speakers or about people they mention, who are not asked to agree. We do not filter or remove any of it.

Some state laws, including laws in Washington and Nevada, give extra protection to what they call consumer health data. We do not say whether any of them applies to us or to you, and we have published no separate consumer health data policy. In FairTalk, personal information of that kind takes these forms: the voice recording, the transcript, the AI analysis (including each person’s perspective and private coaching), and topic titles and resolutions. Section 10 says how to ask what we hold or have it deleted. We handle it as follows.

• Agreement. Section 4 explains how each speaker is asked to agree, and its limits.
• Use. We use what is said to produce that session’s analysis, resolutions and private coaching. We do not use it for marketing or to train AI models, and we do not sell it.
• Recipients. Audio goes to the transcription provider (section 5) and the transcript text to an AI provider: Anthropic. Both are United States companies. What we store is held in a database in Sydney, Australia. Our email and payment providers receive no conversation content.
• Retention. We delete the transcript from our database when the analysis is saved, or after about a week if no analysis is made. The AI provider keeps the text we send for up to 30 days, or longer if it is flagged for possible misuse or the law requires. The analysis stays until it is deleted, and can repeat or quote what was said.
• Visibility. Both linked people can open a session’s shared analysis, including after they unlink. If one deletes their account, the other keeps it, with that person’s name shown as ‘Deleted user’. Private coaching is shown only to the person it is for, and there is no setting to share it. That is the rule our app and server apply, and the Privacy Policy explains a current limit on it. With someone who is not on FairTalk, only the account holder can open the analysis, and the coaching written for the other person is not shown to the account holder either.
• Our own access. FairTalk’s owner and developer can technically reach stored content through database administration. They do so only to fix a fault, answer a request from the person, or meet a legal obligation.

7. No sale and no advertising

We do not sell personal information or share it for advertising. The app has no advertising and no analytics or tracking tools. It does not change how it works when your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal.

Apart from what other people can see in the app, we share personal information only with the providers listed in the Trust Centre and where the law requires it. Two of them also act for themselves. Stripe uses payment information for its own purposes, such as preventing fraud. Google handles your sign-in under its own privacy policy if you sign in with Google, and receives your IP address and browser details when our pages load its fonts.

8. Children

FairTalk is for adults only, is not directed to anyone under 18, and must not be used to record anyone under 18. We rely on account holders confirming they are 18 or over when they accept our documents, and we do not check. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that a person under 18 has an account or has been recorded, we close the account or delete the session. A parent or guardian can tell us at contact@fairtalk.com.au.

9. No legal privilege

Conversations and analyses in FairTalk have no legal privilege and no counsellor confidentiality. A court order, subpoena or other legal process, in the United States or elsewhere, could require us, you, the other person or one of our providers to hand over what still exists, for example in a divorce or custody dispute.

10. Requests, complaints and data breaches

Email contact@fairtalk.com.au. You do not need an account, and requests are free.

• You can ask what we hold about you and ask us to correct or delete it, including where you agreed to a recording and have changed your mind.
• We do not rewrite an AI analysis, but you can ask us to keep your statement of what is wrong with it, or to delete the conversation.
• If you have no account, tell us who recorded the conversation and roughly when. We may need to check who you are, and we consider the privacy of everyone in the conversation when we respond.
• Deleted information can remain in backups for up to 14 days. Providers that receive conversation content keep it for the periods in sections 5 and 6.
• We answer within 30 days and tell you why in writing if we cannot do what you ask. You can then ask us to look again by replying to that email, and we reply in writing within 30 days.

If a data breach is likely to cause serious harm, we will tell the people affected as soon as practicable, wherever they live, where we can contact them. The Trust Centre describes how we handle a breach.

You can also raise a concern with a consumer protection authority where you live, such as your state attorney general or the Federal Trade Commission. Each decides for itself whether it can take up a concern about a company in Australia.

We update this page when our position or our providers change.