Privacy policy

Version privacy-v2-2026-06-03 · Effective June 3, 2026

This is the Phase A stub of Elio's privacy policy. The full policy will be reviewed by legal counsel before launch. The core voice-handling commitments below are load-bearing for BIPA compliance and will not loosen.

Who can use Elio

Elio is currently available to adults aged 18 or older who reside in the United States. You confirm your age as part of consenting to record your voice. Everyone whose voice is recorded must be 18 or older — including any additional household members you invite to add their voice; each person confirms their own age and gives their own consent. We do not knowingly collect a voice recording or any personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that a recording was provided by a minor, we delete it and the associated account. Support for households with children recording their own voices is planned for a future version with the additional legal protections that requires.

Voice recordings — what we keep, and for how long

When you record your voice during onboarding, your recording is uploaded to our servers, where two things happen:

1. Feature extraction. We compute about 30 parameters that describe your voice (pitch, jitter, amplitude shape) and store them as a voice-identity profile. These are numbers — not audio — and we use them to synthesize the warm tonal underlay your dog hears.
2. Raw recording deletion within 24 hours. The raw recording you uploaded is permanently deleted from our storage within 24 hours of successful feature extraction, and the deletion is logged. After deletion, the only artifact of your voice that remains is the parameter set above.

How long each item is kept, stated separately:

• Raw recording — deleted within 24 hours of feature extraction (logged), encrypted at rest in the interim.
• Voice-identity profile— kept for the life of your account (it is re-used to generate each day's track), and deleted when you delete your account or remove that voice.
• Assembled daily tracks — kept in a rolling 30-day window, then deleted.

The synthesized audio your dog hears is not your voice. It is a reductive tonal signal designed to carry the recognizable rhythm and pitch contour of your speech. It is unintelligible as speech — a human listening hears a warm tone, not words. We nonetheless treat the underlying voice-identity profile as biometric data and protect it accordingly (see below).

Biometric data notice (BIPA)

We treat your voice-identity profile as a biometric identifier (a voiceprint) under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) and equivalent laws, and we build our handling of it to meet those laws' requirements rather than to argue it falls outside them. By recording your voice you grant Elio permission to create and store this profile and to use it solely to generate audio for your household's dog(s). We do not sell, license, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from your biometric data.

Your recording and profile are processed and stored using contracted infrastructure providers — currently Cloudflare (encrypted storage), Hetzner (processing), and Neon(database) — who act as our processors and are contractually prohibited from using your data for their own purposes. We do not disclose your biometric data to any independent third party for that party's own use.

You may request deletion of your biometric parameters and account at any time. Deletion cascades to all related data and is completed within 7 business days.

When you grant consent to record your voice we log the consent event — the exact text you agreed to, the time, your IP address, and the US state you reside in — to maintain an auditable consent record as BIPA requires. This consent log is retained for the life of your account.

Dog data

Information you provide about your dog (name, breed, age, weight, behavioral concerns) is used to route the correct cohort of audio for your dog's state and to personalize the listening experience. It is not shared with third parties.

Account & billing

Authentication is provided by Clerk. Payment processing is provided by Stripe. We retain your email address, the subscription/purchase records needed for billing and tax compliance, and basic usage logs (when you played a track, which podcast app downloaded a feed) to operate the service and measure setup success.

Email

We send transactional emails (welcome, daily track delivery, re-engagement) via Resend. You can unsubscribe from any non-essential email at any time; subscription-critical mail (receipts, account changes) remains.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we publish a new version with a new version identifier (see top of page). Existing users will be shown the new policy and asked to re-consent for any material change. The exact text shown at each consent moment is recorded in our audit log alongside the user's consent.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: hello@elio.pet.