EarShift Voice Recording Study
Privacy notice
Effective and last updated: July 28, 2026
Notice version: earshift-voice-recorder-privacy-us-v1
This notice is shown before microphone permission or voice recording. EarShift is operated by Yuliia Sereda, an independent developer in Florida, United States. Privacy and deletion requests may be sent through Prolific or to earshift@earshift.app.
Personal data collected
- Potentially identifiable voice recordings: short words, numbers, sentences, room tone, and calibration audio.
- Prolific Participant ID, Study ID, and Session ID received from the Prolific study link.
- Pseudonymous EarShift speaker, session, and recording IDs.
- Consent selections, document version and hash, and consent timestamp.
- Progress, upload confirmation, audio format, duration, file size, sample rate, channel count, volume, clipping, and related technical quality measurements.
- Manual technical-quality, pronunciation-quality, and corpus-selection reviews, plus limited administrative and security audit events.
EarShift does not ask for your name, personal email address, phone number, precise address, social-media account, employer, or identity document. Do not say personal information in a recording. A voice may be recognizable and is not anonymous.
Purposes and permitted uses
The recordings are collected to create and evaluate naturally spoken U.S. English audio for EarShift. Manually selected recordings may be used commercially for up to five years in free or paid EarShift applications, educational content, product demonstrations, the EarShift website, advertising, promotional materials, and EarShift-controlled social-media accounts, including Instagram.
A selected clip may be trimmed to remove silence, volume-normalized, conservatively cleaned, or converted to another audio format. EarShift will not deliberately alter the words spoken or present the clip as the participant's personal opinion. Completion payment is separate from later corpus selection, and no royalties are promised.
Recordings will not be used for voice cloning, generative voice-model training, impersonation, biometric identification, voiceprints, automatic accent classification, emotion or health inference, advertising profiling, or sale or licensing as a standalone voice dataset.
Lawful basis
Informed consent is the primary lawful basis for collecting and using voice recordings, including the disclosed commercial and public uses. Limited session, security, and administrative records may also be processed where necessary for EarShift's legitimate interests in operating the study securely, confirming uploads, preventing unauthorized access, responding to participant requests, and maintaining an appropriate audit record.
Storage and security
Production audio is stored in a private, non-public Supabase Storage bucket in a U.S. region. Associated records are stored in private Supabase PostgreSQL tables. Prolific identifiers are held in a restricted mapping separate from pseudonymous corpus data.
Data is transmitted over HTTPS. Audio upload and playback use short-lived, object-specific signed access. Administrative access is restricted to an allowlisted administrator using password and TOTP multi-factor authentication. Administrative access, review, export, and deletion actions are authenticated and audited. Prolific IDs are excluded from audio filenames, storage keys, public logs, speaker archives, marketing materials, and corpus exports.
Retention and deletion
- Pending accepted browser audio: until confirmation, normally no more than seven days.
- Incomplete or abandoned session audio: up to 30 days.
- Rejected, excluded, or replaced recordings: normally no more than 30 days after the applicable confirmation or review.
- Selected private recordings, associated consent, review data, and restricted Prolific mapping: no more than five years from participation.
- Active-system deletion after a verified request: within 30 days; provider backup expiry: within an additional 30 days.
At five years, EarShift stops new uses and deletes or irreversibly de-identifies retained private recordings and associated identity mappings unless another lawful written agreement applies.
Service providers and public disclosure
Supabase processes private database and object-storage data; Vercel hosts the recorder; and Prolific processes recruitment, study-link, messaging, completion, and payment data. These providers process data only as needed to provide their services.
If a selected clip is published on the EarShift website or an EarShift-controlled service such as Instagram, it becomes accessible to the public and is also processed under that platform's terms. A third party may copy or redistribute a public clip. EarShift can remove controlled copies where technically possible but cannot guarantee deletion of independently retained third-party copies.
Your rights
Subject to applicable law, participants may request access, correction, deletion, withdrawal of consent for future use, restriction, or information about use. Contact EarShift through Prolific or email earshift@earshift.app with only the Prolific Participant ID and study name. EarShift will not ask for identity documents or unnecessary personal information. A later withdrawal or deletion request does not retroactively affect payment.
Overarching policy and changes
This study notice operates together with the overarching EarShift privacy policy. Material study changes require a new version and apply prospectively unless renewed consent is obtained.