Privacy Policy

Who this covers

Epoch Voices is operated by Tresco Integrations LLC(“we,” “us”). This policy covers epochvoices.com and the conversations you have with its historical-figure avatars. It does not cover any other site or service.

Information we collect

• Account information. If you create an account, sign-in is handled by Clerk. Our own code reads only your Clerk user id and, if you have a paid plan, which plan it is — both from the verified session token — never your email, name, payment details, or any other profile field. Clerk’s own sign-in and account UI (rendered by its client SDK) may hold more than that on its own side; that is Clerk’s data, not something our code requests or stores.
• An anonymous device identifier. If you use the site without signing in, we set a signed, random token — not derived from anything about you — so we can recognize a returning visitor and apply your daily conversation allowance. It is stored as a cookie and echoed by the site from your browser’s local storage. Clearing it starts a fresh allowance; it is not designed to resist that, and it is not used to track you across other sites.
• A hashed form of your IP address. Used only to cap how many conversations can be started from one network address, as a backstop against the device identifier being cleared repeatedly. Your raw IP address is not stored.
• Conversation-allowance counters. A count of conversations started in the current period — a day for a visitor without an account, a calendar month for a free account — keyed to your account or device identifier, not their content.
• Favorites. If you are signed in and mark a figure as a favorite, we store the pairing of your account with that figure.
• Conversation content. What you type to a figure, and what it replies, is not stored in our database. It passes through the processors listed below to produce the reply and the avatar video, and is relayed live to your browser. See Who we share information with. The same is true of a debate you run between two figures. Debates published on this site are written by us, not captured from anyone’s conversation — see Published debates.

We never capture your microphone. Conversations are typed, not spoken — the site only ever sends your browser the figure’s own generated voice and video. No audio of you is recorded, processed, or sent anywhere, and no voiceprint or other biometric identifier is ever created from you.

How we use this information

• To run a conversation: authenticate you, apply your free allowance, and generate and speak a figure’s reply.
• To prevent abuse of the free allowance, using the device identifier and hashed IP described above.
• To remember your favorites, if you have an account.

We do not use this information for advertising. Analytics and tracking are in use to evaluate performance, scalability, load, and security issues.

What that measures, so the sentence above is not doing the work on its own: the page you are on, the address you arrived from, and your browser, operating system, device type and country. It sets no cookie, does not store your IP address, and does not follow you to any other site. The analytics software runs on our own servers and sends nothing to a third party — it is reached through this site’s own address, not a separate one.

Who we share information with

To run a conversation, your typed message and the figure’s reply pass through a small number of service providers acting on our instructions: a hosted search service that finds the relevant passages of the figure’s source material; an AI model service that generates the reply text; a text-to-speech service that turns it into the figure’s voice; an avatar-rendering service that animates the portrait; and the real-time video service whose stream your browser receives. Each handles your message only to produce that reply, and none receives information from any other part of the site.

Separately: if you sign in, your account is held by our identity provider, Clerk, and if you buy a plan, card details are entered into Clerk’s checkout and processed by Stripe. They never reach our servers, which learn only which plan you hold. Stripe holds the card and the payment record, and is where any refund is issued from.

How long we keep information

• Conversation content: not retained by us at all, as above. This includes debates you run.
• Published debates: contain no information about any visitor. Kept while published; a withdrawn debate remains stored, unpublished, until we delete it. See Published debates.
• Conversation-allowance counters: kept for 7 days after the period they count — the day, or the calendar month — ends, then deleted.
• Favorites and account association: kept until you delete your account, at which point they’re removed along with your quota history. See Deleting your account.

Published debates

We publish transcripts of debates between two figures so that visitors can read them without starting one. Every published debate is written by us. We choose the topic and the figures and generate the exchange ourselves; no published debate is, or is taken from, anyone’s conversation with the site. What we store for each is the topic, which two figures took part, what they said, and when it was created. That record contains no information about any visitor.

A published debate is kept while it is published. If we withdraw one, it stays stored but unpublished until we delete it. A published debate is an AI-generated performance in the same sense as every other conversation on the site — see the About page.

Cookies

The only cookie this site sets itself is the signed anonymous device identifier described above. It is not used for advertising or cross-site tracking.

We ask before remembering you. On your first visit, a banner offers a real choice — Accept or Decline, not a dismiss button — and until you choose, nothing is persisted: the site works, but looks like a new visitor on every page load, the same as if you’d declined. Only Accept turns on remembering the device identifier between visits. This applies everywhere, not only where a cookie law requires it.

Your choices

You can use the site anonymously and clear your cookies and local storage at any time to reset your device identifier. If you have an account, you can remove a favorite at any time from the site, and you can delete your account entirely — see Deleting your account.

Deleting your account

If you have an account, you can delete it yourself at any time from your account menu, in the top right of the site. Deletion removes your favorites and your quota history, and deletes your Clerk sign-in. It does not touch the shared, hashed-IP abuse counters described above — those rows aren’t keyed to you specifically, and erasing them would hand a shared allowance back to everyone else who happens to share that address.

Deletion can be partial: if your local data is erased but Clerk fails to delete the sign-in itself, we tell you that plainly rather than reporting success — in that case your sign-in may still work, and you should try again. If the request fails outright, nothing is removed; you’ll be told that too, rather than left uncertain.

Children’s privacy

You must be at least 16 to create your own account or to use the site on your own. Sixteen is at or above the age of digital consent in every EU member state and above the US floor. Where the site asks for your consent — which is only for remembering your device between visits, via the banner described below — a visitor giving it is therefore old enough to give it themselves. Everything else the site does with your information is done to provide the service you asked for, not on the basis of consent.

Pupils under 16 use Epoch Voices only through a school or institution with Institutional access. The institution holds the account; pupils do not have accounts of their own, so we hold no account information about them. The institution decides which pupils use the service and provides the lawful basis for it, and confirms to us that it has the authority or consent to do so. We rely on that confirmation; we do not verify it, and the product has no age-verification step for anyone. See the Terms of Service.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we’ll update the date at the top of this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about your information, can be sent to Tresco Integrations LLC at admin@trescointegrations.com, or by mail to:

We aim to respond within 2 business days. Account deletion no longer depends on this inbox at all — see Deleting your account.