Privacy notice

Last updated: 14 August 2026

1. Who is responsible for your data

Sitten Kun Oy (business ID 3233135-7) is the controller of the personal data processed through Sanota. We are committed to protecting your privacy and to handling your personal data in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Finnish data protection law. In any matter of privacy you can reach us at info@sanota.fi.

2. What personal data we collect

We collect and process the following personal data:

Account details: name and email address. Signing in happens by email, with a one-time code or a sign-in link, so we hold no passwords.
The storyteller’s details: name and year of birth.
WhatsApp details: phone number and WhatsApp identifier, when the conversations run on WhatsApp.
Recordings: the voice notes and spoken answers you record in the service.
Transcripts and written content: the text transcribed from the recordings and the stories written from it.
Biographical material: a notebook built up from the conversations, holding names, years, places and events, so that the interviewer comes to know the storyteller and does not ask the same thing twice.
Photographs: the pictures the storyteller sends, with their captions.
Content you create: titles, notes, corrections and anything else you write or edit.
Payment details: the order and payment information handled by our payment provider Stripe. We do not store card details ourselves; what remains with us is the identifier of the transaction.
Delivery details: name and postal address for delivering the hardcover book.
Technical data: sign-in codes and session identifiers, server logs, and a log of the emails we have sent. Direct identifiers are masked in the logs, and the content of conversations is never written to them.

Your stories and recordings may, if you choose to tell such things, contain sensitive information about health, beliefs or family relationships. We process that as described in section 5.

3. When you buy Sanota as a gift

When you buy a gift we ask for the name of the person receiving it. You may also give us their email address so that we can deliver the gift on your behalf. Without it you give the gift yourself, which works just as well. We use these details only to deliver the gift and to make the gift page personal. The legal basis is our legitimate interest: a gift cannot be given without the name of the person receiving it. We tell them at the very first contact who gave the gift and where their details came from, and they can ask us to erase their details at once. As the buyer, you are responsible for having the right to give us the contact details of someone close to you.

If a gift is never taken up, we erase the recipient’s details on request. The storyteller’s material is always the storyteller’s own: the buyer cannot ask us to erase the storyteller’s stories or recordings, as that request has to come from the storyteller.

4. If you try Sanota on WhatsApp

Sanota can be tried on WhatsApp without an account. In the trial we process your phone number (it keeps the trial to one and prevents misuse), the text created during the trial, and the email address you give us if you ask us to send that text to you as a keepsake. Voice notes in the trial are not stored: they are turned into text and forgotten in the same breath.

If you do not give an email address, we erase the trial data within 30 days. If you do, we keep the address and the text created in the trial so that we can send you the text and tell you about Sanota later. You can ask us to erase your data at any time at info@sanota.fi.

5. Why we process your data, and on what legal basis

We process your personal data for the purposes below. The GDPR legal basis is given for each one:

Providing and running the service: the conversations, transcribing the recordings, writing the stories, and managing your account and sign-in. Legal basis: performance of a contract (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).
Making the book and delivering it to your door. Legal basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)).
Handling payments and managing orders. Legal basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)) and our legal obligation to keep accounts (Article 6(1)(c)).
Messages about the service: the WhatsApp conversation messages and emails about your account and your order. Legal basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)).
Speech recognition and the writing of text by automated means as part of how the service works. Legal basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)).
Recording and processing the voice. We ask the storyteller for consent before the first storytelling moment, and it can be withdrawn at any time. Before consent, voice notes are not stored at all: they are turned into text only far enough for us to understand the answer, and no audio is kept. Legal basis: consent (Article 6(1)(a)).
Delivering the gift to the person receiving it (section 3) and improving the service, keeping it secure and preventing misuse. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in providing and improving the service safely (Article 6(1)(f)).
Sensitive information inside stories and recordings. Your life story may contain special categories of personal data, told of your own accord. We process these on the basis of your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)), and you can withdraw that consent at any time.

We do not sell your personal data. What you tell us is not used for advertising, and it is not used to develop the service for other customers: it is used for your stories and your book, and nothing else.

6. Third party services and processors

We use the following third party services, which process your personal data on our behalf and on our instructions:

Hetzner Online GmbH: server and database. The data centre is in Helsinki, in the EU.
Google Cloud Storage: storage of recordings, photographs, book files and database backups. The storage region is in the EU, in Finland (europe-north1).
Google (Gemini): writing the stories and other text by automated means.
ElevenLabs: speech recognition and speech synthesis.
WhatsApp (Meta): the channel the conversations run on.
Stripe: handling payments.
Resend: sending the emails about your account and your order.
Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads: measuring visits to the marketing site and targeting and measuring advertising. Only with your consent (section 14).
Meta (Facebook and Instagram): targeting and measuring advertising. Only with your consent (section 14).

We do not sell your personal data. We disclose it only to the processors named above, in order to provide the service, or where the law requires it.

7. Transfers outside the EU and the EEA

Our server and database are in the EU (Hetzner’s data centre in Helsinki), and recordings, photographs and backups are stored in Google Cloud Storage in Finland (europe-north1). Some of the other providers we use, for example Google, ElevenLabs, Meta, Stripe and Resend, may operate or process data in the United States or elsewhere outside the EU and the EEA, and your personal data may be transferred to those regions. Where that happens we make sure a safeguard required by the GDPR is in place, such as the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission or the recipient’s participation in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us about the safeguards we rely on at info@sanota.fi.

8. How long we keep your data

We keep your personal data only for as long as it is needed. In more detail:

Account and contact details, transcripts, stories, biographical material and photographs: kept for as long as the account and the customer relationship last.
Voice notes and recordings: kept until you ask us to erase them. The voice is not a step on the way to text; it is part of the memory. The stories and the book come from it, and for many families the sound of their mother’s own voice is the most precious part of everything held here. That is why we do not delete recordings automatically after a set time. You can ask us to erase them at any time, and they go with the rest of your material.
Technical data about sign-in and messaging: sign-in codes 24 hours, a signed-in session at most 30 days, the technical identifiers of WhatsApp messages 7 days, and the log of sent emails (recipient and whether it was delivered, never the content) 90 days.
Backups: the database is backed up every night. The backups rotate automatically: new ones replace old ones.
Payment and order data: kept for the period accounting law requires, that is six years from the end of the financial year in which the purchase was made. The order row carries no name and no address, only the identifier of the payment transaction.

When you ask us to erase your data (section 12) we act on the request without undue delay and within one month of receiving it at the latest; in practice we aim for 30 days. We then erase the storyteller’s whole material: the speech, the recordings, the transcripts, the biographical material, the stories, the photographs and the book. The data goes from the backups as they rotate, within 30 days of the erasure at the latest. We tell you what was erased and what, if anything, remains: in practice only the order row that accounting law requires, which carries no name and no address.

Erasure always happens on request. We do not erase or anonymise material automatically at the end of a set period, because the whole point of the service is that what has been told does not disappear.

9. Who sees the stories

The storyteller decides whether the people close to them, the person who gave the gift among them, see the finished stories. The default is that they do not: someone close sees only that the storytelling is going on, until the storyteller allows more. We do not read the stories except at the storyteller’s own request, for example when they ask for help with a problem.

10. Automated decision-making and profiling

We do not make decisions about you that are based solely on automated processing and that would have legal or similarly significant effects on you, within the meaning of Article 22 of the GDPR. We use automated language technology to transcribe speech and to write text, but the result is always meant for the storyteller to check and edit.

11. The service is for adults

Sanota is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal data from minors as customers of the service. If the story you tell concerns other people, you are responsible for having the right to share information about them.

12. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the following rights:

Access: you can ask for a copy of your personal data. We provide it as a machine-readable file, with the recordings alongside it.
Rectification: you can ask us to correct data that is wrong; an error in a transcript can also be corrected by you, directly in the service.
Erasure: you can ask us to erase your personal data.
Restriction and objection: in certain situations you can ask us to restrict processing or object to it.
Portability: you can ask for your data in a structured, machine-readable form.
Withdrawing consent: you can withdraw a consent you have given at any time. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before it.

You can exercise your rights by writing to info@sanota.fi. We answer within one month; if a request is unusually wide-ranging we may extend that period and will tell you if we do. If you believe your personal data is being handled unlawfully, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Ours in Finland is the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuoja.fi), and you may also complain to the authority in the country where you live. In the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

13. Security

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure and destruction. In practice:

All traffic between your device and the service, and between the service and the providers we use, is encrypted (TLS).
Recordings, photographs, book files and backups are stored in Google Cloud Storage in Finland (europe-north1), which encrypts them at rest.
The server and the database are in a locked data centre in the EU (Hetzner, Helsinki). Administrative access is key-based, and access to data is limited to those who need it to run the service.
Direct identifiers such as email addresses and phone numbers are masked in the logs, and the content of conversations is never written to them.

14. Cookies

The marketing site uses essential cookies, without which the site does not work. They need no consent and we do not track you with them. The same group includes the note kept in your browser’s session memory of how you arrived at the site: it travels with your order so that we know which advertisement or article brought the gift, and it disappears when you close the tab.

In addition, with your consent, we use analytics and marketing cookies:

Google Analytics 4: to understand which pages and articles are useful to visitors.
Google Ads and Meta (Facebook and Instagram): to target advertising and to measure whether it leads to orders.

These cookies are not set before you give your consent in the cookie banner, and without consent the site works perfectly normally. You can change or withdraw your choice at any time in the cookie settings. Inside the signed-in service no analytics or advertising cookies are used at all: a storytelling moment is not advertising data.

15. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice as the service or the law changes. We will tell you about significant changes through the service or by email before they take effect. The version in force is always on this page, and its date is shown at the top.

Contact

Sitten Kun Oy
Business ID: 3233135-7
Email: info@sanota.fi