Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Thinking Code LLC ("we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, and protects your personal data when you use The Thinking Speaker at thethinkingspeaker.com (the "Service"). We are based in the United States, so this policy follows US law. For users in India, it also follows India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

When you create an account, you must tick a box that says: "I am 13 or older. I agree to the Terms of Service and I have read the Privacy Policy, which explains what we collect and why." The box is never pre-ticked. You see it on email sign-up. If you sign in with Google for the first time, you see it before your account is created. We record the time, the method (email or Google) and the version of both documents.

We process your personal data only for the purposes described here. You can withdraw any consent at any time (section 06).

This policy is available in English. To request it in another language, email prashanth@thinkingcode.com.

01 Information We Collect

Account Information

When you create an account, we collect:

• Email address
• Name (if provided)
• Password (stored as a bcrypt hash — we never store your plaintext password)
• If you sign in with Google: your name, email and profile picture from your Google account
• A profile picture, if you add one
• The goal and date you choose when you start, for example an interview or viva on a given day
• Your date of birth, if you choose to add it in your Profile (section 09)
• A record of your sign-up confirmation: the time, the method (email or Google), and the versions of the Terms of Service and this Policy you agreed to

Speech and Session Data

When you use the teleprompter, interview prep, or other speech features, we may collect:

• Scripts and speech text you enter or generate using AI tools
• Documents you upload for practice, such as a resume or study notes, used to generate questions and feedback
• Transcripts of what you say, and your answers
• Session recordings (audio, and video if your camera is on), kept as described in section 05
• Performance metrics, including words per minute (WPM), filler word counts, script adherence percentage, and completion rate
• Session metadata such as duration, date, and speech engine used

How Your Speech Is Processed

When you practise with the teleprompter, an AI mock interview, Company Prep or viva practice, the audio from your microphone is streamed from your browser, through our servers, to TC.ai, our own speech and evaluation platform. TC.ai turns it into text as you speak. The text is used to follow your script, run the interview or viva, and score your answers.

Your audio is sent to TC.ai only while a session is running.

When a session is saved, a recording of it (audio, and video if your camera is on) is kept for AI coaching analysis and replay, as described in section 05.

We do not create face or voice templates that could identify you, and we do not use your recordings to recognise who you are.

Introduction Video (optional)

If you choose to join the Introduction Video Program (see section 03), we collect:

• The introduction video you record or upload, including your image, voice, and anything you say or show in it
• The name or caption you choose to display alongside the video, if any
• A record of your consent: the date and time you agreed, the version of the release you agreed to, and the account it is linked to

This is the only part of the Service that collects video of you for this purpose. Joining the program is voluntary and is not required to use any feature.

Payment Information

Payment processing is handled entirely by Stripe. We never receive, store, or have access to your full credit card number, CVV, or other sensitive payment credentials. We receive only a confirmation of your subscription status, billing cycle, and transaction identifiers from Stripe.

Usage Data

We record events in our own database to understand how people use the Service and where they get stuck, such as signing up, verifying an email, starting a session, reaching the free-session limit, seeing an upgrade prompt, and starting or leaving checkout. This is first-party: we do not send these events to third-party analytics or advertising companies. If you delete your account, we keep these events only in a form that no longer identifies you (section 07).

Device and Browser Information

We collect basic device and browser information to ensure compatibility with our speech-to-text engines and to diagnose technical issues. This may include browser type, operating system, and device capabilities relevant to audio and video processing.

Security and Anti-Abuse Signals

We also collect your IP address (network), a short code (a hash) for your browser type, and a random device identifier stored in a security cookie (section 08). We use these to keep the Service secure, to stop one person using many accounts, and to keep free months fair (section 02). We keep them for 12 months after we collect them, then delete them (section 07).

We also keep a normalised form of your email address (for example, without dots and plus tags in a Gmail address) with your account, so that one inbox cannot open many accounts.

Email Choices and Messages

We record whether you have said yes to optional emails, when and where you said it, and a log of the emails we sent you, so that we never send the same one twice and can show that you agreed.

Share Links

If you share your personal link, we record which account a friend joined through, so that we can tell you whether a friend has joined and give a free month where it is earned (section 02).

02 How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide and operate the Service — powering the teleprompter, tracking speech performance, and saving your session history
• Process payments and manage subscriptions — handling Pro billing through Stripe, managing promotional free months, and sending payment-related notifications
• Generate AI-powered features — sending relevant data (such as your script, topic, answers, uploaded documents or session metrics) to our AI providers to produce speech writing, coaching feedback, and interview questions
• Send account-related communications — including email verification, a welcome message, receipts, payment problems, renewal reminders, password reset emails, and important service updates
• Keep the Service fair and secure — detecting duplicate accounts and misuse, including of free months
• Analyze and improve the product — understanding usage patterns, identifying bugs, and prioritizing new features based on how speakers actually use the tool
• Market the Service with your permission — if you join the Introduction Video Program, using your introduction video in our marketing as described in section 03

We never use your session recordings, scripts, or practice audio for marketing. Only a video you deliberately submit through the Introduction Video Program can appear in our marketing.

We Do Not Sell Your Data

We do not sell your personal data or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

We Do Not Train AI on Your Content

We do not use your recordings, transcripts, scripts or answers to train AI models. Anthropic's commercial terms do not allow it to train its models on the content we send it.

Emails We Send

Emails about your account or money always reach you: verifying your email, a receipt, a payment that did not go through, a reminder before a renewal, a trial or free month that is about to end, and notices about something you have already earned, such as a reward.

Optional emails, such as a reminder that your free sessions are back, a monthly look at your progress, or a reminder if you leave checkout, are sent only if you say yes. You can say yes from the reminder button on the limit screen, from the box on Stripe's checkout page, or from the optional-email checkbox in your Profile. If you are under 18, you can say yes only from the checkbox in your Profile. Every optional email carries our postal address and an unsubscribe link that works with one click. We send email through Resend.

Free Months for Sharing a Link

When a friend joins through your personal link and verifies their email address, you receive 30 days of Pro. Your friend starts with the same 7-day Pro trial every new account gets. Only your first friend counts, and we tell you only whether a friend has joined, not who they are. The free month is one per person in total, whether it comes from sharing your link or from the Introduction Video Program (section 03), not both.

To check that the two accounts belong to different people, we compare the email addresses (treating variations of one inbox, such as extra dots or a plus tag in a Gmail address, as the same). We look for throwaway email addresses. We compare the device identifier cookie, browser type and network (IP address) of the two accounts. Two people on the same network are not treated as one person for that reason alone. If the signals suggest it may be one person with two accounts, a member of our team reviews it and sees these signals. We may refuse a free month, or take one back, if it was earned by misuse.

Basis for Each Purpose

We use your personal data only where we have a basis to do so. This table gives the basis for each purpose.

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If you withdraw consent, we stop only the purposes that rest on consent. We do not stop processing needed to run an account you still have, to prevent fraud and misuse, or to meet legal obligations. Withdrawal does not affect processing that already took place.

03 Introduction Video Program

After you have finished three sessions, you can get 30 days of Pro free by recording a short introduction video and giving us permission to use it in our marketing. Taking part is optional, and declining never affects your account or access to any feature.

How It Works

1. Record a short video in the app (up to 90 seconds) telling us what you thought of The Thinking Speaker.
2. Before you submit, review and accept the Video Marketing Release. You must tick a separate consent box; it is never pre-ticked and is not bundled with our Terms or this Policy.
3. We review the video to confirm it meets the guidelines (for example, clear audio, no third-party personal information, nothing that breaks our Acceptable Use rules). We approve videos on quality and safety only. We do not reject a video because it is critical of The Thinking Speaker.
4. Once approved, we add 30 days of Pro to your account at no charge. If we do not approve a video, we delete it at once.

Who Can Take Part

• You must be 18 or older. You confirm this when you accept the release.
• You must have finished three sessions. Until then, the program is closed.
• One free month per person, regardless of how many videos you submit. It is one in total: if you have already earned a free month by sharing your link, the program is closed to you, and if a video earns your free month, sharing your link earns no second one.
• The video must show only you, unless every other identifiable person has also signed a release.

What You Allow Us to Do

By accepting the Video Marketing Release, you grant Thinking Code LLC a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, and publish your video, your name or the display name you choose, and your likeness and voice to promote The Thinking Speaker. We may shorten, caption or reformat your video, without changing its meaning. This includes our website, social media, email campaigns, paid advertising, and presentations to partners. We will not sell your video to third parties or use it to promote any product other than The Thinking Speaker.

When we use your video in marketing, we will say that you received a free month of Pro for taking part.

We will not use your video to train AI models, create synthetic voices or avatars of you, or alter what you said.

The Free Month

• The free month is applied as a credit on your account. If you are on the Free tier, you move to Pro for 30 days and return to Free afterward unless you choose to subscribe.
• If you already pay for Pro, taking part does not change your billing.
• The free month has no cash value, cannot be transferred, and does not count toward refund eligibility under the Terms of Service.

Withdrawing Your Permission

You can withdraw your consent at any time from the Free Pro month screen in the app, or by emailing prashanth@thinkingcode.com. We delete the stored video at once. Within 30 days we will remove your video from channels we control (our website, our social accounts, and future campaigns). We cannot recall copies that were already printed, shared by others, or archived by third-party platforms before you withdrew. Withdrawing does not cancel or reverse a free month you already received.

If you delete your account, we delete your video and stop using it. Copies already published follow the withdrawal rules above.

Our Record of Your Consent

We keep a record that you gave consent: your account email, the time, the consent version and the video id, and nothing else. We keep it for 3 years after the video stops being used, even if you delete your account. This lets us show that permission was given.

04 Third-Party Services

We use the following providers to deliver The Thinking Speaker. Each receives only the data it needs for its job. We use providers under agreements that limit their use of your data to providing services to us.

• Stripe — processes all payments and manages subscriptions. Stripe receives your payment details directly, and receives your email, name, plan and amounts. It is subject to its own Privacy Policy.
• TC.ai, our own speech and evaluation platform — turns your practice audio into text, runs voice interviews, quizzes and Company Prep, and evaluates your answers. It receives your audio during a session, transcripts, answers and uploaded documents. TC.ai is run by Thinking Code LLC and uses other speech providers to turn audio into text and text into speech. They receive the audio or text only to do that.
• Anthropic — powers AI speech writing, AI coaching feedback, and interview grading through the Claude language model. It receives the text you submit to those features, such as scripts, answers, prompts and session metrics.
• Cerebras — generates AI interview questions. It receives prompt text, which can include parts of your uploaded documents.
• Google (sign-in) — provides sign-in for users who choose it. Google receives the sign-in request. We receive your name, email and profile picture.
• Google Fonts — provides the typefaces on our pages. Google receives the standard request details, such as your IP address, when your browser loads them.
• Cloudflare — provides content delivery, and cloud storage for session recordings, profile pictures and introduction videos.
• Railway — hosts the application and its PostgreSQL database, which holds your account and session data.
• Resend — delivers our emails. It receives your email address, name and the content of each message we send.
• Social media and advertising platforms — if you join the Introduction Video Program, your video may be published on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Once published there, it is also subject to those platforms' own terms and privacy policies.

05 Data Storage and Security

We take the security of your data seriously and use the following measures:

• Hosting — application data is stored on Railway, a cloud hosting platform with infrastructure-level security controls
• Database — user data is stored in a PostgreSQL database with encryption at rest
• Encryption in transit — all connections to the Service use HTTPS/TLS encryption
• Password security — passwords are hashed using bcrypt before storage; we never store or log plaintext passwords
• Session recordings (audio, and video if your camera is on) — kept in cloud storage. Each recording has a long, random web address that we do not list or publish. We delete the recording 30 days after the session, and we do not keep a permanent archive of your recordings.
• Introduction videos — stored separately from session data in private storage with no public link, and visible only to the team members who review and publish marketing content

While we use commercially reasonable security measures, no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security of your data.

Data Breaches

If a personal data breach occurs, we notify affected users and the authorities each law requires, within the time each law sets.

• In the United States, that includes state attorneys general where state law requires it. For example, New York residents must be told within 30 days of discovery.
• For users in India, it includes the Data Protection Board of India. We also report certain cyber incidents to India's CERT-In within 6 hours, as Indian law requires.
• If your login details are involved, we tell you in the Service when you next sign in, not only by email, and we ask you to change your password.

We tell you in plain language what happened, the likely consequences, what we are doing about it, and steps you can take.

06 Your Rights

You can ask us to do the following with your personal data:

• Access — ask for a summary of the personal data we hold about you, the processing we carry out, and the names of the providers we share it with
• Correction, completion, and updating — ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data
• Erasure — ask us to delete your account and all associated data, including session history, scripts, recordings and performance metrics, We keep only what section 07 says we keep.
• Export — ask for an export of your session history and associated data
• Withdraw consent — withdraw any consent as easily as you gave it. For the Introduction Video Program (section 03), use the withdrawal button on the Free Pro month screen in the app, or email us. For optional emails, untick the optional-email checkbox in your Profile, or use the unsubscribe link in any email.
• Cancel a subscription — cancel at any time through the Stripe billing portal (Terms of Service, section 5)
• Nominate — nominate another person to exercise your rights if you die or become unable to do so (users in India)
• Complaints — email us at the address in section 12. We acknowledge a complaint within 7 days and respond within 30 days.

To use any of these rights, email prashanth@thinkingcode.com. We may ask you to verify your identity before acting. We respond within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle your request or grievance, you can complain to the authority in your country, such as your state attorney general in the United States, or the Data Protection Board of India.

Your US Privacy Rights

If you live in the United States, whatever your state, you can:

• ask what personal data we hold about you, and get a copy;
• ask us to correct it;
• ask us to delete it; and
• opt out of any sale of your personal data, or sharing of it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

We do not sell your personal data or share it in these ways, so there is nothing to opt out of today. You can still ask. We do not treat you differently for using these rights. To use them, email prashanth@thinkingcode.com. We respond within 30 days.

07 Data Retention

How long we keep data depends on your plan and on what the data is:

• Free tier — we keep full details (your answers, transcripts and feedback text) for your last 5 sessions. For older sessions we keep the scores, grading and measurements for every session, so your progress stays complete, and remove what you said or wrote. Script text is not stored on our servers for free-tier accounts.
• Pro tier — full session history is retained for as long as your subscription is active, including script text, performance metrics, and AI coaching feedback.
• When Pro ends — when a Pro subscription, free trial or free month ends and your account returns to Free, we keep full detail for your latest 5 sessions. For older sessions we keep scores, grading and measurements and remove what you said or wrote. We tell you this by email before your Pro access ends.
• Session recordings (audio, and video if your camera is on) — deleted 30 days after the session.
• Purpose served or consent withdrawn — when the purpose we collected data for is complete, or you withdraw consent, we delete that data unless the law requires us to keep it.
• Introduction videos — kept until you withdraw consent or we stop using the video, whichever comes first. A video we do not approve is deleted at once.
• Consent record for the video — your account email, the time, the consent version and the video id are kept for 3 years after the video stops being used, even after you delete your account.
• Date of birth — kept with your account and deleted with it.
• Account deletion — when you ask us by email to delete your account, we permanently remove your data within 30 days. This covers your account information, session history, scripts, recordings and performance data. It also covers any introduction video, and we stop using it (section 03). We keep only what this section says we keep.
• Emails and sharing records — the log of emails we sent you, your email choices, and records of friends who joined through your link are deleted with your account.
• Usage events — when you delete your account, our first-party usage events keep no account id, IP address, device id, email hash or free text. They are kept in a form that no longer identifies you.
• Anti-abuse signals — deleted 12 months after we collect them. If a referral is held for review, its signals are kept until the review closes, plus 90 days. The normalised form of your email address stays with your account until the account is deleted.
• Payment records — certain transaction records may be kept beyond account deletion as required by applicable tax and financial regulations.

08 Cookies and Local Storage

The Thinking Speaker uses the following browser storage mechanisms:

• Authentication token — an HTTP-only cookie is used to maintain your logged-in session. This cookie is essential for the Service to function and cannot be disabled while using the app.
• Device identifier (did) — an HTTP-only security cookie holding a random identifier, kept for one year. We use it only for security and to tell accounts apart when free months are given. It is not used for advertising. We delete the identifier with the other anti-abuse signals (section 07).
• Share link (ref) — an HTTP-only cookie, kept for 30 days, set when you open a friend's share link so that your sign-up can be credited to them.
• Script text (localStorage) — your current script text is stored in your browser's localStorage so that it persists across page reloads during a session.

We do not use any third-party tracking cookies. We do not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies from third-party providers, or any cookie-based tracking across websites. Our first-party usage events are described in section 01.

Do Not Track and Similar Signals

We do not track you across other websites, and we do not sell your personal data or share it for advertising. Because of that, a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal from your browser does not change how we handle your data.

09 Minimum Age

The Thinking Speaker is for people 13 and over. We do not offer it to anyone younger, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13.

When you sign up, you confirm that you are 13 or older.

You can add your date of birth in your Profile. This is optional. Once it is saved you cannot change it yourself; to correct it, email prashanth@thinkingcode.com. We use it only to apply the age rules in this section.

If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, including because the date of birth in the Profile shows it, we pause the account, then close it and delete its data.

If you are 13 to 17, you can use the Service. We send you optional emails only if you tick the box in your Profile yourself. We never sell your personal data or share it for advertising (section 02).

If you think someone under 13 has an account, email prashanth@thinkingcode.com.

10 International Users

The Thinking Speaker is operated from the United States. If you use the Service from outside the United States, your information is transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States and in the countries where our service providers (section 04) operate.

We transfer personal data across borders only to provide the Service and only where the law of your country permits it. We apply the protections described in this policy wherever your data is processed. For users in India, we handle your personal data in line with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

11 Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technologies, or legal requirements. When we make material changes, we will notify you by:

• Posting the updated policy on this page with a revised "Last updated" date
• Sending a notification via email to the address associated with your account
• Displaying an in-app notification when you next use the Service

We encourage you to review this page periodically. If a change would let us use your personal data for a new purpose, we will ask for your consent before doing so. We will never expand how we use an introduction video you already submitted without new consent.

12 Contact Us

For support, privacy requests, or any question about this Privacy Policy or your data, email prashanth@thinkingcode.com. Rights requests, complaints, video withdrawals and legal notices all go to this one address.

Thinking Code LLC

1 Cornell Drive, Hartsdale, New York 10530

Email: prashanth@thinkingcode.com

Website: thethinkingspeaker.com

We reply to every request within 30 days. We acknowledge complaints within 7 days.