Privacy Policy

Last updated: 20 October 2026

Skip/Listen is operated by WispMade LLC, an Illinois limited liability company ("WispMade", "Skip/Listen", "we", "us", "our"). This policy explains what information we collect across the Skip/Listen website, waitlist, web app, and mobile app, why we collect it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what rights you have over it. Skip/Listen is intended for adults (18+); see "Children" below.

1. What we collect

• Waitlist details. When you join the waitlist we store the email address you submit, the date you joined, and how you arrived (the referring page or campaign link, where your browser sends it). We do not store your IP address with your waitlist entry.
• Account information. When you create a Skip/Listen account we collect your email address and, if you set one, your name. If you register with an email and password, we store your password only as a salted cryptographic hash, never in a form we can read. If you use "Sign in with Google," we receive the basic profile details Google provides (name, email address, profile picture).
• Sign-in cookies. To keep you signed in we set a small number of strictly-necessary cookies: an httpOnly session cookie, a matching anti-CSRF cookie, and, during Google sign-in, a short-lived single-use nonce cookie. These are not advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and they are not optional the way analytics are. They are what makes "stay signed in" work. Clearing them simply signs you out.
• Product content and usage. The field or vertical you tell us about, the episodes and briefs you open, play, or favourite, your playback position, and your plan and usage counters (for example, voice minutes used in the current period).
• Activity records. While you are signed in, we record what you do with briefs, in our own database. That is: which briefs you open; when you start playing one, how far you get, and whether you finish; when you open the read-along, click a key moment, or click the link to the source episode; when you share, save, or unsave a brief; when you hide an episode (and the reason, if you give one); and when you rate a brief (and the reason, if you give one). We also record the search terms you type and the field or topic filters you use, and, for each list we show you (the catalogue, your library, related briefs), which briefs were on it, so that we know what you were and were not shown. We do not record the questions you ask in voice Q&A, only that a session happened and how long it lasted. We do not record any of this about visitors who are not signed in. See "Learning from your activity" in section 2 for what we use it for.
• Voice Q&A. When you start a live voice conversation about a brief, the audio of your spoken questions is streamed directly from your device to our voice provider. It does not pass through, and is not stored on, Skip/Listen's servers. The provider processes that audio to produce a spoken answer and keeps its own record of the conversation under its agreement with us. We store only session metadata: which brief you asked about, when the session started and ended, how long it lasted, which provider handled it, and the provider's conversation identifier, so that we can meter your usage and reconcile our bill. See "Voice and biometric information" below.
• Product analytics. We use a product-analytics provider (PostHog), routed through our own domain rather than a third-party tracking domain, to understand how the product is used and what to improve. It records page and screen views and interactions with the interface. Once you are signed in, these events are associated with your account's internal identifier, not your email address. On mobile, the analytics library also collects standard device and app context (such as device model, operating-system version, app version, and locale). We do not sell this data, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use it for advertising at all.
  If you are in the EEA or the UK, we store nothing on your device for analytics, and we do not collect your IP address for it. Rather than ask you to click through a consent banner, we simply don't keep an identifier: the analytics identifier lives only in memory and is discarded when you close the page (or, in the app, when you close it). That means we cannot recognise you across visits, which is the point. Everywhere else, that identifier is kept in your browser's local storage (or the app's local storage) rather than in a tracking cookie, and you can clear it at any time.
• Technical and security data. Our hosting, content-delivery, and bot-protection providers log standard technical information (such as IP address, browser and device type, and request timestamps) to keep the service secure, reliable, and free of automated abuse. We use a bot-protection challenge (Cloudflare Turnstile) on account registration, password-reset, and verification-email forms.

We do not collect payment details, and beyond a waitlist entry we collect none of the above until you actually create an account. We do not ask for, and ask that you do not provide, sensitive personal information (such as health, biometric, precise-location, racial or ethnic, or financial data). The mobile app requests only microphone access, and only for the voice Q&A feature; it does not send push notifications and does not collect your contacts, photos, or location.

2. Why we process it (legal bases)

• To run the waitlist and notify you at launch. With your consent (joining is opt-in, and every email includes an unsubscribe link).
• To create and operate your account, serve your briefs, and power voice Q&A. Necessary to perform our contract with you (our Terms of Use).
• Security, fraud, and abuse prevention, and metering your usage against your plan. Our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe and financially viable.
• Product analytics. Our legitimate interest in understanding and improving the product. In the EEA and the UK we rely on that interest rather than on consent, and we have deliberately narrowed what we do so that we can: nothing is stored on your device, no IP address is collected, analytics gives us no cross-visit identity, and there is no advertising. (The activity records described in section 1 are not analytics: they are kept in our own database for signed-in users and are covered by the next item.) If you would rather we didn't process your usage in analytics at all, email privacy@skiplisten.com and we will exclude you.
• Learning from your activity (profiling). We use the activity records in section 1 to learn which episodes are likely to interest you, so that we can put them first. This is profiling in the sense of the GDPR: automated processing of personal data to evaluate your interests. Today we only record this data; we do not yet use it to order what you see. When we do, it will change the order in which episodes appear and nothing else: our take on an episode (Must-listen, Skim, or Skip) is still decided by the episode itself and the fields you chose, never by your activity. We make no decision about you that has legal or similarly significant effects. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in making the product relevant and in knowing which of our briefs are useful, and you have the right to object at any time (section 9).
• Complying with law and enforcing our agreements. Our legal obligations and legitimate interest in defending our rights.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not send you marketing unrelated to Skip/Listen. We do not use your personal information, your questions, or your voice to train our own models, and we do not permit our providers to use it to train theirs.

3. Who else sees it

We share personal information only with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contract, and only for the purposes below. By category, those are:

• Cloud hosting, database, and file storage. To run the service and store your data (United States).
• Transactional email delivery. To send verification, password-reset, and account emails, and waitlist announcements.
• Product analytics. As described above.
• Bot and abuse protection, and content delivery. To keep automated abuse off our forms and to serve the site quickly.
• Sign-in. Google, if you choose "Sign in with Google."
• Speech-to-text, language-model, text-to-speech, and realtime-voice providers. To transcribe episode audio, generate our take and the briefs, narrate the audio brief, and run live voice Q&A.

We do not name individual providers in this policy because they change as we improve the product, and because data-protection law requires us to disclose the categories of recipient rather than each vendor by name. If you would like the current list, email privacy@skiplisten.com and we will send it to you.

We may also disclose personal information where we are legally required to (for example, in response to a valid legal process), where necessary to investigate or prevent fraud or a threat to safety, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. In that last case we will give you notice before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Where personal information is transferred outside your country, we rely on appropriate safeguards for that transfer, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

4. Voice and biometric information

We want to be precise about this, because "voice" and "biometrics" are often conflated and the difference matters.

Speakers in a podcast episode are labelled (for example, "host" or "guest") by matching the text of the transcript against publicly known host names using a language model. No one's voice is analysed to do this.

For live voice Q&A, your spoken question is converted to text by our voice provider so that an answer can be generated and spoken back to you. That is speech recognition, not voice recognition: we do not collect, capture, purchase, receive through trade, or otherwise obtain a voiceprint, faceprint, or any other biometric identifier or biometric information, as those terms are defined in the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14/10) and comparable laws. We do not create a template of your voice, we do not use your voice to identify you or to authenticate you, and we do not use your voice to train any model. Your microphone audio is streamed from your device to the voice provider and is never stored on our servers.

5. Security

We take reasonable and appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, including encryption in transit (HTTPS/TLS), encryption at rest for our database and file storage, hashed passwords, httpOnly session cookies with cross-site-request-forgery protection, database-level isolation of each account's own data, least-privilege database roles, secrets held in a managed secrets store, and access to production data limited to those who need it. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities where the law requires it.

6. How long we keep it

• Waitlist entries. Until launch, or until you ask us to remove you, whichever comes first.
• Account and product data. For as long as your account is open. When you delete your account, we deactivate it immediately and permanently delete your personal data after a 30-day grace period, during which you can change your mind and restore it. The two records below are the only exceptions.
• Subscription consent records. If you subscribe to a paid plan, we keep a record of the automatic-renewal terms you agreed to: the wording you were shown, the price, when you agreed, and the IP address and browser you agreed from. We keep it for 5 years after you agreed, or for 1 year after the subscription ends if that is later, and then delete it. It is kept after you delete your account too, because its purpose is to answer a disputed charge or a legal claim and to prevent fraud. Once your account is gone, the record is linked to you only by a one-way fingerprint of your email address (not the address itself) and the customer number our payment processor gave you.
• Waitlist offer claims. If you claimed the free time we offer people who joined the waitlist, we keep a one-way fingerprint of your email address (not the address itself) and when you claimed it, also after you delete your account, so the offer can be claimed only once per address.
• Activity records. The record of what you opened, played, clicked, searched for, and were shown is kept for 13 months and then permanently deleted. We do not keep a summary of it in any other form. Two things are kept for as long as your account is open, because they are what make a feature work: how far you got in each brief (so you can resume), and the episodes you hid (so they stay hidden). All of it is deleted with your account, after the 30-day grace period above.
• Voice-session metadata and usage records. Retained for billing, metering, and accounting purposes for as long as we are required to keep financial records.
• Security and technical logs. Retained for a short period (typically no more than 90 days) unless a longer period is needed to investigate an incident.
• Source podcast audio. Not personal data, but worth saying plainly: our working copy of an episode's audio is deleted as soon as the brief is finished. We don't keep it.

We may retain limited records beyond these periods where we must do so to comply with law, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights: to know what personal information we hold about you and to obtain a copy of it; to correct it; to delete it; to receive it in a portable format; to withdraw consent you have given; to object to or restrict certain processing; to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information (we do neither); to object to profiling (section 9); to limit the use of sensitive personal information (we do not collect it); and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, these rights arise under the GDPR and UK GDPR, and you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority. If you are in California, they arise under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA; we have not sold or shared personal information in the preceding twelve months, and you may use an authorised agent to make a request on your behalf. Other US states grant similar rights.

You can delete your account and all associated personal data yourself, at any time, from Settings in the app. For anything else, email privacy@skiplisten.com. We will verify your identity against the email address on your account, and we will respond within 30 days (or 45 days for California requests, extendable once where the law allows). Exercising these rights is free unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

8. Where it's stored

Your data is stored in our database and file storage, hosted in the United States, and is processed by the providers described in section 3, some of whom operate in the United States and other regions. If you use Skip/Listen from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be processed in the United States.

9. Your choices

• Delete your account. From Settings in the app, at any time, or by emailing privacy@skiplisten.com.
• Leave the waitlist. Every email we send includes an unsubscribe link, or email us and we'll remove you.
• Analytics. Email privacy@skiplisten.com to opt out of product analytics. You can also use a browser or extension that blocks analytics at any time. Outside the EEA/UK you can additionally clear your browser's local storage; inside the EEA/UK there is nothing to clear, because we store nothing.
• Object to activity profiling. Email privacy@skiplisten.com from the address on your account. We will delete the activity records we hold about you and stop recording them, promptly and in any case within the 30 days in section 7. Your place in each brief and the episodes you hid will keep working, because those are features, not profiling. Deleting your account removes all of it.
• Voice Q&A. It only ever runs when you start it, and you can revoke microphone permission in your browser or device settings.
• Cookies. You can clear cookies in your browser at any time. This signs you out but does not delete your account.

10. Children

Skip/Listen is a general-audience product intended for adults (18+). It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18 (or under 16 in the EEA/UK). If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact privacy@skiplisten.com and we will delete it promptly.

11. Payments

Paid plans are not live yet. When they are, payments will be handled by a third-party payment processor. We will never see or store your full card number. Our refund and cancellation terms are those published at wispmade.com/refunds. We will update this policy before any payment processing begins.

12. Changes

We may update this policy as the product develops. We will post the new version here with a new "last updated" date, and where the changes are material we will tell you directly, by email or in the app, before they take effect.

13. Contact

Questions, complaints, or requests about your data: privacy@skiplisten.com.