Privacy Notice

Last revised: 13 August 2026

This notice explains what happens to the information you provide when you take part in a conversation for this initiative. It replaces any privacy policy previously published on this site.

1. Who is conducting this initiative and who operates the service

Two organizations are involved and each carries its own obligations.

Most conversations on Paperminds are part of a study designed by another organization. For those studies, Heka usually acts as a service provider on that organization's documented instructions. The organization decides the purpose of the study, who is invited, what is asked, and who receives the results.

Heka Health Inc. (French corporate name: Heka Santé Inc.), doing business as Paperminds, provides the interview technology, conducts the conversation, and holds the recordings, transcripts and conversation records.

Heka Health Inc. Head office: 102-3105 place Louis-R.-Renaud, Laval, Québec H7V 4B3, Canada Contact: office@paperminds.ai

Heka decides the purposes of its own account administration, service security, billing, and compliance with the law.

Some projects assign different or shared roles. Where that is the case, the notice for that study identifies the organization and describes the allocation. Where Heka acts only on an inviting organization's instructions, we may pass a request about that study to that organization and help it respond.

Paperminds is a person carrying on an enterprise under the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector.
The person responsible for the protection of personal information is Zhen Chen, CIPP/C. You can reach him by writing to zhen@paperminds.ai.

2. Taking part is voluntary, and the conversation is recorded

You can decline before the conversation starts. You can pause it and you can end it, at any point. You can have your recording deleted before the end of the data retention period by submitting a request by email to zhen@paperminds.ai.

Audio recording is required in order to take part. The service records every conversation and there is no way to take part without a recording. The recording is used to produce the transcript and to verify the quality of what is reported. If you do not want to be recorded, you cannot take part in this initiative. Where you arrived by a link from a research panel, declining may also mean you cannot complete the study or receive an incentive the panel attaches to it.

3. What is collected

Audio. The conversation is recorded from beginning to end. Your speech is converted to text, and the text of the whole exchange is kept.
Whatever you say. Free-form answers can reveal financial, employment, political, family or other intimate information even when the question does not ask for it, depending on what you communicate. Please do not provide information the initiative has not asked for.

Form answers, where a form is presented to you.
Contact details, only where you are asked for them and provide them, for example to request a follow-up.

Technical information, kept to a minimum: a session identifier, timestamps, IP address, browser and device information and access events.
Findings derived from your answers, such as themes, summaries and selected quotations. Themes are aggregated and quotations are reworked to preserve your privacy.

4. Identifiers and linking

Your conversation is stored against an identifier.

Where you arrive by a link from a research panel, the panel's respondent identifier is stored with the conversation exactly as it was supplied and it is passed back to the panel at the end.

Where you are signed in, your account identifier is stored with the conversation, which connects your conversations to each other across sessions.

5. Who processes the information

We use specialized service providers to perform certain functions necessary to the service, including voice and telephone communications, transcription, speech synthesis, processing by artificial intelligence models, hosting, storage and authentication.

We rigorously assess each provider's personal-information protection practices and enter into an agreement with each of them governing how the data is processed. We apply a principle of non-retention by default.

For more information about our service providers or their data-processing practices, you can contact us at zhen@paperminds.ai.

6. Where the information is stored

Recordings and the primary database are held in the Canada (Central) region of Amazon Web Services.

Information is encrypted in transit between your browser and our servers and between our servers and those providers.

7. Training, human review and improving the service

Our own models. Paperminds does not use your recording, transcript, or any other information from your conversation to train artificial intelligence models of our own.

Biometrics. We do not use voiceprints or any other biometric characteristic to identify or verify anyone. Your voice is not turned into a template that could be used to recognize you.

Human review. The Paperminds team may listen to recordings and read transcripts in order to operate the service and check its quality.

Automated decisions. No legal decision, and no decision of similar significance, is made about you solely by automated means.

Selling. We do not sell personal information.

9. How long it is kept

Records collected for this initiative are destroyed at the earlier of two dates: six months after the end of the engagement, and twelve months after your conversation. That covers the recordings, the transcripts, the answers, the identifiers, and the identifiable findings derived from them.

A legal hold may suspend deletion, for specifically identified records only, for as long as the hold is in force.

Encrypted database backups expire on a fixed seven-day cycle. Operational logs are subject to a 30-day deletion target.

10. Your rights

You may ask for access to the personal information held about you, and you may ask for it to be deleted. You may also withdraw your consent to future use or communication.

Paperminds (Heka Health Inc.) Privacy Officer, Zhen Chen zhen@paperminds.ai

We may need to verify your identity, and we may need enough information to locate the conversation your request concerns: a conversation record is not indexed by name.

For any questions about your rights, you can visit the website of the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec: cai.gouv.qc.ca

11. Security

Conversation records are reachable only through an administrative interface that requires authentication. Information is encrypted in transit, as described in section 6.

12. Cookies

The application writes one cookie of its own, which records your consent decision so you are not asked again on every visit.

Where sign-in is enabled, the authentication system also sets session cookies, which are necessary for you to remain signed in.

There is no advertising or profiling technology in the application.

13. Changes to this notice

We will publish material changes here with an updated revision date at the top of this document. Where the law or a new purpose requires it, we will give additional notice or ask for consent again.