Special-category data

This page is for anyone whose callers might say something about their health, and for the procurement teams who ask us about it. It describes what our system does. It is not advice about your own obligations, and we have not assessed whether you may record your callers — you are the controller, and that decision is yours.

We accept every industry

There is no list of businesses we turn away. A dental practice, a physiotherapist, a private GP and a veterinary surgery can all use Proofbell, and plenty of call tracking is entirely ordinary for them: which advertising brought the call, whether it was answered, how long it rang before somebody picked up.

Transcription is the part that matters, and you can switch it off for good

You can declare that your calls may carry special-category data. When you do, transcription becomes unavailable on that account — not discouraged, not filtered, unavailable. The setting cannot be turned on, and any project that already had it on is switched off in the same action.

Reversing the declaration does not switch transcription back on. Resuming third-party processing of your callers' voices is a decision you should make deliberately, on purpose, rather than as a side effect of unticking a box.

Why we decline instead of filtering

We already remove things from transcripts automatically: card numbers, bank details, National Insurance and NHS numbers, and optionally email addresses and postcodes. Those all work for one reason — each has a fixed shape, and a shape is something software can reliably find in speech.

Health information has no shape. “The chest pains are back and the tablets are not helping” carries a condition and a treatment in completely ordinary words. A list of diagnoses and drug names would catch a fraction of what people really say, and the fraction it missed would be invisible.

That is the dangerous part. A filter like that gets described as protection, and then everybody relies on it. We would rather tell you plainly that we cannot clean a clinical conversation than sell you a filter that mostly works. So the choice we offer is honest: transcription, or a declaration that makes it unavailable.

What we never store, whatever you declare

• Raw transcript text is never kept. There is no column for it. What is stored is the transcript after automatic removal has run, and the removed pieces are gone rather than hidden.
• Recordings and transcripts never leave in a payload. Not in an alert, not in a webhook, not as a link. They are fetched from the API, with a permission, and every access is written into your own audit log against a named person.
• A caller's phone number is opt-in on anything we send outward to an advertising platform or a CRM.

If you already have transcripts you would rather not have

Tell us. A transcript can be deleted from a call, and deletion is permanent rather than a flag — a call whose transcript has been removed says so, instead of looking like one that was never transcribed. If you want the whole history cleared, we will do it and tell you what was removed.

What we would ask you to think about

Recording a patient call at all is a decision with your own obligations attached, and we are not the right people to make it for you. Two things are worth knowing before you do:

• Tracking numbers do not support 999 or 112, so a tracked number must never be the only number reachable on a site where somebody might need urgent help.
• An announcement before recording is configurable per project, and in some jurisdictions it is required. Ours defaults to recording off until you configure it, which is the safe direction.

The full picture of who processes what is in the data processing agreement, and how long things are kept is in the privacy notice. If something here does not answer your question, ask us — a clear no is more useful to you than a vague yes.