The problems with confidentiality common to all large scale commercial video calls apps

We know that the conversations that the coaching, leadership or any other conversations that take place on video platforms are often sensitive. After speaking to many people who use these commercial video call services for coaching, mentoring, or leadership calls, two things concerned us. The lack of clarity about what happened to the data, and a lack of visibility and ownership of recordings. We built Ovida to deliver a more secure and transparent video call experience for meeting hosts and for their guests.

Lack of clarity about what happens to data. Most people who join video calls hosted on the large commercial platforms will never read the terms and conditions, or understand what happens to their data. At Ovida, we do not trade, market, share or sell your data to anyone. The data we collect and store is used solely to benefit the participants of the call by helping them understand and improve their communication skills. We don't offer deeply discounted (or free) video call services with the aim of making money by trading in your data. We make money by billing the professionals who use Ovida to improve their practice. Our allegiance is always to them and to you, their clients, never to some third party who is using your data.

Ownership of recordings. Any time a coach, mentor or leader records a meeting on any commercial video call platform, the other participants immediately lose visibility and control of that recording. Because they do have an account with the video call provider they have effectively disclaimed ownership of the data. Ovida requires the host in every meeting to be signed up and logged in to Ovida. We don't require the guest to be signed up and logged in to join the meeting, but they can choose to do it afterwards, and then they can:

Our commercial model, which enables us to give you absolute control of your data, allows you and your meeting host to meet with confidence that your privacy will always be preserved.

To generate the deep analytics our users rely on, we send meeting transcripts to third party providers for processing. We only use large, well-established businesses with data policies that are compliant with our own strict policies. The transcripts are not stored by our providers post the processing. We scrub PII from all transcripts before sending them for processing, so there is no way for anyone at those businesses to tie the transcript back to you.

Ovida is used by Fortune 100 financial services business, who trust us with their deeply confidential data. We have passed stringent penetration tests to secure these contacts.

If you decided to sign up before or after your meeting, both and you coach can see your meeting data. Ovida produces metrics and data about your coach's performance that is private to them.

Your coach may share your meeting with a mentor or supervisor. It is your coach's responsibility to obtain your consent before doing this. The identity of the people your meeting is shared to will be made visible to you. You can withdraw your consent to the sharing at any time, either by asking your coach to remove shared users from the meeting, or by asking us to do so directly.

Your coach can download an anonymised transcript of your meeting, for submission to a coaching accreditation body. It is your coach's obligation to get your consent before doing so.

Your coach can download the meeting video or audio. It is their obligation to obtain your consent before doing so.

Ovida is registered in the United Kingdom and is subject to the most stringent privacy regulatory framework in the world - the EU's General Data Protection Regulation.

You can read our Data and Privacy Notice here.

You can also contact our founders at any time on hello@ovida.org to learn more or discuss how we manage your data.