What this website keeps, and who sees it
This page covers afracom.ca: the pages, the contact form, the chat and the hearing check. The site sets no cookies and runs no advertising code. One hearing check page keeps a log of visits for a trial, described below, and no other page does. The chat and the hearing check do keep a few things in your browser's own storage, and the sections below say what.
Reading the pages
The pages are served by Firebase Hosting, part of Google Cloud, and the main pages' typefaces come from Google Fonts, so your browser asks Google for those too. Both receive your IP address, as any server does.
The contact form
When you send the form, we store what you typed: your name, business, email, telephone and message, and which kind of request you chose. We also store the user-agent line your browser sends, which names the browser and its operating system.
A copy goes straight to Afracom's staff on Telegram. If you used the chat first, the request is linked to that conversation.
The chat
Each message you type goes to Anthropic, with the conversation so far, and their AI model writes the reply from this website's own pages. The conversation is stored under a random ID that your browser keeps, not under your name.
Conversations are copied to Afracom's staff on Telegram, so a person can read along and step in.
To limit abuse, the chat counts messages from each IP address. That count is stored under the address itself. The stored conversation keeps a one-way hash of the address and a rough device label, such as iphone-safari.
The hearing check
The check asks for no name, email or phone number. When you finish it, the result is stored under a random reference, with the five-letter code the check shows you. The trial page, described below, shows no code, and its results have none.
That record holds your answers, including any warning signs and ringing in the ears, and the listening results round by round. It also holds the date, how long the check took, and two details of the device: whether it has a touch screen, and the audio rate it plays at. It holds no IP address and no browser details. Nothing in it names you.
Your browser keeps your progress and your last result on your device, so a reload does not start over. Your browser forgets that copy after 30 days; the result we store is covered under How long it is kept. The PDF is made on your device, and sharing goes through your device's own share menu. Neither reaches us.
Checks taken on the demo are stored the same way, marked as tests.
The hearing check trial
While a trial runs, the hearing check at afracom.ca/hearing-test also keeps a log of each visit. We use it to improve the check, and only Afracom reads it. The log holds no name or contact details.
It records each screen you see and how long you stay on it, and notes when you leave the page and come back. It records the choices you make, your answers in the ear check, every practice and test round with the digits played, the digits you typed, how you entered them and how long you took, any pauses, the result, and the buttons you tap on the result screen.
It also records what any browser tells a website without asking: the browser and the operating system it runs on, the screen and window size, languages, time zone, roughly how much memory the device has and how many processors, the connection type, light or dark mode, how the device plays sound, and on some phones the model name. If you followed a link to the page, the log keeps the name of the site it was on, never the page, and any campaign tags the link carried.
Each visit gets a random ID. Your browser also keeps a random device ID and a count of visits in its own storage, so a second visit from the same browser shows up as a return.
The log keeps a shortened form of your IP address. The end of it is cut off before it is stored, so it points to a block of many addresses, not to yours alone.
The log is linked to the result of the same visit. Each record in it is deleted automatically about 90 days after it is written.
Where it is kept, and who sees it
Form messages, chats, hearing check results and the trial log are stored in Google Cloud Firestore, in Afracom's own project. No visitor's browser can read them. Afracom's staff can.
Three outside services handle parts of this for us: Google runs the hosting, the storage and our server code, Anthropic writes the chat replies, and Telegram carries messages to our staff.
Google Cloud's request logs record the IP address of every request to our server code. Our code never reads those logs.
How long it is kept
Form messages, chats, hearing check results and the per-address chat counts are not deleted on a schedule. They stay until we remove them.
The trial log is the exception. Each record in it is deleted automatically about 90 days after it is written.