Introduction

Welcome to We The Free (WTF). We are committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring that your personal information is handled in a safe and responsible manner. This privacy policy explains how we collect, use, and share your personal data when you use our website and services. We The Free is the data controller for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

What Data Do We Collect?

Our organization collects the following data:

  • Personal identification information — name, email address, contact information, and similar details you provide when registering, subscribing to our newsletter, or signing up as a volunteer.
  • Conversation data — when you start a live call or AI chat through our MyChats, 3minutes, or 3movies services, we collect the audio and video of the call, the automatically generated transcript, and, for AI chat sessions, the full message history of the conversation. This data is linked to the name, email, country, and language you provide when starting the session.
  • Volunteer activity data — if you register as a volunteer (activist), we also process the calls and chats you take part in on our platform, along with associated moderation and performance records.

How Do We Collect Data?

You directly provide our organization with most of the data we collect. We collect data and process data when you:

  • Register online with our website or services.
  • Voluntarily complete a customer survey or provide feedback on any of our message boards or via email.
  • Use or view our website via your browser's cookies.
  • Voluntarily sign up for our email list.
  • Start a live call or AI chat through our MyChats, 3minutes, or 3movies services — the audio, video, and transcript of the session are captured automatically for the duration of the call.
  • Register and take part in calls as a volunteer — your voice, words, and associated activity are recorded as part of every call you participate in.

We may also receive your data indirectly from the following sources:

  • When you interact with our social media posts, groups, or message boards.

Legal Basis for Processing Data

We process your personal data based on the following legal grounds:

  • Consent — when you have given clear consent for a specific purpose, for example signing up for our newsletter or allowing us to record a call or AI chat. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the details below.
  • Contractual necessity — when we need to process your data to provide something you have asked for, such as generating replies during a live AI chat session.
  • Legal obligation — when we are required to process data to comply with the law.
  • Legitimate interests — when processing is necessary for our legitimate interests, provided your rights and interests do not override them. For example, we run automated analysis on transcripts and chat histories to check that our volunteers are following our community standards and to learn what makes conversations effective. We focus on the conversation itself rather than on any individual, and we anonymise transcripts after a short period.

How Will We Use Your Data?

Our organization collects your data so that we can:

  • Inform you about events that you may be interested in attending.
  • Send you important information about our website, features, and technologies.
  • Manage your login/session details when accessing our website.
  • Connect you with a volunteer when you start a call through our MyChats, 3minutes, or 3movies services, and enable the live call or AI chat to take place.
  • Record and transcribe calls, and analyse the transcripts and AI chat histories in order to moderate volunteer conduct, assess the outcomes of conversations, improve how our volunteers and chatbots communicate, and send follow-up summary emails where relevant.
  • Train, supervise, and support our volunteers using data from calls they have taken part in.

Calls and AI Chats

Our MyChats, 3minutes, and 3movies services let members of the public speak to a volunteer over live video, or chat with an AI assistant. Because this involves processing that goes beyond what is disclosed elsewhere in this policy, we set out the details here.

When you use one of these services:

  • Live calls are automatically recorded (audio and video) through our video platform.
  • A transcript of every call is automatically generated.
  • AI chat conversations are stored in full as a message history.
  • The recorded and transcribed data is linked to the name, email, country, and language you supplied when starting the session.

After a call or AI chat has ended, we pass the transcript or conversation history through automated AI analysis. We use this analysis to moderate volunteer conduct by flagging conversations that appear to contain abusive or harmful behaviour by a volunteer so our moderators can review them, to assess how well our volunteers and chatbots communicated with members of the public, and to improve our services over time.

For our volunteers specifically, the moderation system can trigger an automated suspension of access to our call platform when the AI flags a conversation as likely abusive. A human moderator reviews every such flag and can restore access. Volunteers have the right to contest these decisions and to request human review; see "What Are Your Data Protection Rights?" below.

We keep the full, identifiable version of a call or chat transcript only for as long as is reasonably necessary for the purposes described above. After that, we remove your name and other direct identifiers and anonymise the transcript itself, so that our longer-term records describe the conversation rather than the people in it. We may keep these anonymised records for research, to improve our services, and to help our volunteers and chatbots communicate better in future conversations. Video and audio recordings held by our video platform provider follow that service's retention policy; you can ask us to delete a specific recording using the details in "How to Contact Us" below.

How Do We Store Your Data?

Our organization stores your data on infrastructure we operate or on services we contract from established hosting providers (see "Who We Share Your Data With"). We apply appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect it.

We retain your personal data for as long as it is necessary for the purposes described in this policy. You may ask us to delete your personal data at any time by emailing [email protected]; see "What Are Your Data Protection Rights?" below.

Where we collect statistics about activity on our platforms — for example, how many people completed a campaign action — we may retain these as aggregated, non-identifying metrics for as long as they remain useful for understanding the impact of our work.

Who We Share Your Data With

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with other organizations for them to market their own products or services to you.

We use trusted service providers (processors) to operate our services. These providers act only on our instructions and, where required, are bound by written data processing agreements. They are:

  • DigitalOcean — hosting for our infrastructure.
  • Laravel Forge — server management.
  • Zoom — provides the video calling platform used by our MyChats, 3minutes, and 3movies services. Zoom hosts the recordings of calls on its cloud infrastructure and generates call transcripts, which are then returned to our systems.
  • OpenAI — receives call transcripts and AI chat conversation histories in order to perform analysis and, for AI chats, to generate responses in real time.
  • Anthropic — receives call transcripts in order to perform automated moderation of volunteer conduct.
  • Freelance technical contractors — who help us build and maintain our platforms.

We may share aggregated, non-identifying statistics about our work and impact with partner organizations and funders.

Marketing

Our organization would like to send you information about our work, campaigns, and services that we think you might like. If you have agreed to receive marketing, you may always opt out at a later date. You have the right at any time to stop our organization from contacting you for marketing purposes.

If you no longer wish to be contacted for marketing purposes, please email [email protected] or select "unsubscribe" at the bottom of any email from We The Free.

What Are Your Data Protection Rights?

Our organization would like to make sure you are fully aware of all of your data protection rights. Every user is entitled to the following:

  • The right to be informed – You have the right to be informed about the collection and use of your personal data.
  • The right to access – You have the right to request our organization for copies of your personal data. This service is provided free of charge. We may only charge a reasonable fee, or refuse to act, if a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.
  • The right to rectification – You have the right to request that our organization correct any information you believe is inaccurate. You also have the right to request our organization to complete the information you believe is incomplete.
  • The right to erasure – You have the right to request that our organization erase your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request that our organization restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to object to processing – You have the right to object to our organization’s processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
  • The right to data portability – You have the right to request that our organization transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions.
  • Rights related to automated decision-making, including profiling – You have the right to not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you.

Our volunteers in particular should note: where our automated moderation system has flagged a call as likely to contain abusive volunteer conduct, and this has resulted in your access to the platform being suspended, you have the right to ask for a human review of that decision and to contest it. Contact us using the details in "How to Contact Us" below to do so.

If you make a request, we will respond within one month. We may extend this by a further two months if your request is complex or you have made several requests; we will let you know within the first month if this applies and explain why. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us at: [email protected].

International Data Transfers

Some of the service providers listed above are based outside the European Economic Area (EEA). In particular, OpenAI and Anthropic are based in the United States, and Zoom also processes some data in the United States. Where we transfer your personal data to these providers, we rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission to ensure that your personal data is protected in a manner consistent with the protections it would receive in the EEA.

More generally, if we transfer your personal data outside the EEA, we will ensure that it is protected in a manner that is consistent with how your personal data is protected by us in the EEA. This can be done in a number of different ways, for instance:

  • The country that we send the data to might be approved by the European Commission.
  • The recipient might have signed up to a contract based on "model contractual clauses" approved by the European Commission, obliging them to protect your personal data.
  • In other circumstances, the law may permit us to otherwise transfer your personal data outside the EEA.

Cookies

How Do We Use Cookies?

Cookies are text files placed on your computer to collect standard Internet log information and visitor behavior information. When you visit our websites, we may collect information from you automatically through cookies or similar technology. For further information, visit allaboutcookies.org.

Our organization uses cookies in a range of ways to improve your experience on our website, including:

Keeping you signed in.

Understanding how you use our website.

Collecting referrer and referee data to power our “activist dashboard”.

What Types of Cookies Do We Use?

There are a number of different types of cookies, however, our website uses:

  • Functionality – Our organization uses these cookies so that we recognize you on our website and remember your previously selected preferences. These could include what language you prefer and the location you are in. A mix of first-party and third-party cookies are used.
  • Advertising – We may use marketing pixels for monitoring the performance of our online campaigns or for retargeting of marketing campaigns.

How to Manage Cookies You can set your browser not to accept cookies, and the above website tells you how to remove cookies from your browser. However, in a few cases, some of our website features may not function as a result.

Privacy Policies of Other Websites

Our website contains links to other websites. Our privacy policy applies only to our website, so if you click on a link to another website, you should read their privacy policy.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

Our organization keeps its privacy policy under regular review and places any updates on this web page. This privacy policy was last updated on 17/04/26.

How to Contact Us

If you have any questions about our organization’s privacy policy, the data we hold about you, or you would like to exercise one of your data protection rights, please do not hesitate to contact us at: [email protected].

How to File a Complaint

We hope to resolve any concerns about how we handle your personal data directly. Please contact us first at [email protected] and we'll do our best to put things right.

If you're not satisfied, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. In the UK, this is the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113). If you're in the EU/EEA, you can complain to the supervisory authority in your country of residence.