One of the most popular questions we get in from clients is who will get to listen to any recordings they send over.

As we work through our current ISO 27001 audit assessment, the brief answer is that audio and video recordings are only listened to by anyone who needs to. This will usually be one of our associate transcribers, a quality control manager and our transcription manager.

Recordings sent to us are usually uploaded via our secure online file upload service developed specifically for us, to protect the integrity of the recordings. The service is ISO 27001 accredited, and our provider also contracts with a range of government and local authority clients to provide secure upload services.

Once we receive an audio or video file, we store it on our IT system, which is based in North Wales. We are UK GDPR compliant and assessed every year by IASME to make sure that we remain compliant, and all our data is treated in strict accordance with the relevant data protection regulations. This year we have also added Cyber Essentials Plus auditing to our service, which means we have been independently checked for our cyber security levels.

How can you be sure that no-one else is listening to recordings?

The only people in our company who will listen to your recordings will be the transcribers who complete the transcript of your audio or video recordings, the quality control manager if your recording is selected as one of those to be tested for accuracy, and also our transcription manager or one of our directors if there is a problem. All of these people are within our organisation.

At no time is your recording listened to by anyone else, whether that is another employee in the business, any third parties or any other of the management or board teams. The recording is uploaded using our secure server, and transferred to our transcriber so that they are able to provide the transcript. Our transcribers work under the terms of a signed confidentiality undertaking, which means they have restricted themselves to simply transcribing your recording into text.

Returning files

Once the transcript is complete, the recording is retained in line with our retention policies for as long as necessary.

The transcript is sent to clients in password protected format and using our secure email service (Egress). Egress is military grade encrypted email, and is used by governments around the world to send highly confidential material.

At all times the data is with us it is kept in a secure environment. Our servers and PCs are kept in locked rooms without any third-party access, and our transcribers work solely on specific recordings before then deleting all notes and documents that have been created.

Summary

One of the key reasons clients use transcription services like ours is that we are able to provide an extremely high level of security and we are going to be retaining data within the UK at all times and in compliance with GDPR regulations.

If you would like to have a chat about our secure services and the number of people who will be looking or listening to your recordings, please get in touch. Our managing director, Anna Gresty, is always happy to have a conversation about data security, you simply need to reach out to her.