Privacy policy

The short version

You describe an incident out loud. We turn it into a NERIS report, and we store the report and its transcript for your department. We do not store the audio. We do not sell anything to anybody. If you use the trial without an account, what you record is deleted after 30 days unless you sign in and claim it.

Who we are

FireMic is a private company that builds incident reporting software for fire departments. We are not a government agency and we are not affiliated with USFA, FSRI, FEMA, or any state agency. You can reach a human at our email, our phone, or by text.

What we collect

What you record and write

• Audio you record, held only for as long as it takes to turn it into a report. It is not stored on our systems.
• The transcript of what you said, stored with the report. Firefighter narratives routinely contain patient names, addresses, and medical detail. We treat the transcript as the most sensitive thing in the system and it is excluded from our logs, our error reports, and our analytics by explicit rules, not by good intentions.
• The report itself: incident type, times, units, actions, narrative, and any module data.
• Photos you attach, in a private storage bucket with no public read access.

Who you are

• Your name and role on your department's roster, so a report can be attributed to whoever filed it.
• Your email address if you sign in with Google (or another provider we add later). We do not receive your password.
• A PIN for officers and admins, stored only as a one-way hash. We cannot read it back, and neither can anyone with a copy of the database.
• Your department and its NERIS identifier, which is public federal data.

Technical data

• An anonymous identifier stored in your browser so that a visit to our website and a later visit to the app are understood as one person rather than two. It is a random value. It is not derived from anything about you and it is not shared with anyone.
• Usage events (which steps of the flow you reached and how long they took), if analytics is enabled. Never the content of a report. Properties whose names look like personal data are dropped before an event is sent, and long strings are dropped on the assumption they are narrative text.
• Error reports if error reporting is enabled: a stack trace and a URL, with request bodies, cookies, authorization headers, transcripts, report contents, and email addresses stripped.
• Rate-limiting counters, keyed on a hash of an IP address or anonymous id. We do not store raw IP addresses for this purpose.

Anonymous trial recordings

You can record an incident and read the finished report without creating an account. Because that means a stranger's recording is sitting on our systems with nobody's consent on file, it is handled under four specific rules:

1. It is deleted after 30 days. Not marked expired: deleted. A scheduled job runs daily and removes unclaimed trial drafts past their expiry. Between runs, an expired draft is already unreadable, because every read filters on the expiry date. The countdown is shown to you in the app as a real date.
2. It can never be filed to NERIS while it is anonymous.Trial drafts live in a separate table from department records, and the submission path only reads department records. There is no code path that moves one into the other. Filing requires signing in and being part of a department that has authorized us.
3. You are told, in the app, that this is a trial and that the draft expires, with the actual expiry date rather than a slogan, on every screen of the trial.
4. It is never used as training data. The endpoint that records training examples requires a real department membership, which an anonymous session cannot obtain, and it never reads the trial table. An automated test scans that file and fails our build if anyone adds an anonymous path to it.

If you later sign in and claim a trial draft, it becomes your report and is kept like any other report. The 30-day deletion is a promise about anonymous data, not a reason to delete something you asked to keep.

One more thing worth stating plainly: the anonymous id that groups your trial drafts does not unlock them. Reading a draft back also requires a secret the server issues to your browser and stores only as a hash. Someone who learns your anonymous id cannot read what you recorded.

Who else touches your data

We use a small number of service providers to run the product: turning your recording into a report, storing data, hosting, and the scrubbed error reporting and usage analytics described above. All of them are established US-based companies, and they receive only what their part of the job requires. We do not publish the list here, but if your department needs it for a data agreement, contact us and we will share the current list in writing, with what each provider receives.

One recipient is worth naming: NERIS (USFA / FSRI) receives the reports you choose to file. It is the federal system the report is for.

We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for advertising. There is no advertising network on this site or in the app.

How long we keep things

• Audio: not stored by us at all.
• Anonymous trial drafts: 30 days, then deleted, unless claimed by an account.
• Reports and transcripts: kept for your department for as long as it uses the product. A filed incident report is a record your department is expected to retain, and the transcript is the evidence for what is in it.
• Roster and account data: until the member is removed or the department leaves.
• Rate-limit counters: hours, then deleted by the same daily job.

Your choices

• Do not want a trial draft stored? Do not record one, or wait 30 days, or sign in and delete it. The product does not require you to leave one behind.
• Want your data out? Ask us and we will delete your department's data from our database. There is no self-serve delete for a filed report today, deliberately, because reports are records.
• Anything already filed to NERIS belongs to NERIS, not to us. We cannot delete a federal filing on request; corrections and removals go through NERIS itself.
• Analytics: the site and app honour a browser's Do Not Track only insofar as our analytics provider does; the more reliable option is a content blocker, which we do not work around.

Children

This is a tool for fire department members doing their job. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

Where data is processed

Our providers are US-based companies and processing happens in the United States. We have not built this for use outside the US, and NERIS is a US federal system.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we do with report content, we will tell departments directly rather than only updating this page.

Contact

Questions about any of this, including "can you show me that?", are welcome. Ask. Show email address · Show phone number · Send a text