Privacy notice

CalmStamp, based in Accra, Ghana, is the data controller for personal data processed through CalmStamp: we decide why and how it is processed, and we are responsible for it under the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843).

For anything about your personal data, write to privacy@calmstamp.com. We answer every request within 21 days, and usually much sooner.

This notice applies to calmstamp.com, the CalmStamp app and the emails we send. It explains what the law calls the nature, purpose, recipients and retention of your data, and your rights of access and correction (Act 843, s.27(2)).

• We collect what the interview practice needs, and no more (s.19).
• We never sell personal data, and never rent it or use it for advertising.
• Our AI providers may not use your documents, voice or answers to train their models.
• Your identity documents are deleted automatically 30 days after upload, and your voice recordings 30 days after the session.
• No advertising or tracking cookies. The only cookie we set keeps you signed in.
• Staff can’t browse your case. Viewing a user’s facts needs a written reason, and every view is logged.

Account details: your email address and password. Your password is stored only as a salted hash by our authentication provider; we can’t read it.

Your case: the facts you enter or confirm, which the officer uses to interview you. Depending on your visa type these include your name, date of birth, nationality, marital status, children, city, passport expiry and last four characters, DS-160 confirmation number, interview date, school and program, education and test scores, work and income, business or property, sponsors and their occupation and income, funds and recent deposits, family members’ occupations, relatives in the US, travel history and previous US visa refusals.

Documents you upload: for example your passport bio page, DS-160, I-20, admission letter, transcripts, bank statements, sponsor letters or payslips, and the text and facts we read from them. These can contain other people’s data, such as a sponsor’s; please upload them only with that person’s agreement.

Your interviews: the audio of your answers and the officer’s questions, transcripts (including your corrections), scores, debriefs, readiness history, the notes you keep and your ratings of realism.

Your interview result, if you tell us: the decision and the questions you were asked. We only include it in anonymous statistics about which questions come up if you tick the box that allows it.

Payments: the pack, amount, date, Paystack reference and payment channel (for example “mobile money”). Paystack handles your card or wallet details; we never receive your full card number or PIN.

Technical data: records of which features you use (for example that you opened a debrief), error logs, and, while a live interview runs, a short one-way code made from your network’s address range and your browser type. That code can’t identify you; it only tells us whether one account is being used from many places at once. Our bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile) looks at browser signals when you sign up or sign in. We count page visits and measure page speed with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and can’t identify you; page addresses are sent without their query strings, and admin pages aren’t counted.

What stays on your device: the free Case Scan runs in your browser. Its answers are kept only in your browser’s storage until you create an account and choose to use them; they are never sent to us before then.

We don’t ask for special personal data (religion, ethnic origin, health, political opinions, sexual life or criminal behaviour: s.37). If a document you upload happens to contain some, we process it only as part of that document, with your consent given by uploading it.

Giving us your email is required to have an account. Everything else is your choice, but the officer can only use facts you give, and without them the interview is less realistic.

Act 843, s.20 lets us process personal data with your consent or where one of the grounds it lists applies:

We don’t send marketing email. If we ever want to, we will ask for your prior written consent first, as Act 843 s.40 and the Electronic Transactions Act, 2008 s.50 require, and every such email will let you unsubscribe.

The officer, document reading, grading and the stronger answers use Google’s Gemini models through Google’s paid developer service. During a live interview your microphone audio is streamed from your browser to Google to produce the officer’s replies. Under Google’s terms for this service, Google processes this data to provide the service to us and may not use it to train its models.

Simulated decisions, scores and readiness are produced automatically. They are practice feedback, not decisions about you: they have no legal effect and are never shared with any government or school. If you think a grade is wrong, correct the transcript and ask for it to be graded again, or write to us and a person will look at it (s.41).

You can ask us to explain how a score or simulated outcome was reached (s.35(1)(d)); each debrief already shows the reasons the officer gave and the topics that counted.

We use the service providers below to run CalmStamp. They act on our instructions under written contracts that require confidentiality and security (s.29), and may not use your data for their own purposes.

We also share data when you ask us to, for example through a debrief link you create, and when the law requires it, such as a valid court order or a request from the Data Protection Commission. If CalmStamp is sold or merged, your data would pass to the new owner under this notice, and we would tell you first.

We never share your data with the U.S. Embassy, any government, school or sponsor, unless the law requires it or you ask us to.

Our main systems are in Ireland, in the European Union, and AI processing may happen in the United States. The service that queues background work (reading a document, grading an interview) runs in the United States and handles only internal reference numbers, never the content. We choose providers that protect data to a standard at least equal to Act 843: encryption in transit and at rest, contracts that limit use to our instructions, and independent security certifications. Where data about people outside Ghana is processed here, we respect the law of their country as well (s.18(2)).

We keep personal data only as long as the purpose needs it, or the law requires (s.24):

When you ask us to delete your account, we delete your data within 30 days, except the payment records above and a record that the deletion happened. Backups roll over and are erased within a further 30 days.

We take the technical and organisational measures Act 843 s.28 requires, including:

• encryption of all traffic (HTTPS) and of stored data;
• database rules that let each account reach only its own data, enforced by the database itself;
• documents kept in private storage, reachable only through short-lived links;
• staff access on a need-to-know basis, with a written reason recorded for every view of a user’s case;
• the officer’s instructions and your case kept on our servers, never exposed to the browser.

If we have reasonable grounds to believe someone has accessed your personal data without authority, we will tell you and the Data Protection Commission as soon as reasonably practicable, with enough detail for you to protect yourself (s.31).

Under Act 843 you may, free of charge:

• Know and access what personal data we hold about you, why, where it came from and who receives it (s.35);
• Correct or delete data that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete or misleading, or that we no longer have a reason to keep (s.33). You can correct your facts and transcripts yourself in the app at any time;
• Object to processing that causes or is likely to cause you unwarranted damage or distress (s.39);
• Refuse direct marketing at any time (s.40);
• Ask for a person to review an automated result and explain its logic (s.35(1)(d), s.41);
• Withdraw consent you have given, for example to reminders or statistics, without affecting what we did before;
• Close your account and have your data deleted, subject to what the law requires us to keep.

Write to privacy@calmstamp.com from the email address on your account. We may ask you to confirm your identity before acting, so that no one else can get your data. We respond within 21 days.

If you are not satisfied, you have the right to complain to the Data Protection Commission of Ghana (dataprotection.org.gh). We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

Some student applicants are under 18. The law treats a child’s data with special care (s.37(1)(a)), so an applicant under 18 may use CalmStamp only with the consent and supervision of a parent or guardian, who creates the account or agrees to it and pays for any pack. If we learn that we hold data about a child without that consent, we will delete it. A parent or guardian may exercise the child’s rights by writing to privacy@calmstamp.com.

We use one essential cookie, to keep you signed in, and store two small items in your browser (your Case Scan draft and whether your microphone check passed). We use no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies. Details are in our Cookies and storage notice.

We will update this notice when our practices or the law change, show the date of the current version at the top, and tell you by email before any change that affects how we use data you have already given us. Ghana’s data protection law is being reformed; if a new Act replaces Act 843, we will update this notice to meet it.

CalmStamp, Accra, Ghana. Privacy: privacy@calmstamp.com. Everything else: support@calmstamp.com.