Policies

Cultural Safety

Coyote & Eagle is a platform for Native people to speak, practice, and share their Indigenous languages. Language and culture are deeply intertwined in Native communities. Some words, phrases, and contexts carry ceremonial, spiritual, or community-specific significance that is not meant for open circulation.

The patterns described below are not optional features. They are structural decisions that reflect the values of the communities this platform serves. They were designed by Native builders for Native communities.

Your recording is private unless you choose to share

When you record something, it is saved privately to your account by default. Practice counts. Speaking matters more than sharing. Publishing to a community or making a recording public is always a conscious, separate action — never an automatic one.

Cultural permission is required to publish

Every time you publish audio, you are asked to confirm that you have cultural permission to share it in that context. This is not a legal disclaimer. It is a moment of intentional pause, rooted in the cultural practice of asking permission.

Communities control their own space

Communities are stewarded by trusted members from those communities. Stewards approve new members, moderate content, and maintain protected word lists that the AI layer must not transcribe or translate. Community membership — not language proficiency, account age, or documentation — is how access works on this platform.

Human moderation, not algorithms

Content moderation is performed by community stewards and platform moderators — humans from the communities being served. We do not use English-trained profanity filters, toxicity classifiers, or AI-based content scoring. These tools routinely flag Indigenous words as false positives, and each false positive is a trust-destroying moment.

AI is transparent and bounded

When AI is used in any part of a post — transcription, caption suggestions, translation assistance — it is automatically flagged and visible. Community stewards can maintain lists of terms the AI layer must never process. The community defines those boundaries, not the algorithm.

Consent is context-specific

Permission to share audio in one context does not imply permission for other contexts. A recording shared with your community has been consented to for that community. It has not been consented to appear on a public homepage, be excerpted in another user's post, be packaged with someone else's response and shared elsewhere, or be used in marketing, grants, or press materials.

Coyote & Eagle will not use community audio in marketing, grant applications, press materials, conference presentations, or any external context without the explicit consent of each speaker involved. This applies to Codetalkers.io's own promotional needs, not just third-party requests.

When in doubt, we ask. The cost of asking is small. The cost of using someone's voice without their consent — especially in communities with historical experience of extraction and exploitation — is immeasurable.

No streaks, no scoreboards

The platform does not track posting streaks, participation scores, leaderboards, or any engagement metric visible to users. Daily prompts are invitations to speak, not challenges to complete. An elder who speaks their language every day at home but never posts is not less valuable than someone who shares frequently. The platform should never imply otherwise.

Privacy

This section describes what information Coyote & Eagle collects about you, how it is used, and what control you have over it. Tribal data sovereignty is a founding principle of this platform, and it applies to behavioral data, not just content.

What we collect

• Account information: your email address and a hashed (irreversibly scrambled) copy of your password. We never store passwords in plain text.
• Profile information: the display name, bio, avatar, and language path you choose to add.
• Community memberships: which communities you belong to, and whether each membership is visible to others.
• Audio recordings: audio you record or upload. Private practice recordings are visible only to you. Community or public recordings are visible according to your chosen setting.
• Captions, transcriptions, translations: text you write or generate to accompany your recordings.
• Basic technical logs: error rates, server response times, and aggregate usage counts needed to keep the platform running. These are not tied to your identity.

What we do not collect

We do not use third-party analytics providers (Google Analytics, Meta pixels, Mixpanel, Segment, Hotjar, session replay tools, or anything similar). We do not track individual behavior across sessions. We do not transmit your activity to advertising networks or data brokers.

How audio is stored

Your recordings are stored on Vercel Blob, a commercial storage service that hosts the audio files. Private recordings are only accessible to you. Community recordings are accessible to members of the community. Public recordings are accessible to anyone visiting the platform's public feed.

How AI is used

AI features (transcription, caption suggestions) send your audio or prompt text to Anthropic's Claude API. The platform applies community-managed word lists to filter protected terms before and after AI processing. We do not send audio to AI services for analytics, moderation, or any purpose beyond the feature you explicitly invoked.

Cookies and session storage

We use a session cookie to keep you signed in. The feed uses temporary session storage to remember that you have consented to audio playback for the current tab. No tracking cookies, no third-party cookies.

Your rights

Export your content. You can request a download of all your recordings (including private practice), captions, transcriptions, community memberships, and profile information at any time.

Delete your account.Account deletion actually deletes. Audio files are removed from storage, database records are purged (not marked inactive), and cached copies are invalidated. Audio recordings are always fully removed — voice is biometric and cannot be meaningfully anonymized. You can choose whether text contributions in community threads are removed or reattributed to "Former member."

Community withdrawal.A community's stewards can request that all community content be withdrawn from the platform. We provide an export of the community's full content and then remove it. This right is structural, not discretionary.

Children

This platform is not directed at children under 13. If you are under 13, please do not create an account. If we learn that a child under 13 has created an account, we will delete it.

Contact

Privacy questions and data requests: privacy@codetalkers.io.

Terms of Service

By using Coyote & Eagle, you agree to the following terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the platform.

Your account

You are responsible for keeping your account credentials secure. Do not share your password. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account.

Your content stays yours

You retain full rights to the audio recordings and text you share on Coyote & Eagle. By posting, you grant the platform a limited, revocable license to store and display your content to the audience you have chosen (private, community, or public). This license ends when you remove the content or delete your account.

We will not use your content for marketing, grants, press, or any external context without your explicit consent. See the Cultural Safety section above.

Cultural permission is your responsibility

When you publish audio, you affirm that you have permission — personally, culturally, and community-wise — to share what you are sharing in the context you have chosen. Do not post content you do not have the right to share. Sacred, ceremonial, or community-restricted material should not be published to public audiences without community steward approval.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Post content you do not have rights to share.
• Misrepresent your identity or tribal affiliation to gain access to a community.
• Harass, threaten, or harm other users — whether in text, audio, or behavior toward community stewards.
• Attempt to circumvent community membership gates, cultural permission prompts, or moderation decisions.
• Scrape, redistribute, or republish other users' audio outside the platform.
• Use the platform or its API to train machine learning models without the explicit consent of the speakers whose content would be used.

Moderation

Community stewards and platform moderators review content that is flagged or that users have marked as sensitive. Stewards can publish or flag posts in their community; platform admins have the authority to remove content. Moderation decisions are made by humans from the communities being served, not by automated filters.

Account termination

You can delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate an account that violates these terms, with notice when practical. Termination for cause does not extinguish the rights described in the Privacy section above.

No warranty

The platform is provided as-is. While we take reasonable care to keep it running and secure, we cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability, protection against all security threats, or preservation of content through platform outages. If durable preservation of specific recordings is important to you or your community, we encourage keeping your own copies.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms over time. When we do, we will update the date at the top of this page and note material changes. Continued use of the platform after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms: hello@codetalkers.io.