VEILVOICE -- LEGAL DISCLAIMER AND LIABILITY WAIVER ================================================= Project: VeilVoice -- irreversible voice de-identification Author: tilas01 Repo: https://github.com/tilas01/veilvoice Site: https://tilas01.github.io/veilvoice/ Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later Version: 1.0 Updated: 2026-08-16 This is the authoritative text of the notice shown in the welcome dialog on the website. It is kept here as plain text so that it can be read, quoted, diffed and archived without running any JavaScript, and so that the website has a stable thing to link to. If the dialog and this file ever disagree, this file is the one that is meant. VeilVoice was developed with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic) and has been reviewed and audited by tilas01. That review is a maintainer audit: it catches what the author can see. No external firm and no independent researcher has reviewed this code. If you are relying on it for something where being identified would cause you real harm, read the source before you trust it -- it is written to be read, and every claim below is checkable against it. 1. SCOPE -------- This waiver covers all content, tools, binaries, documentation and source code provided on the website and within the GitHub repository tilas01/veilvoice. That includes, but is not limited to: - the de-identification engine (veilvoice-core) - the cryptography (veilvoice-crypto) - the audio path (veilvoice-audio) and metadata cleaner (veilvoice-meta) - the command-line tool (veilvoice) and desktop application (veilvoice-gui) - the website, the wiki, the in-browser hash verifier - every release binary and every generated artefact 2. NO WARRANTY -------------- Everything listed in section 1 is provided strictly "AS IS", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. This restates, in ordinary words, sections 15 and 16 of the GNU General Public License version 3, which is the licence this software is distributed under. 3. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY -------------------------- The author (tilas01) expressly disclaims all liability for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages of any nature, including but not limited to: a. data loss or corruption; b. loss of a recording, a key, or a passphrase, including through the self-destruct and secure-erase features, which are irreversible by design; c. failure of de-identification to prevent a particular person from being recognised in a particular recording; d. legal, professional, personal or physical consequences arising from being identified despite using this software; e. failure of encryption to protect a file against a particular adversary; f. conflicts arising from third-party audio drivers, virtual cables or proprietary software. 4. WHAT THIS SOFTWARE DOES NOT DO --------------------------------- This section exists because misunderstanding it is the way someone gets hurt. - It does NOT hide what you said. Intelligibility is preserved deliberately. The words are in the output and can be read, transcribed and searched. If the message itself is sensitive, encrypt it, or do not send it. - It does NOT remove a regional accent completely. The melody and colour of an accent are destroyed. Which phonemes you actually produced cannot be changed by any signal-level transform, so a strong accent may remain audible. - It does NOT sanitise the background. Room acoustics, other voices, a doorbell, a passing siren -- all of that passes through. Check what else is in your recording. - It does NOT protect you from an attacker already running code on your machine, or one who can tap the microphone before VeilVoice receives it. - It does NOT clean anything outside the file: filenames, filesystem timestamps, and the channel you send it over are your responsibility. - Page-locking keeps keys out of the swap file. It does not survive hibernation, which writes memory to disk wholesale. 5. INTENDED USE AND YOUR RESPONSIBILITY --------------------------------------- VeilVoice is built for people who have a legitimate reason to not be identified by their voice: journalists and their sources, whistleblowers, survivors of abuse and stalking, activists, researchers publishing recorded interviews, and anyone who would simply rather a company not hold a biometric identifier of them. You assume full and sole responsibility for every use you make of it, and for determining whether that use is lawful where you are. Disguising your voice is legal in most places; using a disguised voice to commit fraud, to harass, to impersonate, or to evade a lawful obligation is not, and nothing in this project is intended to assist with any of that. Some features are destructive by design. Where a feature erases data or destroys a key, it is irreversible, it is opt-in, and it is gated behind an explicit confirmation. That gate is a safety net, not a substitute for understanding what the option does. 6. AI ASSISTANCE AND SOURCE REVIEW ---------------------------------- As stated above, this project was developed with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic) and reviewed and audited by tilas01. This is disclosed because you are entitled to know how the software you rely on was produced, and because it should inform how much you verify before trusting it. AI assistance does not remove the author's responsibility for the result, and it is not offered as an excuse for any defect. The practical consequence for you: read the source. The whole project is published under the GPL precisely so that you can. The cryptography uses standard, well-reviewed primitives from established libraries rather than anything invented for this project, and the de-identification argument can be checked by reading two source files. 7. PRIVACY ---------- The website is a static site on GitHub Pages. It sets no cookies, performs no session tracking, uses no analytics, loads no web fonts and pulls in no third-party scripts of any kind. Your colour-scheme choice and your acceptance of these terms are stored in your own browser, in localStorage and sessionStorage respectively. Neither leaves your device, and there is no server for them to be sent to. Clear them from your browser's own settings at any time. The in-browser hash verifier hashes files locally using the browser's built-in WebCrypto. The file you select never leaves your machine; there is no upload and no endpoint that could receive it. One optional feature makes a third-party request: the live repository panel fetches public data from api.github.com. It is behind a button, it is announced on the page, and nothing else depends on it. The application itself makes no network connections at all. This is enforced in continuous integration, which fails the build if an HTTP client enters the dependency graph. 8. THIRD-PARTY SOFTWARE ----------------------- VeilVoice links to and recommends software it does not own. Each is covered by its own licence and its own warranty position, and nothing here alters them. - Virtual audio routing on Windows is commonly provided by VB-CABLE, which is proprietary donationware from VB-Audio. It is NOT bundled, and installing it is a separate decision you make. - Audacity is recommended for recording and editing. It is free software under the GPL, maintained independently of this project. - All Rust dependencies are permissive-licensed (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC) and are listed in Cargo.lock. 9. LICENCE ---------- VeilVoice is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or (at your option) any later version. You may run it for any purpose, study how it works, change it, and redistribute it, including commercially. If you distribute a modified version you must release your changes under the same licence and make the corresponding source available. There is no NonCommercial restriction and no field-of-use restriction: a privacy tool that people are not free to inspect, modify and pass on is not one they can fully trust. Full text: LICENSE.txt in this folder. Plain-English summary: LICENCE-PLAIN-ENGLISH.txt in this folder. 10. ACCEPTANCE -------------- Using this website, the repository, the released binaries or any output they produce constitutes your binding agreement to these terms in full. The welcome dialog asks you to confirm two things before continuing: (1) that you have read and understood this waiver, including section 4, which sets out what this software does not do; and (2) that you have read the licence and will comply with it. Your acceptance is recorded in your browser's sessionStorage and is discarded when you close the tab. It is not sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to be sent.