The Floor · last updated 5 November 2026
The Floor is for talking with people you already know. This page says what it stores, why, and for how long. It is short because the application collects little.
Ordinary conversation passes through the server as it happens and is not written anywhere. Only a recording somebody deliberately started is stored — and, in a channel that has a live transcript switched on, the text described below.
A recording can be turned into text. It never happens on its own: somebody in the channel asks for it, once per recording, and their name is shown beside the result — because asking sends everybody’s audio, not just theirs.
The audio is sent to AssemblyAI, in the United States, which returns the words in it and nothing else. It is sent the recording as you would hear it: the parts a silenced person spoke while they did not hold the floor are removed before anything leaves, exactly as they are removed from what the recording plays. AssemblyAI is not asked to tell voices apart between people — The Floor already knows whose microphone each part came from — and is told nothing about who is speaking, what the channel is, or who is in it.
A transcript is kept here, with the recording it came from, is visible to exactly the people who can play that recording, and is deleted when the recording is — immediately for everyone, and about 7 days later underneath, like everything else.
A channel can also be transcribed as it talks, with no recording at all. While that is switched on, a channel says so on every screen in it, with a Transcribing label where a recording’s would be. Each person’s audio is streamed to AssemblyAI as it is spoken, the parts a silenced person spoke while they did not hold the floor replaced with silence first, and only the text that comes back is kept: one line per thing said, with the speaker’s name and the time, readable by the channel’s members and deleted with the channel, on the same schedule as everything else in it. The audio itself is not stored here.
A transcript can also be deleted on its own, leaving the recording. That works the same way: it disappears for everyone at once, and the text is removed about 30 days later. Longer than the week a deleted recording gets, and for a reason worth saying: deleting a recording by mistake is obvious, because the conversation goes from everybody's list, while deleting a transcript by mistake leaves everything else exactly where it was and can go unnoticed for far longer.
A channel's Record tab can ask Claude, an assistant made by Anthropic. It never speaks on its own: when somebody in the channel presses one of its Ask Claude buttons, the channel's Record is sent to Anthropic as text — what has been said in it, as transcribed, and what has been pasted into it, with the name each was kept under, up to roughly the most recent seven hours of it — and Anthropic returns one reply, of the length that button asks for. Nothing else is sent: not the audio, not who else is in the channel, not anything about the person who pressed it beyond what the Record already says.
The reply is kept in the channel's Record like anything pasted into it, under the name Claude, for everybody in the channel to read, and is deleted with the channel, on the same schedule as everything else in it. Every screen in the channel says Responding… in place of Ask Claude while the reply is being written.
There is one exception to its never speaking on its own. In a channel whose live transcript is on, five minutes after it first writes down something said in a conversation, if it has not stopped in between, what has been said so far is sent to Anthropic as text, with the names it was kept under, and Anthropic returns a few sentences about it. Those are sent once, as a notification, to the channel's members who are not in the conversation, and are not kept by The Floor.
This server can also give Claude a library: one person's own writing, kept in noesis, a service the people who run The Floor keep. Anybody with an noesis library may connect it on Floor Settings, by signing in to noesis there; The Floor then keeps a grant from noesis to read that library, sealed, along with the noesis name and address it belongs to, until they disconnect it or delete their account. In a channel where that person has switched it on, Claude may look things up in it while writing a reply — the words it searches with, drawn from the Record, go to that server — and the reply may quote what it finds. Disconnecting switches it off in every channel.
There is no advertising, no third-party analytics, and no service anywhere that receives your activity — AssemblyAI, above, is sent audio to be transcribed, and Anthropic, above, is sent a channel’s Record when somebody in it asks Claude, and nothing else: not your contacts, not when you were connected, not what you did in the application. Nothing about you is sold or shared for anyone else’s purposes, and nothing is used to profile you or to decide what you are shown. Your address book is never read — the contacts in The Floor are people who have accepted a request inside it.
What is measured is the four things listed above, all of them counted by this server and sent nowhere: how much of its time and bandwidth went on each account, whether you have allowed notifications, whether a ping brought somebody, and whether anybody asked far more of the server than everybody else. All but the second are kept for 30 days and then deleted. All of it records durations, sizes and outcomes, never content — not what was said, not what was played, not the words written with a ping, not what any recording contains. There is no record of which screens you opened or how long you spent looking at anything.
Two more things are counted, and they are the only measurements here that are attached to nobody at all. The first: there are two ways to leave a conversation — the house at the top of the screen, and swiping it away to the right — and two ways back into the one you are in: the line pinned at the top of your home screen, and swiping in from the left. This server keeps a running tally of how many times each of those four was used in a day, and that is the whole of it: no account, no time of day, no order, nothing that could be taken apart afterwards into what any one person did. It is kept so that we can tell which of two ways of doing the same thing people actually use, and stop building the one nobody reaches for. It is never shown to another user, it goes nowhere, and nothing in the application behaves differently because of it.
The second is about the public podcast pages, and nothing else. When a conversation has been published, its page on this site and its feed can be listened to by anybody, including people with no account here — and when an episode is started, this server adds one to a tally of how many times that episode was started that day. That tally is the whole of it. No address, no device, no podcast app’s name, no account, no time of day beyond the date, and no way to tell one listener from another or one day’s listener from the next. There is nothing in it that could be taken apart afterwards into a person.
This applies only to the published pages and feeds. Listening inside the application is not counted this way and never has been: what is kept about that is the minutes described above, against your own account, for paying for the server. Nothing about a published episode is joined to an account, and nothing about your listening in the app is added to a published episode’s tally. It is a count of how often each published episode was started, kept so that somebody who published a conversation can be told whether anybody is listening to it, and so that the cost of serving these files is not guessed at. It is a number of starts rather than a number of people — one person playing an episode twice counts twice, and a podcast app that downloads an episode nobody ever hears counts once — and it is never shown to another user, goes nowhere, and changes nothing about what anybody sees.
Deleting a recording or a channel marks it immediately: it disappears for everyone at once and can no longer be played or shared. The underlying data is removed about 7 days later, so that a deletion made by mistake can be recovered by asking.
Your account is deleted under Settings, in the app or in a browser — you do not need anything installed — and it happens immediately. Your address, your name, your contacts and every sign-in are removed. You are taken out of every channel you were in: channels you shared with other people carry on without you, since they are those people’s conversations too, and channels you were the last member of are deleted with everything recorded in them. Recordings made in a channel that other people are still in stay with that channel, along with the name you had when each one was made — they are other people’s copies of a conversation they were in, and they are not ours to take away. Nothing that remains identifies you or can be signed in to.
Donating is entirely optional and unlocks nothing — the application behaves identically whether you give or not. Donations are handled by Ko-fi, on their own site, under their own privacy policy; The Floor never sees your card. Ko-fi tells this server the email address, name and amount of each donation, which is recorded so that a donation can be attributed to your account. If you pay with a different address than you signed in with, the donation is simply not connected to you. Deleting your account disconnects any donation from it; the record of the payment itself stays, with Ko-fi and here, because it is money that changed hands rather than something about you.
The Floor is no use to somebody who arrives with nobody here, so a new account that signs up without an invitation is put into one channel — Getting Started — with up to three other people who joined around the same time, and one of the people who run The Floor. It happens once and it never happens again. Somebody who arrives on an invitation from people who are already here is not put in one.
It happens once you can be told about it, and not before: when you turn notifications on, or — if you decline them and sign in with an email address — when we start sending them to you by email instead. The whole of what that channel offers is that somebody may speak into it later, which is no use to somebody who cannot be told it happened — so the place is held until there is somewhere to reach you. If you can be reached neither way you are never put in one, and nothing else about your account changes.
The people in that channel see your display name, which is what anybody in a channel with you sees. They are not shown your email address, they are not shown any handle on your profile, and none of them become your contacts — being in a channel together is not a contact here, and who your contacts are stays entirely something you choose. Nobody can find you this way: there is no directory, no search for people, and no suggestion of anyone to anybody.
You can leave that channel whenever you like, from its settings screen, and it disappears from your home screen for good. It stays where it is for everyone else.
This is something The Floor does while it is new, to give people something to try. It will stop, and when it does this section goes with it.
A community is a channel its owner opens to anybody holding its link. The page that link opens shows the community's name, its description and how many members it has, to whoever has the address. It names nobody, its owner included, and it is not listed anywhere.
Joining one shows your display name to its other members, who may be people you have never met — the same as any channel. None of them become your contacts, and joining does not make you the owner's. Its owner can remove you, and can delete the community and everything recorded in it, without asking anybody; you can leave it whenever you like, from its settings screen.
Amazon Web Services stores the recordings and sends the sign-in emails. Apple and Google deliver notifications, each to their own phones. Ko-fi handles donations. AssemblyAI transcribes a recording when somebody asks it to, and a channel’s speech as it happens where its live transcript is on. Anthropic writes Claude’s replies when somebody asks for one. None of them are given anything beyond what their job requires, none of them but AssemblyAI and Anthropic receive your conversations, and AssemblyAI receives only what it is asked to transcribe, and Anthropic only the Record of a channel in which somebody asked Claude to respond — the recording storage key used by the media server can only add files, not read them back.
All traffic is encrypted in transit. Sign-in codes and session tokens are stored only as hashes, so a copy of the database does not let anybody sign in as you. Live audio is carried over WebRTC, which is encrypted end to end in transit.
The Floor is not directed at children and is not intended for use by anyone under 13.
If what is stored changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too.
Questions, or anything deleting your account in Settings did not settle: support@rvanegas.co. There is a support page too.