Reference
Data protection, for a practice owner.
What Mila creates, where it sits, who else touches it, and what stays with you. It is written to be read, not to be waved. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own practice's obligations.
The short version
One thing leaves the computer during ordinary use: the appointment audio, sent to be turned into text, in the EU. Text comes back. Everything Mila keeps — the recording, the conversation, your notes — lives on that computer, encrypted, and there is no copy of it with us, because there is nowhere with us for it to be.
Local storage is not the same as local processing. The upload above is real, and the rest of this page is about it.
What leaves the computer
Two things, and the second one only if you go and switch it on yourself.
1. The recording, to be turned into text
Transcription runs on Speechmatics, a UK company, on their EU service. The whole appointment recording goes, as one audio file, with a short setting block: English, speakers separated, and the dental word list when it is not empty. What comes back is text.
This happens from the moment you have set up an account with them. Without one, recordings sit waiting and nothing leaves the machine at all.
The job is deleted from their side as soon as the text has been fetched and read, and Mila tries three times to make sure. A job abandoned because the wait timed out is deliberately left, and falls to their own seven-day sweep. How long the recording was — the billing detail, not the content — outlives it.
2. Text, to a language service in London — only with your own credentials
Mila also has a path to AWS in London, for a second pass over dental terms and for drafting a note. It sends text, never audio.
It is off. It runs only if you put your own AWS credentials into Settings. Leave them out and the call cannot be assembled, and nothing is sent. If you do put them in, this is what would go, and it is more than the appointment in front of you:
- For the second pass over terms: one record per word — its position, the word as recognised, how confident the service was, and an anonymous speaker label. No audio, no names, no identifiers.
- For a drafted note: the conversation with the speakers identified, the appointment type, the patient's name when Mila holds it, your style settings, and up to four of your own past notes, word for word, about other patients.
- For working out your house style: the full text of up to thirty past notes you paste in.
That is the honest answer to "what would this send", and it is why the switch is yours and not ours.
What stays on the computer
- The recording, written to disk continuously as it is captured and encrypted as it goes, never held in plain form.
- The conversation, once it comes back, and any note you write.
- Tooth references and dental terms being written into notation — "upper left six" becoming UL6. That is a fixed rule that runs on your own machine. It makes no network call at all.
- Anything the app says to a panel in your own browser. That conversation never leaves the machine and is never reachable from the network.
Encryption here protects a machine, or a copy of its files, going astray. It does not protect you from software already running as you: on a Mac the lock is bound to the app, and another application asking for it raises a prompt you have to approve.
Who is responsible for what
| Who | What they hold | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Your practice | The recordings, the conversations, the notes — all on your own machine. | You decide why and how patient data is used. That does not change because Mila is on the computer. |
| Speechmatics | The audio while a job runs, and how long it was afterwards. | Acts on your instruction, under the account and the terms you hold with them directly. |
| AWS | Nothing, unless you have put your own credentials into Settings. | Same shape: your account, your terms, your switch. |
| Mila | Nothing at all. No account, no server, no copy. | Software on your computer. There is nothing here for us to hand over, lose or be asked for. |
Keeping and deleting
What is on your machine stays until you delete it, and deleting an appointment in Mila deletes its recording and its text with it. Nothing expires on its own.
There are no backups and no restore. If the practice computer dies, the recordings and conversations go with it. The notes you have already pasted into your practice system are your record, and they are untouched. Worth deciding about before you rely on it.
Consent and your patient's rights
Consent to record comes through your practice's own process, exactly as it would for any other recording. Mila does not obtain it, does not store it, and does not ask about it. It records when you press Record and at no other time.
Because everything is on your machine, a patient's request — for a copy, for deletion — is answered from your machine. There is no queue at our end and nobody to ask.
Before your practice starts
For a practice to use Mila properly, these need to be in place:
- A contract, and a data-processing agreement, between your practice and Mila.
- An agreed answer to whose account the transcription service sits under, once it is not your own.
They are named here rather than glossed over. If you are considering this for a practice, write and say so — that is the conversation that makes them exist.
If something goes wrong
Write to Mila-app@protonmail.com. A dentist reads it. Keep patient content out of a first report — ordinary email is not a channel for it — and say what you saw and what you were doing.