Trust and Security

Our StoryFile Life tool allows anyone to rapidly record stories from their family and friends, preserving family traditions and events for generations.. Conversa is our professional tool to authoring and training StoryFile conversations for businesses, including training, sales, and anywhere employees, customers or users need to ask questions. 

A core mission of StoryFile technology and storytelling centers on the human experience and agency for the subjects interviewed and audiences that interact with those subjects.The value of trust at StoryFile, dates back to our early work creating interactive conversations with historical figures: civil rights leaders like Ambasassor Andrew Young, holocaust survivor Rose Schindler, or Japanese-American WWII veteran Lawson Sakai.  In order to have an authentic experience with these amazing individuals,  we used actual videos of the subjects with stories told in their own words. An important consideration to the subject’s storytelling experience includes audience interaction. Our AI provides agency to users to ask their own questions, to follow their own curiosity, and build their own personal connection with the interviewees. Many of these conversations have been featured in museums around the country including the Japanese American National Museum (JAMM), the Boston Museum of Science, National Naval Aviation Museum, and many more.

In conducting an interview with a subject, either with a friend, family member, or professional, it is important to establish trust between the interviewer and interviewee. The best stories are when people are willing to open up and share their true selves. The best stories are not just lists of facts, but narratives that share the desires, fears, and context behind the events. In building trust with the interviewer, we recommend starting slowly with simple biographical questions and stories about daily life before diving into more complex issues. The interviewee is ultimately in control of their own story. They only have to answer the questions and topics they feel comfortable talking about. Just saying that you are not willing to answer a question because it is too personal, off-topic, or inappropriate – is a perfectly valid and natural human response. Feel free to redirect people back to whatever topic you really want to address.

When recording an interview, it is important to know that your videos are going to be securely stored and always accessible. Don’t worry! All your videos are safe with us, stored on our encrypted cloud servers. This means that you – and those with whom you share your StoryFile – can stream your video on any device from almost anywhere in the world and feel secure that your story and your legacy are protected. We provide a robust upload process for all videos to cloud storage. We use the TUSD transfer protocol which will attempt to resume any interrupted uploads.  All video uploads and downloads are conducted using a protected HTTPs connection, and all videos on the server are encrypted while at rest. While streaming video links are temporary for security purposes, you can always download all your StoryFile videos from either StoryFile Life or Conversa for local backup. Once the basic set of videos are uploaded, you can immediately start interacting with your StoryFile on any device.

Any StoryFile user can create a StoryFile, either by signing up to StoryFile Life for personal use or by signing up for Conversa for businesses. We support a unified login system across all our products including Conversa, StoryFile Life, and our iOS mobile app – all you need is to provide your name and email address, or signup using your existing Google and Facebook accounts. For Conversa Enterprise clients, we also support SSO Identity Providers through OpenID Connect or SAML 2.0.

At StoryFile, we follow a “privacy by default” policy. This means any data should be private, unless its creator and owner specifically shares it with other users or the public.  We support several methods for sharing StoryFiles.  For StoryFile Life, you can add your friends and family to your StoryCircle, a social group where they can sign in with their own accounts (or Google and Facebook) to view your StoryFile. You can also make it public, meaning that anyone in the world can view the StoryFile as long as they have your StoryFile link. This option is great for embedding StoryFiles in your social media pages, blog, or other websites. As you would do on any social media platform, if you make your StoryFile public, be careful about sharing sensitive personal information.

Conversa provides more advanced controls for how you share and publish your StoryFiles.  All Conversa clients are assigned a user group and an Admin user. Conversa Admins  create users and assign roles. Besides Admins, other types of Conversa users can include Content Creators and Viewers.  Content Creators have the ability to create StoryFiles, upload video and add training data. A Content Creator could be an instructional designer, a script writer, a video editor, or an AI trainer – or someone who does all of these things. Viewers have the ability to search and view StoryFile videos and analytics in Conversa, but do not have the ability to edit.  

If a StoryFile Creator or Admin wants to share a StoryFile with a limited group of people, they will assign that StoryFile to a Team.  Teams can be used to represent other Conversa users or regular users. Not everyone in your organization needs to get into the underlying working of Conversa.  Most people will just be talking to StoryFile on their mobile devices or laptops.  As a Convera Admin you can manage these non-Conversa users, assigning them to Teams as well. You could use a Team to represent a group of writers or instructional designers in Conversa, a set of employees from marketing, a cohort of students interacting with a learning activity, or other natural groups within your organization. If you want to share a StoryFile on your company website or social media, then you will probably want to make it public. Conversa provides multiple ways to embed your StoryFile using iFrames, using a QR code, or our WordPress plugin. You can change the privacy settings for StoryFile on the StoryFile Publish page or Overview page. You can assign a StoryFile to a Team on the All StoryFiles page.  

Trust is also a key part of ethical and responsible artificial intelligence. One of the main reasons that AI based natural language is advancing so rapidly is the availability of massive online datasets of text such as Wikipedia, online news and bulletin boards, and CommonCrawl. AI algorithms learn to recognize patterns and relationships in the words and represent them as neural networks with thousands of weights. Unfortunately these networks can often feel like black boxes – they can make amazing predictions but there may be biases based on imbalances in the training data. In Conversa, we provide analytics tools to try to better explain why our AI is recommending a particular video. When training a StoryFile you can see not only the top match, but also other videos that the algorithm was considering. This tool helps you identify and refine the AI performance to reduce confusion and improve accuracy.

We understand that building trust is an ongoing process where StoryFile must continue to strive to be transparent in our processes, technology, and our goals. Our company continues to conduct regular penetration tests to identify and fix any potential vulnerabilities in our cloud services, applications, and procedures.  We are continuing to improve our policies and procedures to achieve higher security certifications. Feel free to ask us about our privacy policies and how you can protect and share your data. You can check out questions about security and privacy on our StoryFile Life interactive FAQ. If you have any questions or concerns you can always reach out to us directly at support@storyfile.com.

We are Trustworthy Because: We want to earn the right to be trusted by our clientele as the best in class platform for conversational video. We excel when we are transparent, dependable, and inclusive. We provide excellent customer service and strive to exceed expectations with regard to access, compliance, and data security. We are committed to providing the highest levels of security to our clients and take the responsibility of protecting their stories and life experiences with the utmost regard.

Every person’s story matters

Our Vision: To give everyone the opportunity to share their story for the future and to create connection through conversations with each other.

Our Mission: To create technology that provides the tools to create, consume, and share conversational video; to give everyone the opportunity to be a storyteller, an enquirer, and a seeker; to share life stories and lessons with families, friends, and others across generations; to promote connectivity and community through conversations; and to give the gift of time to the future. StoryFile’s mission is to  empower people to unleash the magic of conversational video technology and storytelling. StoryFile is disrupting the technology, AI, media, entertainment, and educational industries and democratizing conversational video. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone should have the tools to tell their stories. Life experienced – anytime, anywhere, everyday.