Who is responsible for what
Bugle provides promotional examination software to fire departments. That creates two different relationships, and the difference matters when you want to ask about your information.
- Examination records belong to the department. When a department runs a promotional process on Bugle, the information about its staff and candidates is the department’s. The department decides what is collected and how long it is kept; we hold and process it on its behalf, under our agreement with it and on its instructions. Questions about your examination record go to your department, and we help it answer.
- This website is ours. When you write to us through the contact form or by email, we are responsible for what you send.
What we hold
About department staff
- Name, work email address and role — administrator, exam reviewer, assessor, proctor or certifying official. Bugle staff who build a department’s examination appear in that department’s records under their own names.
- Your password, stored only as a salted scrypt hash that nobody can read back, and your authenticator secret if you use two-step sign-in.
- A record of sign-ins and security events: when, from which network address, and in which browser.
About candidates
- Name, email address, badge or employee number, rank, and the dates the department uses for seniority.
- Veterans’ preference category, where the department’s rules apply one.
- Race, ethnicity and sex — only where the department collects them for statistical screening, as federal selection guidelines expect: whether groups are selected by a list, or pass each part, at different rates, and whether single questions behave differently between groups. Every one of them can be declined, and declined is the default. They are used for that screening and nothing else, only in groups, and no assessor ever sees them.
- Accommodations a candidate asks for and the department’s decision on each — what is needed, never a diagnosis — readable only by the people who act on them, with every reading recorded.
About examinations
- Answers, when each was given, and scores — and, where the department keeps them, each answer as it was chosen, including every change.
- What the proctor recorded about a sitting: check-in, how identity was confirmed, pauses, irregularities, and a sitting ended early.
- Assessors’ evaluations, made against an anonymous code rather than a name.
- Fireground simulation records: the orders a candidate gave and when.
- Spoken answers, recorded as audio, where part of an examination asks for one.
- Secure-client session records, such as whether the examination window lost focus.
- Appeals — what was appealed and what the candidate said supports it, the reviewer’s answer, the decision, and every score it changed.
- Each candidate’s place in a process and how it changed, and the notices the department sent about it, with whether each reached the mail system.
- An audit record of who did what and when, with network address and browser. It is append-only and hash-chained, so an entry that was removed or altered shows.
From this website
- What you type into the contact form — name, email, agency, rank, candidate numbers, timeline and message — with the network address and browser it came from.
How it is used
- To run the department’s examinations: deliver them, score them, keep the record, and produce the lists and reports the department asks for.
- To keep accounts and the service secure: sign-in checks, throttling, and investigating misuse.
- To send the email a process needs — invitations, schedules, notice that results are released.
- To support a department when it asks us to.
- To run and improve the service, we record that things happened — an examination was started, submitted or scored; a list was certified — without names and without scores.
We do not sell personal information, use it for advertising, or share it with anyone other than the processors listed below, except where the law requires it.
Artificial intelligence
Some tools send material a department gives us — its guidelines, its collective bargaining agreement, the building and conditions it wants a simulation to have — to an AI model, which drafts examination questions and scenarios and finds the rules in a contract. A person reviews every draft before it can be used: the department’s exam reviewer approves every question and every part of a panel exercise, and the command standards a panel is shown beside its rubric are approved by Bugle’s staff and then by that reviewer. Bugle never sends candidate information — names, answers, scores, demographics — to an AI model. The provider, Anthropic, processes that material under commercial terms that do not allow it to train its models on it. Where a simulation’s pictures or voices are generated, OpenAI makes them from the scenario’s description, again without any candidate information.
Reading a department’s documents — taking the words out of its guidelines and its agreement, scanned copies included — is done on Bugle’s own servers: from the file’s own text, from page text the department supplies with it, or by character recognition of the page images. None of it is sent to an AI model to be read.
Spoken answers. What a candidate says aloud is written down by Deepgram: in a fireground simulation, each radio transmission as it is sent, so the simulation can answer it; in an oral board, a presentation or another answer given aloud, the recording of each answer once it is made, so the words can be shown beside it. The simulation’s replies — which repeat a candidate’s order back — are spoken by Inworld (see the table below). Where neither can be reached, and in a conversation with a role-player, a speech model on the candidate’s own computer writes the words down. While a candidate speaks, their browser may also show the words as it hears them, with its own speech service — in Chrome, Google’s; in Edge, Microsoft’s — under that browser’s terms. The recording Bugle keeps is the record; the written-out words are a convenience the candidate can correct.
Who processes it for us
| Service | What it does for us | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Runs the application and stores uploaded documents and recordings | United States |
| Neon, on Amazon Web Services | The database | Ohio, United States |
| Resend | Delivers the email the service sends | United States |
| Anthropic | Drafting, filing and suggesting from department documents, finding the rules in an agreement, and helping our staff answer inquiries, as described on the AI use page | United States |
| OpenAI | Generating a simulation’s pictures and voices from its description, where one is generated | United States |
| Render | Runs the nightly backup of the database, which is sealed before it leaves the job so that only we can open it | Ohio, United States |
| Cloudflare | Keeps a second copy of stored documents and recordings, and the sealed database backups; and connects the two ends of a video call, such as a remote check-in, relaying its sound and picture when they cannot reach each other directly. The call stays encrypted between the two browsers, so the relay cannot see or hear it, and keeps nothing of it | North America; a call, through its location nearest each person |
| Google Workspace | Our own email, including notice of contact-form messages | United States |
| Deepgram | Writes down what a candidate says aloud: on a simulation’s radio, as it is sent, so the simulation can answer; and in a recorded spoken answer, for the panel. Every request tells it to keep the recording only as long as it takes and never to learn from it | United States |
| Inworld | Speaks a simulation’s radio traffic — dispatch, the companies, the people on the scene — including replies that repeat a candidate’s order back; writes a recording down when Deepgram cannot. It never trains on audio it writes down; the words it speaks are kept in its logs under its own policy | United States |
Cookies
Only the ones signing in and sitting an examination need:
pep_sessionkeeps you signed in.pep_pendingcarries a sign-in between your password and your second step, for ten minutes at most.pep_oidcprotects a hand-off to your city’s single sign-on.pep_heretells the service a page of it is open, so that a session ends a few seconds after the last one closes.ld_tokenties a sitting to the secure desktop client, where a form requires it.pep_hqandpep_hq_pendingdo the same as the first two, for Bugle’s own staff in their own console.
There are no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and no third-party scripts on any page.
Keeping it safe
Every department’s records are sealed from every other’s inside the database, connections are encrypted, and every opening of a department’s examination content outside a sitting is recorded under the person’s name. The security page sets out how.
How long it is kept
- Examination records are kept for as long as the department’s agreement and its records-retention schedule require. Promotional records are often public records with retention periods set by law, so the department — not Bugle — decides when they are destroyed. When an agreement ends, the department’s records are handled as that agreement provides: its certified lists, examination records, appeal packets and audit record export as documents it keeps, and records are removed from the service on its written instruction.
- Sign-in and security records are kept for as long as they are needed to secure the service and investigate misuse.
- Contact-form messages are kept while we are in conversation with you and your agency. Ask, and we delete them.
Your choices
- Candidates and department staff: ask your department to see or correct your record. It can ask us to help.
- Demographic questions can always be declined, and declining changes nothing about how you are examined or scored.
- Anyone may write to us at charles@bugleassessments.com.
Children
Bugle is for fire service professionals and is not directed at anyone under 18.
Changes
When this notice changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and we tell the departments we work with directly.
Contact
Bugle · charles@bugleassessments.com