Provenance and consent

Your counsel reads this page before your researchers read the schema.

So it contains the actual release language, the actual rates we pay, the actual de-identification steps, and a straight comparison of public dataset licences — including the one that is commonly misreported in our favour.
Consent
100% documented, written, pre-capture
Contributor pay
$38 / hour base, time-based
License
Commercial, buyer-owned, perpetual
Indemnity
Consent chain warranted

Provenance and consent

The license is a product surface, not a footnote.

Your legal team will read this section before your research team reads the specs. So here is the actual release language, the actual pay, and the actual de-identification pipeline.

Participant release — verbatim

PARTICIPANT RELEASE — COMMERCIAL TRAINING USE
Version 3.2 · effective 2026-01-14

1. GRANT. I grant Firsthand Data, Inc. ("Firsthand") a perpetual,
   irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable, royalty-free right to
   record, store, process, reproduce, and distribute the audio,
   video, depth, and motion recordings captured of me during the
   session(s) described in Schedule A (the "Recordings"), and to
   license the Recordings to third parties for the purpose of
   training, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models,
   including commercial models.

2. SCOPE. The grant covers derivative representations of the
   Recordings, including but not limited to depth maps, hand and
   body pose estimates, segmentation masks, textual action labels,
   and model weights derived from any of the foregoing.

3. COMPENSATION. I will be paid the hourly rate stated in
   Schedule A for all time spent in session, including setup,
   calibration, and breaks. Payment is not contingent on the
   Recordings being accepted, delivered, or licensed.

4. WITHDRAWAL. I may withdraw consent for future sessions at any
   time. I may request deletion of any Recording not yet delivered
   to a licensee by written notice to privacy@ifirsthand.com.
   Recordings already delivered cannot be recalled from a licensee,
   and I acknowledge this limitation.

5. BYSTANDERS. I confirm that I have not knowingly recorded any
   person who has not signed this release. Where an unidentified
   person appears, Firsthand will de-identify them or discard the
   affected footage.

6. NO IDENTITY LICENSE. This release does not grant the right to
   use my name, likeness, or voice for advertising or endorsement.

7. GOVERNING LAW. Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict of
   laws principles.

Participant signature: ______________________  Date: __________
Operator signature:    ______________________  Date: __________

What contributors are paid

Base session rate
$38 / hour
Includes
Setup, calibration, breaks, travel over 20 min
Thin-coverage premium
+$12 / hour (clinical, construction, agriculture)
Payment terms
Net 7, no per-task bounty, no rejection clawback

Published because a per-task bounty produces rushed, unusable footage. Collector standards.

De-identification pipeline

Faces
Bystander faces detected and blurred; participant faces mostly out of frame by rig geometry
Plates
Licence plates and street numbers blurred on all outdoor and automotive footage
Audio
Speech scrubbed of names, addresses and card numbers; ambient audio retained
Screens
Visible phone and monitor content masked unless it is the manipulated object
Bystanders
If a person cannot be de-identified, the clip is discarded rather than shipped

Jurisdictions of capture

  • United States
  • Canada
  • United Kingdom
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Poland
  • Portugal
  • Japan
  • South Korea
  • Singapore
  • Mexico
  • Brazil
  • GDPR ART. 6(1)(a)
  • CCPA / CPRA
  • UK GDPR
  • APPI (JP)
  • PIPEDA (CA)
  • SOC 2 TYPE II — IN AUDIT

License terms

What you actually get.

Plain-language summary of the commercial license attached to every delivered batch. The executed agreement controls, and we will send it before you sign anything.

Grant
Perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive by default
Permitted use
Training, evaluating, fine-tuning and deploying models, including commercial models
Derived weights
Yours. No royalty, no revenue share, no reporting obligation.
Redistribution
Not permitted for the footage itself; unlimited for models derived from it
Term
No expiry. A lapsed program does not revoke data already delivered.
Warranty
We warrant the consent chain for every delivered episode and indemnify against claims arising from it
Exclusivity
Available per skill line or per environment, priced as a multiplier

Public dataset licences

How the alternatives are licensed.

Useful whether or not you buy from us. Several teams have shipped models trained on corpora they misread as commercially clear, so verify every line of this against the current terms yourself.

Ego4D
Permits commercial use. Widely misreported as non-commercial — check the current terms yourself.
EgoDex
CC BY-NC-ND. Non-commercial and no derivatives, which rules out commercial training use.
EPIC-KITCHENS
CC BY-NC 4.0. Non-commercial.
Something-Something
Research-only academic licence, per-organisation approval.
Firsthand
Commercial, buyer-owned, perpetual, with a documented and warranted consent chain.

Summarised in good faith as of the last review of this page. Not legal advice, and not a substitute for reading the licence text.

Consent chain

Six checkpoints, every episode.

Consent is a chain rather than a signature. Any break at any checkpoint discards the footage instead of downgrading it.

Before capture
Written release signed, identity verified, hourly rate agreed in Schedule A
At capture
Site permission on file; bystander signage posted where the site is semi-public
At ingest
Automated face, plate and screen detection; speech scrubbed of identifiers
At review
Human reviewer confirms no un-consented person is identifiable in any frame
At delivery
Consent artefact IDs listed per episode in the batch data card
After delivery
Withdrawal requests honoured for undelivered footage; delivered footage cannot be recalled, and we say so in the release

Send this page to your counsel.

If they need the executed license text or a data card from a real batch before a call, ask and we will send both.