Privacy Policy

01Who we are

Smiley Face Studio LLC (“we”, “us”) is a California limited liability company. We operate smileyface.studio and everything on it: the software we sell, listed on our products page, and the Mythwright private beta. We are the controller of the personal information described here.

This policy covers the whole site and every form on it. We are a US studio and this page is written to US and California law; section 07 says what we do when you have rights under your own. You can reach us about anything here at connect@smileyface.studio.

02What we collect, and only when you give it

We do not have accounts and we do not require one. Nothing below is collected unless you do the thing that collects it.

Just visiting. Our host records the ordinary technical information any web server sees, and we use aggregate analytics that count page views rather than people. We do not build a profile of you and we do not run advertising trackers.

The contact form. Your name, email, what you are interested in, and your message.

The newsletter. Your email address, and nothing else. The newsletter lives on Substack: signing up passes your address to Substack, which runs the list and asks you to confirm there.

The Waterline, Cinder, Omen, Tessera and V404 forms. The same two forms on each of the five pages. Feedback: what you want to tell us, and optionally what you played it in, which version, and your email if you want an answer. A bug report: what went wrong and what you did, optionally your host, plugin format, macOS version and plugin version, a crash log you paste in, and your email if you want an answer. Both are emailed to the studio mailbox named in section 05, and nothing else is stored.

If you claim a licence after paying. You pay on PayPal, off this site, and then tell us where to send the software. The claim form collects the name you want on the licence, your email, the PayPal transaction ID from your receipt so we can match the payment by hand, and optionally the DAW or host you run, your macOS version and a description of your machine, plus any note you add. The machine field is a sentence you type, like “M2 MacBook Pro” — we do not read anything off your computer and there is no hardware fingerprint anywhere in this. We also record that you ticked the box confirming you had read what the claim page says about the build, because “all sales are final” is only fair if that is a consent record rather than our word for it. The whole thing is one email to us; no database, no download page.

If you buy something. Everything we sell is sold directly by us, with payment processed by PayPal. We never see or store your card details. We receive confirmation of the order, what it was for, and the name and email address on the payment. PayPal tells us a payment happened, and, where a product has one, the claim form above tells us whose it was and where to send it — those two are the only way we can connect the two halves.

If PayPal brings you straight back to your license. Where a product page checks out in one go, PayPal sends you back to a page with your license and the download on it, and the same email follows. Our licenses are made ahead of time, so we keep one short list to make sure no two buyers are given the same one: the PayPal order number, and which license it was given. Nothing else goes in it — no name, no email, no amount.

If you use one of our apps during its beta, the app sends us diagnostics: the app version, your operating system and chip architecture, a random identifier for the installation (not derived from you or your machine), which model providers are configured (never a key), and for each run the models used, how many answered, timings, token counts, estimated cost and any errors. It never sends your prompts, the models’ answers, your files or their names, your keys, your licence key, or your email address. The app’s own privacy document lists this in full, and the app shows you the queued events before they are sent. Diagnostics are required during the beta and become optional at 1.0.

That last promise is enforced twice rather than trusted once. The app refuses to build an event containing your writing, and the endpoint that receives them checks again on arrival and drops the whole event if it carries a prompt, an answer, a file path, an email address or a key. A future version of the app that regressed would lose the diagnostic rather than land something we said we would never hold.

If you send feedback from inside one of our apps, the app sends what you wrote, the report type, and your licence key, which proves the report comes from a real purchase. The key contains your licence email and order reference; we check it and do not keep it. What we file is your report, the order reference, which tier of licence it was, and a masked email (for example d***@example.com). If you choose to attach the conversation the report is about — the app shows you exactly what will be sent first — that is filed too, and the issue records whether you chose to include it.

If you claim a Mythwright beta place, we receive what you type into the claim form: a name or handle, an email address, what you make, roughly how much of it and over what period, which AI model you intend to use, how much of the work was uncommissioned, and an optional note. We also record that you acknowledged this policy and our terms, that you confirmed you are a US resident — this round is US-only, and the form will not send without it — and when.

If you run the instrument and send the wrap-up report, we receive that report. It describes your creative work — recurring images, how pieces relate, the verdict the instrument returned. It is about your work, and some of that work may be unreleased.

If you choose to send a raw session log, we receive that too. This is optional, never required, and declining changes nothing about what you receive from us. Redact it however you like before sending, or do not send it at all.

Keeping the forms from being a spam cannon. Every form on this site is rate-limited by IP address: the server holds the times of your last few submissions in memory for an hour so it can say “that’s a lot of sending”, and that is the entire use. Your IP is not written to a database, not attached to the mail the form sends, and not used to work out who or where you are. Each form also carries a hidden field that only an automated script fills in; if it is filled, we accept the submission politely and send nothing.

03What we do with it

We answer you. That is most of it. Contact messages get replies, bug reports get read, newsletter emails get the newsletter and nothing else, orders get fulfilled.

A licence claim is worked by hand, once: someone opens PayPal, finds the transaction ID you sent, checks it against a payment, and emails you the software, or a link to it, at the address you gave, with the licence in the name you asked for. The host, macOS version and machine you described are there so we send a build that runs and know what you were on if you write back about a problem. Test-build sign-ups decide who is sent a build before it goes out. Bug reports get read and, when the fix lands, answered.

Waterline, Cinder, Omen, Tessera and V404 orders are sent as a link on Google Drive: we upload a fresh copy of the build for your order alone and email you a private link to it, with your licence file attached. The file is shared as “anyone with the link”, so your email address is not added to its sharing, and neither the file nor its folder carries your name or address. If you lose the link, ask and we will send a fresh one.

The Mythwright claim form is used to decide who joins a twenty-place cohort, and to write back to you either way. Reports and logs are used for exactly one thing: reading them and revising the instrument. That is the entire purpose, and it is the reason the beta exists.

Our lawful bases, if you are somewhere that asks for them: performing a contract or a request you made, our legitimate interest in running and improving our own studio and products, consent where we ask for it — the newsletter, and the optional raw log — which you may withdraw at any time, and legal obligation where one applies, such as keeping tax records for a purchase.

04What we will not do, stated as commitments

These are the promises the essay makes, repeated here so they are binding rather than atmospheric.

• We will not publish your report, your log, or your work.
• We will not quote them, publicly or privately, including anonymised.
• We will not show them to other testers, or to anyone outside the studio.
• We will not use them as marketing, as a case study, or as a testimonial.
• We will not train or fine-tune any AI model on them, and we will not supply them to anyone else to do so.
• We will not sell, rent or trade any of it, ever, to anyone.

If we ever want to quote something because it is genuinely illuminating, we will ask you first, in writing, and a no costs you nothing.

Those are about Mythwright reports and logs specifically. The one that covers everything else you send us — a sign-up, a bug report, a licence claim — is the last: none of it is sold, rented or traded, ever, to anyone.

05Who else can see it

Everything the product forms send — licence claims, Mythwright claims and reports — arrives at connect@smileyface.studio. The one exception is the feedback and bug reports for Waterline, Cinder, Omen, Tessera and V404, which go to a second studio mailbox, david@smileyface.studio, read by the developer who makes those plugins. The shared address is a studio mailbox, not one person’s: the people who run the studio can read it, which is how an order still gets fulfilled when one of us is away. Messages from the contact form go to a studio address in the same way. It is a small number of people and no wider than that — no contractors, no shared drive, nothing synced anywhere else. (The one thing we put in Google Drive is a Waterline, Cinder, Omen, Tessera or V404 buyer’s copy of the build, described in section 03; nothing you send us goes there.)

Mythwright reports and logs are the exception, and deliberately: they arrive in that mailbox but are read and worked by one person, and once a report is kept it is kept on studio hardware rather than in a cloud document system. That is a practice we hold ourselves to, not a lock on the mailbox, and we would rather say which it is.

These service providers necessarily handle data in transit or at rest:

• Resend delivers the mail our forms generate, and the email with your license after a purchase.
• Upstash (Upstash, Inc.), through Vercel, keeps the list of PayPal order numbers and the license each was given, described in section 03. It holds nothing else about you.
• GitHub (GitHub, Inc.) hosts the free downloads of the plugins. When you download one, GitHub receives the request, as any website does (your IP address and browser), under its own privacy policy.
• Google (Google LLC), through Google Workspace: Gmail hosts the mailbox that receives it and carries the mail we write to you by hand, including a Waterline, Cinder, Omen or Tessera order, and Google Drive hosts a Waterline buyer’s download, and a Cinder, Omen or Tessera buyer’s the same way. Your email address is not added to that file’s sharing, but when you download it Google receives the request, as any website does (your IP address and browser), and if you are signed in to Google at the time, Google can also tie the download to your Google account, all under Google’s own privacy policy.
• Apple (Apple Inc.), only if a Waterline download link will not work for you (the same goes for Cinder, Omen and Tessera) and we resend the file with Mail Drop from Apple’s Mail app. The file is then held on Apple’s iCloud, Apple receives the download request, and that link expires on its own after 30 days.
• Vercel hosts this website and provides basic, aggregate traffic analytics. Those analytics are about pages, not people, and are not joined to anything you send us.
• Google Fonts (Google LLC) serves the typefaces in the playable browser previews of Waterline, Cinder and Omen. When a preview loads, on its own or on its product page, your browser fetches them from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, so Google receives that request (your IP address and browser) under its own privacy policy. The rest of this site serves its own typefaces.
• PayPal processes payments for everything we sell. They handle your card or PayPal account details; we receive the order, your name and your email.
• Supabase hosts the database that stores the app diagnostics described in section 03. It is locked to server-side access only.
• GitHub hosts the private issue tracker that in-app feedback reports are filed into.
• Substack runs the newsletter list, under its own privacy policy.

We are based in the United States, so your data is processed there. We will also disclose information if the law actually requires it — we would rather say so than pretend that is not how it works.

06How long we keep it

First, the thing that shapes all of this: apart from app diagnostics, none of the forms on this site write to a database. The email is the record. So “how long we keep it” mostly means how long a message stays in a mailbox, and deleting it means deleting the message. The list of order numbers and licenses in section 03 is kept for as long as the licenses work, which is for good; it holds no one’s name or address.

Mythwright claims: if you are not selected, we delete your claim within 90 days. If you are, it is kept for the run of the beta.

Mythwright reports: kept while we are still revising the instrument against them, and reviewed for deletion at the end of the beta.

Licence claims: kept while we owe you something — the build, the updates the product page promises, and support on a licence we issued in your name. The PayPal transaction ID stays with it, because it is the only link between a payment and a person we sent software to.

Bug reports, from any product: kept while they are useful for fixing the thing they are about. Ask and we will delete yours. Reports filed from inside one of our apps become issues in our private tracker and are kept as long as the issue is.

App diagnostics: deleted after 180 days. That is a scheduled job on the database, not a reminder someone has to remember.

Order records: kept by PayPal under its own terms, and by us for as long as tax law requires.

Raw logs: deleted on request immediately, no reason needed, no questions asked. We would rather you send one knowing that than not send one.

07Your rights, and how to actually use them

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or withdraw consent for the optional log. Depending on where you live you may also have rights to restrict or object to processing, or to receive your data in a portable form.

Email connect@smileyface.studio from the address you used, or tell us which address to look for. For a licence claim, the PayPal transaction ID finds it fastest. We aim to act within 30 days. We will not ask you why, and asking will never affect what you receive from us.

Two honest limits. A build already emailed to you, or downloaded from a link we sent, cannot be unsent, and a licence checked on your own machine cannot be switched off from here — deleting your claim deletes our record, not your copy of the software. And app diagnostics carry no email address or name at all, only a random installation identifier, so we cannot find “your” rows without it. Send us that identifier and we will delete them; otherwise they age out at 180 days on their own.

We do not make automated decisions about you, and we do not profile you. A person reads every report and chooses every cohort member.

If you are in California

California law gives residents the right to know what personal information is collected, to request deletion or correction, and not to be discriminated against for asking. Use the same address above; we do not charge for it and we do not treat you differently for it.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We never have. There is nothing to opt out of because we do not do it.

For completeness: the CCPA’s obligations attach to businesses above certain revenue and volume thresholds, and a studio of our size is well below them. We are describing what we actually do rather than claiming a status either way.

If you are in the UK or the EEA

The Mythwright beta is currently open to US residents only. That is a deliberate choice, and not a judgement about anyone: a report describing your unreleased work is meaningful personal data, and transferring it to the United States brings obligations we would rather meet properly than approximate. Twenty places is small enough that waiting is the honest call. Later rounds will open up.

The rest of the site — reading it, the contact form, the newsletter — is open to you, and for that you have the rights UK GDPR and GDPR give you: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability. You can complain to your national data protection authority, though we would rather you told us first and gave us the chance to fix it. We are based in the United States, so anything you send us is processed there.

08Security, honestly stated

Mail is encrypted in transit. Reports live on encrypted studio hardware. Access to the mailbox is limited to the people who run the studio, and Mythwright reports are worked by one of them. The diagnostics database is closed to everything except the server that writes to it: row-level security is on with no read policy, and the public API keys are revoked from the table and every view over it, so nothing client-side can read a row.

We are a small studio, not a bank, and we are not going to claim otherwise. If what you would send is so sensitive that a breach would seriously harm you, the right answer is to redact it or withhold the raw log entirely — which costs you nothing here, by design.

09Age

The Mythwright beta is for people aged 18 or over, and so is buying anything from us. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.

10Cookies

This site does not use advertising or tracking cookies, and does not build a profile of you. Vercel’s analytics collect aggregate page metrics without cookies. Any storage the site uses is functional — remembering a setting you chose on the page you chose it on.

Do Not Track. Some browsers send a “Do Not Track” signal. There is no agreed standard for responding to it, so we do not respond to it specifically — but only because there is nothing for it to switch off. We do not track you across other websites, and no third party is permitted to collect personally identifiable information about your activity here over time or across sites.

11Changes

If we change this policy in a way that affects what happens to data you already sent us, we will email the people it affects rather than quietly updating the date at the top.

See also our Terms of Use.