Privacy how we handle your data

Last updated: 2026-06-17 · v1.0

Plain-English summary

Nixie.Studio is a local-first generative media studio. Most of the data the application produces — your prompts, your generations, your catalog, your costs — lives on your own machine and is not transmitted anywhere by us. The platform shows you what you made; the providers (fal, Luma, etc.) charged you for what they generated, but they did so under your own API keys and your own contractual relationship with them, not ours.

The exceptions — the data we (the cooperative) collect — are narrow, listed below, and we tell you what we do with each category. We default to opt-in for marketing and opt-out for transactional communication, per GDPR. Members can update their preferences any time on their profile page.

What stays on your machine

• Your prompts, settings, and generation outputs — written to generations/ and indexed in the local catalog.
• Your asset costs, computed from real provider rates.
• Your project tags and history.
• Your provider API keys (fal-key.txt, youtube-key.txt) — gitignored, never sent to us.

What we collect when you submit work to the cooperative

When you publish work for cooperative curation (a future feature; not yet shipped), we receive:

• The asset itself (image, video, prompt, model, cost basis).
• Your member profile fields (display name, country, social links, role) — only what you explicitly added to your profile.
• The submission timestamp.

We use this only to operate the curation system: route submissions to curators, display attribution on accepted assets, and maintain the audit trail required for legitimate curation. We do not sell this data, and we do not share it with third parties beyond the cooperative's curators and members.

Posting to YouTube (Google user data)

The studio includes an optional “Post to YouTube” feature that lets a signed-in member upload one of their own finished video renders directly to their own YouTube channel. This is the only feature that touches Google user data, and it does so under a strict per-upload model.

• Scope. We request only https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.upload — permission to upload a video to the member’s channel. We request no read access and no other YouTube or Google data.
• Per-upload consent. Every post opens its own Google consent window. Authorization is granted for one upload at a time; there is no persistent connection to your Google account.
• No credentials stored. The short-lived access token Google returns lives only in the server’s memory for the few minutes the upload takes and is discarded the moment it finishes. We do not store access tokens or refresh tokens, and we never write any Google credential to disk.
• What is sent to YouTube. Only the video file the member selected and the title, description, tags, and visibility they entered — uploaded to their own channel via the YouTube Data API.
• Revoking access. Members can revoke the studio’s access at any time from their Google Account security settings; the next post simply prompts for consent again.

Limited Use. Nixie.Studio’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. Data obtained through the youtube.upload scope is used solely to perform the upload the member explicitly requested; it is never transferred or sold to third parties, never used for advertising, and never used for any purpose other than completing that upload.

Email and communications

The cooperative may eventually send email for several distinct purposes. Each is independently controllable on your profile:

• Transactional — outcomes on your own submissions, account/security notices. Always sent. Not user-toggleable, per standard service practice and CAN-SPAM. These cannot include marketing content.
• Cooperative updates — releases, mission entries, brigade news. Default ON; toggleable.
• Curator notifications — for members serving as curators: queue alerts, modification reviews. Default ON for curators; toggleable.
• Publication activity — when another member uses your shared-library asset in their own work. Default ON; toggleable.
• Marketing — promotional content. Default OFF (opt-in only, per GDPR). Toggleable.

A master "unsubscribe from all (except transactional)" affordance is available on your profile. When email sending eventually goes live, every cooperative email will also include a one-click unsubscribe link in the footer per CAN-SPAM.

Cookies and tracking

The studio's web pages set no third-party tracking cookies. We use localStorage for a small number of UI preferences (your selected interface language, whether you've seen the welcome splash, whether you've dismissed certain banners). These are private to your browser and are never transmitted to the cooperative.

No analytics SDKs (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Segment, etc.) are loaded. No advertising trackers. The page only loads external resources from cdnjs.cloudflare.com (the marked markdown renderer, BSD/MIT licensed) and jsdelivr.net (the world-atlas TopoJSON for the community map, public-domain data).

Your rights

Members of the cooperative have the rights expected of any member-owned organization, plus those required by GDPR for EU/EEA members and CCPA for California members:

• Right to access. Your profile is always visible to you on /profile. The contribution and publication trails for your work are visible there too.
• Right to correct. Edit your profile anytime.
• Right to be forgotten. Email Tim (taburley@gmail.com) to request deletion of your member record and submission history. Honored within 30 days. (A self-service deletion affordance will land in a future release.)
• Right to data portability. Your catalog is on your own machine; it is portable by definition. Cooperative-side records (submissions, contribution trail) can be exported on request.
• Right to withdraw consent. Toggle off any opt-in category on your profile, anytime, no explanation required.

Where to ask

Email Tim directly: taburley@gmail.com. Until the cooperative legally formalizes and a designated data protection contact is appointed, the founder is the contact.

About this notice

Version 1.0. This notice is a working document drafted while the cooperative is N=1 (the founder only). When the cooperative formalizes its legal structure and begins onboarding members, this notice will be reviewed and ratified through cooperative governance, with substantive changes notified to all members in advance. The current version is intentionally narrow rather than comprehensive — we describe what is true today, not what we might do in the future.