Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

Aetherwist is a game made by Threadworks Labs LLC, a Texas limited liability company (“we,” “us,” or “our”). Aetherwist isn’t a separate company. This policy covers aetherwist.com, the Aetherwist app at aetherwist.com/play, the Discover gallery, and any print store we offer. You can reach us at hello@aetherwist.com or at the address in Section 15.

Aetherwist accounts belong to adults. Kids can play through an adult’s account, and our Children’s Privacy Notice explains how we handle that in detail.

2. The Short Version

• Only adults sign up. We ask for a date of birth to confirm you’re 18 or older, and we don’t keep the date.
• There’s no text box and no uploads. Pictures are made only from our own set of runes, so nobody can type personal details into the creative part of Aetherwist or upload a photo.
• We don’t sell your information, we don’t share it for advertising, and Aetherwist has no ads.
• We don’t use your family’s pictures to train AI models.
• Your pictures are private unless someone signed in to your account chooses to share one on Discover, and shared pictures never show who made them.
• You can delete pictures one at a time, or your whole account, whenever you like.

3. What We Collect

From you, the account holder

• Email address and sign-in details. Our sign-in provider, Clerk, stores your email address and your password or other sign-in method. We never see your password.
• Age and consent confirmation. At sign-up you enter your date of birth and confirm you’re a parent or guardian setting up the account. We use the date of birth only to check that you’re 18 or older and then discard it. We keep a record that you passed the check, which version of our terms you accepted, and when.
• Plan and billing details. Payments are handled by Stripe. Stripe collects your card details and billing address, and we never see your full card number. We keep a record of your plan, its status, and the Stripe reference numbers that link your account to it.
• Print orders, when the store opens. To make and ship a print, Stripe collects your name, shipping address, email, and phone number, and we keep the order record so we can track it and handle problems.
• Messages you send us. If you email us, we keep the conversation so we can help you.

What your household makes in Aetherwist

• Creations. The pictures your account makes, the runes and settings used to make each one, the title we generate for it, and whether you’ve marked it as a favorite.
• Safety and quality results. Every picture is screened by an automated safety check before it’s saved. We keep the check’s results with the picture, along with automatic quality scores we use to pick the best result.
• Your progress. The rune combinations your account has discovered, any “first ever” combinations, and how many summons you’ve used each day, including days you reached your daily limit.
• Discover activity. Which creations your account has shared, liked, or reported. This is kept privately so each account counts once, and it’s never shown publicly.

Technical information

• Sign-in cookies from Clerk, which keep you signed in. See Section 8.
• Server logs. Our servers keep short technical logs of requests (such as the page or action requested, whether it worked, and how long it took), along with your account ID for actions like summoning. Our logs don’t record IP addresses or browser details for normal requests. We use IP addresses briefly, in memory, to stop abuse such as too many requests at once, and if a visitor who isn’t signed in trips that limit, the log notes the IP address that was slowed down. Email addresses are masked before anything is written to a log.
• Diagnostics from the app. Each time a picture is summoned, the app sends us a short technical report about how the summon animation ran: the browser’s name and version, the screen size, and performance numbers, tagged with your account ID. These reports go into our server logs and are deleted with them after up to 30 days.
• Settings saved on your device. The app saves things like sound settings and your current board in your browser so they’re there next time. These stay on your device.

What we don’t collect

We don’t collect photos, voice recordings, contacts, precise location, or anything typed into the creative part of Aetherwist, because there’s nowhere to type it. We don’t use advertising identifiers or tracking pixels. We don’t currently use any analytics service. [[If we add analytics later, we’ll update this policy first, and we won’t use it on the part of Aetherwist where kids play.]]

4. How We Use Information

We use information to:

• run Aetherwist: sign you in, make and store your pictures, keep your gallery, track your daily allowance, and remember your progress;
• keep Aetherwist safe: screen pictures, handle reports about shared pictures, prevent abuse, and protect our systems;
• handle billing and orders through Stripe and our print partner;
• send you emails about your account, such as receipts, payment problems, plan changes, and account deletion notices. We don’t send marketing emails;
• answer your questions and handle refund requests;
• improve Aetherwist, for example by testing picture quality and fixing problems; and
• meet our legal obligations.

We don’t use your information for advertising, and we don’t build profiles of you or your children for marketing.

5. How Pictures Are Made

When someone on your account summons, our servers turn the runes into a picture using AI models that run on graphics computers we rent from independent hosts through a marketplace called Vast.ai. Those computers may be located inside or outside the United States (we exclude hosts in China).

Here’s what reaches those computers, and what doesn’t:

• What they receive: the picture recipe (a text description built from your runes, plus technical settings), a small preview of the finished picture so a title can be generated, and, when you order a print, the picture file to prepare for printing.
• What they never receive: your name, email address, account ID, payment details, or anything else that identifies you.
• How it’s protected: the connection is encrypted, and each computer automatically deletes the pictures, previews, and recipes it handled within a few minutes. The people who operate those computers have administrative access to them while they run, which is why we never send them anything that identifies you.

The AI models, the safety check, and the title generator all run on these computers. We don’t send your pictures or recipes to any outside AI company.

6. Discover and Public Sharing

Discover is our public gallery. A creation appears there only if someone signed in to your account chooses to share it, one picture at a time.

• What’s public: the picture, its title, the runes and settings used to make it, how many likes it has, and a badge if it was a “first ever” combination. Other signed-in families can start their own summon from the same recipe.
• What’s never public: your name, email address, account, or any username. There are no profiles on Aetherwist.
• Search engines and our website: shared pictures can appear in search results, and we may show them on other pages of aetherwist.com to show people what Aetherwist makes.
• Removing it: you can withdraw a shared picture anytime. It leaves Discover right away, although copies can take a short while to clear from caches and search results.

7. Who We Share Information With

We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t share it with anyone for advertising. We share it only with the companies that help us run Aetherwist, only for that purpose, and only as much as they need:

Who	What they do	What they receive
Clerk	Sign-in and email verification	Your email address, sign-in details, consent record
Stripe	Payments, subscriptions, sales tax	Your account reference, email, billing address, card details, and shipping address for prints
Cloudflare	Website hosting, picture storage, network security, sending our emails	Your pictures; your IP address and cookies when you visit; your email address and the content of the emails we send you
MongoDB [[confirm]]	Our database	The account and creation records described in Section 3
[[API HOSTING PROVIDER]]	Runs our servers	The information our servers process
Vast.ai hosts	Graphics computers that make pictures	Picture recipes and pictures only (see Section 5)
Printify, when the store opens	Making and shipping prints	Your name, email, phone, shipping address, and the print file

We may also share information if the law requires it, to protect the safety of our users or the public, to enforce our terms, or as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of our business. If ownership of Aetherwist changes, this policy will continue to apply to the information we already have, and we’ll tell you before it’s used in a different way.

8. Cookies and Similar Technologies

Aetherwist uses only the cookies it needs to work:

• Sign-in cookies from Clerk keep you signed in securely.
• A game cookie we set on the game page lets your browser download the game’s files while you’re signed in. It carries your account ID and lasts up to 12 hours.
• A redirect cookie we set for one minute when the game page sends your browser to sign in, so it doesn’t loop between pages. It holds no ID.
• An age-check cookie we set if someone enters a date of birth under 18 at sign-up, so the age question isn’t offered again until the browser is closed. It holds no date and no ID.

We don’t set any advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies, and no third party sets them on Aetherwist either.

The app also stores a few things in your browser so it works smoothly: your settings, your current board, and short diagnostic notes that help us understand a crash. These stay on your device. You can clear them by clearing your browser’s site data, which will also sign you out and reset your settings.

Because Aetherwist doesn’t sell or share personal information for advertising, there’s nothing for browser “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signals to switch off, but you’re welcome to use them.

9. How Long We Keep Information

Information	How long we keep it
Your account, email, and sign-in details	Until your account is deleted
Your pictures, recipes, and titles	Until you release them [[DECISION: or the account goes a set time, e.g. 2 years, without a sign-in, after an email warning]]. When you delete your account, they’re kept with nothing that ties them to you (see below).
Shared Discover pictures, likes, and reports	Until withdrawn, or until your account is deleted
Your progress and daily usage records	Until your account is deleted [[DECISION: or reaches the inactivity limit above]]
Plan and subscription records	Ours are deleted with your account. Stripe keeps payment records as the law requires.
Print order records (name, shipping address, phone)	[[DECISION: e.g. 7 years]] for tax and accounting
Records of emails we’ve sent	Kept as a record that we sent them. Your email address is removed from them when your account is deleted.
Server logs	Up to 30 days, then deleted automatically
Your consent record (that you confirmed you’re an adult and the parent or guardian, which version of our terms you accepted, and when)	Kept, even after your account is deleted, as proof the agreement was made. It contains no contact details.
A record that we deleted your account	Kept, without your personal details, so we can show the request was completed

When you delete your account, there’s a 30-day window in case you change your mind. After that we delete your account details, sign-in record, subscription and Stripe customer record, Discover shares, likes, reports, and progress. The pictures your account made, along with their recipes and titles, are kept, but we move them to storage that has no connection to your account and remove everything that pointed from your account to them. Nothing left ties them to you or your family, and we may use them to improve Aetherwist. Print files made from your pictures are deleted, and records of any print orders are kept for tax and accounting with their links to your pictures removed. If you’d rather a picture not be kept at all, use Release on it in your gallery before your account is deleted.

10. How We Protect Information

We use encrypted connections, short-lived private links for your pictures, a sign-in provider built for security, payment pages hosted by Stripe, limits that slow down abuse, and access controls that restrict our own team to a small number of people who need it to run Aetherwist. Those team members can view account records and pictures when needed to keep the service working and safe, for example to investigate a report or a problem with a summon.

No system is perfectly secure, and we can’t guarantee that information will never be accessed without permission. If a breach affects your personal information, we’ll notify you as the law requires.

11. Your Choices and Rights

You can:

• See your pictures anytime in your gallery, and download any of them.
• Delete a picture with “Release” in your gallery. This deletes it from our storage and from Discover if it was shared.
• Withdraw a shared picture from Discover anytime.
• Delete your account from your account settings, or by emailing us. You’ll have 30 days to change your mind.
• Ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct or delete it, by emailing hello@aetherwist.com. We’ll confirm it’s really you, usually by replying to the email address on the account, and respond within [[30 days]].
• Cancel your plan anytime from your account settings. Your account and gallery stay.

Some U.S. states give their residents specific privacy rights. We offer the rights above to everyone, wherever you live in the United States, and we won’t treat you differently for using them. If we turn down a request, you can reply to ask us to reconsider.

12. Children

Children can’t create Aetherwist accounts. Kids play through an adult’s account, and the adult is responsible for that use. While a child plays, Aetherwist records the same kinds of things it records for any player on the account: the pictures made, the runes used, and the technical information described above. We treat all of it as the account holder’s information and use it only to run Aetherwist.

If we learn that we’ve collected personal information from a child under 13 without a parent’s permission (for example, if a child signed up by entering an adult’s birth date), we’ll delete it. Our Children’s Privacy Notice has the full details.

13. Where Aetherwist Is Available

Aetherwist is offered only to people in the United States. Some of the companies listed in Section 7, and the graphics computers described in Section 5, may process information outside the United States.

14. Changes to This Policy

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use information we already have, we’ll email you before it takes effect.

15. Contact Us

Threadworks Labs LLC [[MAILING ADDRESS]] [[PHONE NUMBER]] hello@aetherwist.com