Privacy notice

IndieAM ("we") makes marketing for small businesses: campaign ideas, plans, and finished posts, published to the social accounts you connect. This notice covers the IndieAM app, the website at indieam.com, and the emails we send. IndieAM is based in California, USA, and your data is stored in the United States.

• Your account: your email address. If you sign in with Google, also the name and profile photo on your Google account.
• Your request for access: your business's name, what it does, its country, and its website or social page.
• How you found us: when you ask for access or create a business, how you heard about IndieAM and, if one of our links brought you, that link's short tag.
• Your business: what you enter or ask us to read (such as your website), and everything made from it - ideas, topics, plans, and posts - with your edits and approvals.
• Your team: the email addresses of the people in your business and of the people you invite.
• Photos, clips, and voiceovers: what you and your team upload or record, pictures and animations made with AI when you ask for them, and the finished pictures and videos. Before we store a photo or clip, we remove its hidden details, such as where and when it was taken and on what device. We keep a short description of each one, which you can edit, and the words of each voiceover, for captions.
• Connected social accounts: which account is connected, the words of its recent posts when we read them to fill in your business information, and, for each post, a few counts read at set times after it went out, such as views, likes, and comments. Counts only, never who saw or interacted with a post.
• Billing: each business's billing status and history, such as when its trial ends and when it was charged, and the country of the billing address. You enter your card on Stripe's page, and we never see or store its number.
• Your agreement to our terms: which version you agreed to and when, the IP address and browser you agreed from, and a fingerprint of the exact text, so we can show what you agreed to.
• Requests for help: your message, the business and page it's about, and whether you let support look at your business.
• Security and reliability records: your sign-in sessions, including the IP address and browser they started from, records that limit repeated sign-in attempts, and records of how the service is used, such as AI usage and errors.

What you upload can show or mention other people, such as customers or staff in a photo. We handle it only to make your business's posts, and your business is responsible for having their permission.

We get only your name, email address, and photo, and use them only to sign you in and show who you are in the app. We don't get access to your Gmail, Drive, contacts, calendar, or anything else in your Google account, and we ask Google for nothing after you sign in. You can remove IndieAM's access at any time in your Google Account settings.

To run IndieAM for you: to sign you in, make and publish your posts, show how they did, bill your business, answer your requests for help, email you about your account and your businesses, and keep the service secure and working. And to keep records the law requires, enforce our terms, and prevent abuse, such as offering a free trial only once.

We don't sell your data, share it for advertising, or show ads. We don't use photos or recordings to identify anyone, and we don't create face or voice templates (biometric identifiers) from them.

Service providers that run IndieAM for us, only to provide the service and only what they need: hosting and data storage, video processing, background work, AI, publishing to your social accounts, email delivery, protecting sign-in from automated abuse, and monitoring and error reporting.

What we send to AI providers, and when:

• To write ideas, plans, and posts: your business information.
• To fill in your business information: the words we read from your website, your business bio, and the recent posts of the accounts you've connected.
• To describe a photo or clip: the cleaned photo, or a few still frames from a clip, never its sound.
• To make a picture with AI: the picture's written prompt, never your own photos.
• To animate a shot: a copy of that shot's photo, cropped to the shot.
• For an AI voice: the lines it reads. For your own voiceover: the recording, to write out its words.

Our AI providers' terms don't allow them to use your data to train their models. To make an animation, our provider passes the shot's photo on to the company that makes the animation model, which handles it under its own terms.

When you ask for a sign-in code, a security service checks that a person, not an automated program, is signing in. For that check it sees your IP address and details about your browser and device, and it doesn't tell us who you are.

When an Owner connects a social account, the access granted on the platform is held by our publishing service. It uses it only to publish your approved posts, read how they did, and read the words of the account's recent posts so we can fill in your business information. Its terms let it use the pictures and videos only to post them, and it tells us it keeps them only until they're posted.

Payments are handled by Stripe, which also uses payment details to prevent fraud, under its own privacy policy.

We may also share information when the law requires it, to protect people or the service, or if IndieAM's business is transferred to a new owner or company, which then has to protect it as this notice says.

Before a business signs up, we may make it a sample month of posts to show what IndieAM could do for it. To make one, we read the business's public website and send that text to our AI providers to write the posts and make the pictures. Only that business and IndieAM see the sample, and we delete it, along with what we read, within 14 days, or straight away if anyone with its link asks.

Nobody at IndieAM browses your business. If you need help, support can open a read-only view of it for a limited time, after recording the reason, and every view is logged. When you ask for help in the app, you choose whether support may look.

We keep your data while your account and your business exist. We may delete a business once its billing has been stopped for at least 30 days. You can delete photos, clips, and voiceovers at any time.

When a business or an account is deleted, its data is deleted with it, except:

• records of AI usage and media credits, without your business's content;
• records of publishing activity, such as which channel a post went to and whether it went out, without its content;
• records of refunds made when someone cancelled instead of agreeing to changed terms: the amount and when;
• requests for help, with the email address and business name they were sent with;
• IndieAM's record of its admins' actions, which can include an email address, kept for security;
• if the account had a free trial, a one-way fingerprint of its email address and the fingerprint Stripe gives the card (never the card's number), so the trial isn't offered to it again;
• a record that the deletion happened, without names or email addresses;
• what Stripe keeps for billing, such as invoices.

Deleted data can remain in our backups and our service providers' logs for a limited time, typically 30 days.

• Edit your business information at any time in the app.
• Delete your account, or, as a business's Primary Owner, the business, in the app. See Deleting a business or your account.
• As an Owner, disconnect a social account at any time, in the app or in the platform's settings.
• Ask us what we hold about you, or ask us to correct or delete it, by emailing hello@indieam.com. We'll check the request comes from you, usually by replying to the email address on your account, and answer within 45 days.

IndieAM uses cookies it needs to work: to keep you signed in, while you connect a social account, and to remember for the rest of your visit that you chose Not now on our terms.

We use one more. If you arrive through a link we've shared, such as one in a post or on a card, a cookie remembers that link's short tag for 30 days, and nothing else about you, so we know which of our efforts bring people to IndieAM. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and no other company tracks you on our site.

Because we don't track you across other sites, we treat every visitor the same, whether or not their browser sends a Do Not Track signal.

Your account and business information is encrypted in transit and at rest. Photos and clips are kept in private storage, and the links to them expire within an hour. Access is limited to what's needed: IndieAM's admins need a second sign-in step, and support views are read-only and logged. No system is perfectly secure, so if something happens that affects your data, we'll tell you as the law requires.

IndieAM is for businesses and isn't meant for children. You must be 18 or older to use it, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

If we change this notice in a way that matters, we'll email account holders, the date at the top changes with it, and the updated notice applies from then on.