Privacy Policy

The data controller for AnvilGen (“the Service”) is Marks Tarasovs, a sole trader based in the Republic of Latvia, trading as AnvilWorks (“we”, “us”). We are small enough that we do not have a data protection officer; for anything in this policy, including rights requests, email AnvilWorksYT@protonmail.com. A postal address is available on request.

Information you give us

• Account — your email address and, if you set one, a password. We never see or store the password itself: our authentication provider stores only a one-way hash. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email and name from Google.
• Channel setup — the channel description, topics, audience, tone, and notes you enter, and the presenter and voice you pick from the library.
• A presenter photograph — only if you choose to upload your own image to build a presenter. We do not collect voice samples: voices come from our providers’ libraries, or from a voice account you connect, not from recordings you make for us.
• Reference images you attach to a video (for example a thumbnail you want to match).
• Scripts and edits — the text you write or change at each review step.
• Connected provider credentials — if you connect your own HeyGen subscription or API key, HeyGen library key, ElevenLabs key, Pexels key, or YouTube channel, we store the resulting tokens or keys, encrypted (section 9). They are used only to run the jobs you approve and are never shown back to you in full.
• Billing — a customer reference from Stripe and your purchase history. Card numbers are handled entirely by Stripe; we never receive them.
• Affiliate program — if you join it: a display name, your PayPal email, links to the channels or profiles you promote on, your audience size, and how you plan to promote, plus commission and payout records.
• Support and correspondence — any email you send us.

Information we create while serving you

• Generated ideas, scripts, thumbnails, presenter images, rendered videos, and publishing metadata.
• A transcript of your finished video’s audio, used to time captions and graphics during editing.
• Job and render logs: what ran, when, how long it took, and any error, so we can fix failures and refund credits.
• A credit ledger: every purchase, spend, refund, and adjustment.

Information collected automatically

• A sign-in session, kept in a cookie (section 13).
• Standard server logs: IP address, browser type, pages requested, timestamps, and errors, kept briefly for security and fault-finding.
• Rate-limit counters tied to your account, so one account cannot exhaust shared AI capacity.

People we contact before they have an account

We invite YouTube creators to partner with us. To do that we keep a record of the creator’s public channel name, handle, country, description, and the business contact email they publish on their channel or website, together with our notes and the message we sent. We write only to addresses published for business contact, once, and section 15 explains how to stop us contacting you.

We use no third-party analytics, session recording, or advertising services.

• Running your account, generating and storing your videos, letting you download themPerformance of our contract with you
• Taking payment, spending and refunding credits, paying affiliate commissionsPerformance of our contract
• Service emails: sign-in codes and links and password resets (sent by our authentication provider), receipts (sent by Stripe), and account noticesPerformance of our contract
• Security, preventing abuse and fraud, preventing misuse of faces and likenesses, enforcing the TermsOur legitimate interests
• Diagnosing faults and improving the Service using job, render, and error logsOur legitimate interests
• Inviting creators to partner with us using their published business contact detailsOur legitimate interests (a one-time business invitation with an easy opt-out)
• Product updates to existing customersOur legitimate interests; consent where your law requires it
• Accounting, tax, and responding to lawful requestsLegal obligation

Our legitimate-interests assessment, in short: where we rely on legitimate interests, the data involved is security and diagnostic records or published professional details, not the content of your videos; we do not combine it with other sources, profile you, or use it for advertising; and it is what a reasonable person would expect a service like this to do. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time without affecting what was done before.

We do not train AI models on your content. Your prompts, scripts, images, and videos are processed only to produce your outputs. We access our AI providers through business APIs whose terms exclude your data from model training. If you connect your own account with a provider (for example your own HeyGen subscription or ElevenLabs account), what that provider does with data inside your account is governed by your agreement with it, not by us.

If you upload a photograph to create a presenter, we send it to our avatar provider (HeyGen), which builds an animated presenter from it and stores that presenter, under our HeyGen account or under yours if you connected your own. We also pass the presenter image to Google’s image model to place the presenter in your thumbnails. That is all we do with it. We do not use faces to identify anyone, we keep no facial database, we never match faces across accounts, and we do not train models on them. Because we never use a face for identification, we do not process it as special-category biometric data under the GDPR. Some U.S. states (Illinois, Texas, Washington) regulate face data regardless of purpose; our Terms require written consent from any real person you upload, which those laws also require.

You can withdraw a photograph at any time by deleting the channel it belongs to, or your account: it is removed from our storage immediately. If you want the presenter built from it removed from our HeyGen account as well, email us and we will delete it there too.

We do not collect voice recordings. Voices are synthetic, from our providers’ libraries, or, if you connect your own ElevenLabs account, voices you manage there under their terms.

Our Terms require you to hold clear written permission from any real person whose photograph you upload, and to produce it if we ask. If you believe your face is being used in AnvilGen without your permission, email AnvilWorksYT@protonmail.com: you do not need an account, we will investigate, and we will remove it.

• Presenter photographs and reference imagesUntil you delete the channel they belong to, or your account. Removed from live storage immediately either way.
• Channels, scripts, thumbnails, videos, transcriptsUntil you delete the channel or your account.
• Job and render logsKept with the video they belong to and removed with it.
• Sign-in sessionsUntil you sign out or the session expires.
• Account recordWhile the account is open. Deleted on closure, except the accounting records below.
• Credit ledger, invoices, payment records5 years, as Latvian accounting law requires. Payment records are held primarily by Stripe.
• Affiliate commission and payout records5 years, as above.
• Support emailsUp to 2 years after the conversation ends, so we can follow up on the same issue.
• Partnership invitation recordsUntil you ask us to stop, and in any case no longer than 24 months after our last message to you. If you opt out we keep only your address on a do-not-contact list.
• Server logsA short period, normally under 30 days.
• BackupsEncrypted. Deleted items age out of backups within 30 days.
• YouTube analytics and AI summaries of themNot retained. Fetched from Google and generated when you open the page, and not stored.

You can delete your account yourself at any time from Account settings. That immediately cancels any subscription, removes every file you uploaded or we generated for you from live storage, and deletes your account and its data, leaving only the accounting records above and backup copies that age out within 30 days.

We do not sell your data and we do not share it with anyone for their marketing. Running AnvilGen involves these processors, which act on our instructions and receive only what their job needs:

• SupabaseDatabase, sign-in, and file storage. Holds the data the Service keeps and sends the sign-in and password-reset emails.
• VercelHosts the website and app; sees request logs.
• RailwayRuns the job worker that generates scripts, images, and videos.
• AnthropicText generation and analysis: your channel description, topics, scripts, transcripts, audit inputs, and, when you ask for an AI summary of your YouTube analytics, those figures.
• GoogleImage generation (thumbnails and presenter images: your prompts and presenter image), Sign in with Google, and the YouTube APIs described in section 8.
• HeyGenAvatar video rendering: your presenter image and the narration script.
• OpenAISpeech-to-text on your finished video's audio, to time captions.
• ElevenLabsVoice synthesis, only if you connect your own account: the script text.
• PexelsStock footage search: the search terms only.
• Anchor Browser and SteelCloud browser used only when you connect your HeyGen subscription through the site. Your HeyGen sign-in happens inside a browser they host, so we never see your HeyGen password; the browser session is destroyed as soon as the connection completes.
• Google (Gmail)Delivers our partnership invitations and any email we write to you personally.
• ProtonHosts our support mailbox, so it holds any email you send us.

Two companies handle your data as controllers in their own right, under their own privacy policies, because the law makes them responsible for that part: Stripe, which as merchant of record processes your payment, tax, receipt, refunds, and any chargeback and therefore receives your email and payment details; and PayPal, which receives an affiliate’s email and payout amount when we pay commissions.

We may also share data with our accountant and professional advisers; with law enforcement, courts, or regulators where the law requires it; and with a buyer or successor if the business is transferred (for example to a company we form), in which case this policy keeps applying until you are told otherwise. Our current provider list is available on request.

We are in the European Union, and most of the providers above are in the United States, so your data leaves the EU/EEA. Where a provider is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, we rely on that. Otherwise we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses in our agreement with the provider, together with the provider’s own security measures. For UK users, the equivalent UK mechanisms apply. Email us if you want to know the mechanism used for a specific provider.

If you connect your YouTube channel, AnvilGen accesses — with your explicit consent via Google OAuth — read-only data from your Google account, limited to: your YouTube channel's basic information (name, thumbnail, public statistics) and your channel's YouTube Analytics reports (views, watch time, audience retention, subscriber changes, traffic sources, top videos).

• How it is used — solely to display your own analytics to you inside AnvilGen and, when you request it, to generate an AI summary of those numbers for you. Producing that summary means sending the figures to Anthropic, our text-generation processor, for that purpose only; the summary is shown to you and not stored. Your Google data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared with other users or with anyone other than the processors that act on our instructions to provide these features to you.
• How it is stored — analytics are fetched live from Google and are not retained; the OAuth tokens that authorize access are stored server-side, encrypted, under access controls that make them unreadable from the browser.
• Revoking access — click Disconnect in AnvilGen (this deletes the stored tokens) or remove AnvilGen at any time from your Google account permissions.

AnvilGen's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. AnvilGen uses YouTube API Services; by connecting your channel you also agree to the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's handling of your data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

• All traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS), and browsers are told to use HTTPS only.
• Passwords are never stored by us. Our authentication provider keeps only a salted one-way hash (bcrypt), which cannot be reversed.
• Connected provider keys and tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. The encryption key lives only in our server environment, never in the database, so a copy of the database alone does not reveal them. The columns holding them are also locked so they can never be read from the browser.
• Every database row is isolated to the account that owns it at the database layer (row-level security), and uploaded and generated files live in private storage that is only ever served through short-lived signed links.
• The site sends a strict Content Security Policy and related security headers, and the sign-in cookie is limited to our own site.
• Backups are encrypted at rest by our hosting provider and kept separately from the live database.
• Database and server access is limited to the operator. Server credentials are never shipped to the browser.
• To help you or to investigate abuse, the operator can open your account. This is done only when needed for that purpose.

No system is perfectly safe. If a breach ever puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the supervisory authority as the law requires, which under the GDPR means notifying the authority within 72 hours.

Under the GDPR (and the UK GDPR if you are in the UK) you have the right to:

• Access — a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — correction of anything wrong or incomplete.
• Erasure — deletion where we have no continuing reason to keep it. You can delete a channel (which removes its presenter, videos, and files) or your whole account yourself in the app.
• Restriction — we keep the data but stop using it while a question is resolved.
• Objection — to processing based on our legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your situation.
• Portability — your data in a machine-readable format, or sent to another provider where feasible.
• No solely automated decisions — see section 14.
• Withdrawal of consent — wherever consent is the basis.

To use any of these, email AnvilWorksYT@protonmail.com from the address on your account, or tell us enough to identify you. It is free. We answer within one month, or up to three months for a complex request, in which case we tell you within the first month. We may ask you to confirm your identity first.

If you are not a customer but believe your face or personal data has been uploaded by one, you have exactly the same rights, and you do not need an account to use them.

If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain to Latvia’s supervisory authority, the Data State Inspectorate (Datu valsts inspekcija) at dvi.gov.lv; if you live elsewhere in the EU/EEA, to the data protection authority in your own country; and if you are in the UK, to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. Complaining to a regulator does not stop you going to court.

The Service is for adults. You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and our Terms do not allow videos made for children or that depict minors. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18; if we learn that we have, we delete the account and its data. If you believe a child’s data or image has ended up in AnvilGen, email AnvilWorksYT@protonmail.com and we will remove it.

We set no advertising cookies and share nothing with advertisers. What we store in your browser:

• Sign-in cookie (sb-…)Strictly necessary. Keeps you signed in. Contains only your session token. Lasts until you sign out or the session expires.
• Referral cookie (av-ref)Set only if you arrive through a partner's referral link. Stores the referral code, nothing about you, for up to 60 days so the partner is credited if you subscribe. It is not used to track you across sites or to show you advertising.
• Draft idea (anvil:pending-idea, local storage)Keeps a channel idea you typed on the home page so it is still there after you sign in. Stays until you clear your browser storage.

Two further cookies (av-admin-return and av-impersonating) exist only in our operator’s own browser during a support session and are never set for you. Local storage items stay in your browser and are not sent to us as a record of your behavior. If we ever add an analytics tool, this policy will name it before it goes live.

We make no decisions about you by purely automated means that have a legal or similarly significant effect. Some automatic steps do happen: Stripe approves or declines a payment; a request is refused if your account hits a rate limit or has too few credits; and a provider may decline to render content that breaks its rules. A decision to suspend or close an account is made by a person, and you can appeal it by email.

Service emails about your own account (sign-in codes, receipts, notices) are sent as part of the Service, by us or by Supabase and Stripe on our behalf. We may send product updates to customers; every one has a one-click unsubscribe. If we sent you a partnership invitation and you would rather not hear from us, reply with “unsubscribe” or use the link in the email: we stop, and we keep only your address on a do-not-contact list so we never email you again by mistake.

We update this policy when the way we work changes, and the date at the top always shows the latest version. If a change is material, we email the address on your account at least 14 days before it takes effect.

For rights requests, our current provider list and transfer details, concerns about a face or likeness, or anything else in this policy: AnvilWorksYT@protonmail.com.