1. Who is responsible
The data controller for the personal data described here is Daniele Zotta, a private individual established in Italy, operating AI Podcast Lab.
- Email for privacy matters: [email protected]
- Postal address: Via Cesare Battisti 36, 38053 Castello Tesino (TN), Italy
We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer; we are not required to. Write to the address above for anything in this policy.
2. What we collect
Account data
Your username, email address, optional first and last name, and a cryptographic hash of your password. We never store your password itself. We also record when you joined, when you last signed in, and whether your email address has been confirmed.
Registration is only completed once you open the confirmation link we email you. Until then the account exists but cannot be signed in to, and if it is never confirmed it is deleted automatically, as set out in section 7.
Content you create
Everything belonging to an episode: its title, your talking points, any source URL you supply, any text you paste, the text we extract from a source URL, your revision requests to the AI editor, the generated script, the generated audio file, and the settings you chose (language, length, voice, quality, format). When web research is enabled we also store the citation links returned.
Billing data
Your plan, subscription status, billing period dates, included and purchased credit balances, and credit-purchase history. If you subscribe or buy credits, we store the identifiers Stripe assigns to the customer, subscription, Checkout Session, and payment so we can match payments to your account and prevent duplicate fulfillment. We never see or store your card number. Card data goes directly to Stripe.
Messages you send us
If you write to us through the contact form, we store the name and reply-to address you give, the subject you pick, the message itself, the language you wrote it in, and — if you were signed in — which account it came from. We keep our own notes on how the request was handled alongside it. Please do not put anything you would not want written down in a support message.
Technical data
Our servers keep ordinary web logs — IP address, timestamp, requested URL, user agent, response status — and error reports when something fails. These exist to run and secure the Service.
Anti-abuse checks on public forms
The sign-up, log-in, password-reset, and contact forms carry a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge, so that bots cannot mass-create accounts, guess passwords, use our mailer to flood strangers, or bury our support inbox. When one of those pages loads, Cloudflare receives your IP address, your browser details, and behavioural signals from the page, and returns a token that we verify with them. We never see those signals ourselves — only whether the check passed.
Analytics — only if you accept it
If, and only if, you accept analytics cookies, Google Analytics 4 collects the pages you view, approximate location derived from a truncated IP address, device and browser type, referring site, and the pseudonymous identifier stored in its own cookie. If you are signed in, that data is not joined to your account: we do not send Google your user ID, username, or email address, and we do not upload episode content.
Analytics is not used for advertising, and Google Signals and ads personalisation are switched off. Refuse it and nothing is loaded from Google Analytics at all.
Cookies
A small number of strictly necessary cookies, always on, plus Google Analytics cookies that are set only with your consent. Full detail, including how to withdraw that consent, is in the Cookie Policy.
3. Why, and on what legal basis
| Purpose | Data | Legal basis (GDPR Art. 6) |
|---|---|---|
| Creating and running your account | Account data | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Writing scripts and rendering audio for you | Content you create | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Taking payment, fulfilling credit purchases, and managing subscriptions | Billing data | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Keeping invoices and accounting records | Billing data | Legal obligation, Art. 6(1)(c) |
| Service emails (address confirmation, password reset, billing notices) | Account data | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Confirming that the email address on an account is real and belongs to you | Account data | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — preventing fake and hijacked registrations, and making sure account email reaches you |
| Answering a message you send us through the contact form | Messages you send us | Performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) where it concerns your account — otherwise legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f): replying to someone who asked us a question |
| Blocking bots on the public forms (Cloudflare Turnstile) | IP address, browser and behavioural signals | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — keeping accounts, logins, and our mailer from being abused |
| Security, fraud and abuse prevention, debugging | Technical data | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — keeping the Service available and not misused |
| Aggregated, non-identifying usage statistics from our own logs | Technical data | Legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — understanding load and failure rates |
| Website analytics (Google Analytics) | Page views, device and browser, approximate location, analytics identifier | Consent, Art. 6(1)(a) — refused by default, withdrawable at any time |
Analytics is the only processing here that runs on consent. Withdrawing it is as easy as giving it — the button on the Cookie Policy reopens the choice — and withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of what was collected beforehand. Refusing analytics changes nothing about what the Service does for you.
We do not sell personal data, do not use it for advertising, and do not send marketing email. There is no automated decision-making that produces legal effects for you, and no profiling.
4. What happens to your content
This is the part that matters most, so it is stated plainly. We do not run AI models ourselves. To write or revise a script, the relevant parts of your episode — your title, talking points, pasted or extracted source text, the current script, and your revision request — are transmitted to a third-party AI provider. To render audio, the script is transmitted to a speech provider. When you enable web research, your topic is additionally sent to a managed search provider.
Which company receives it depends on how the Service is configured and on the audio quality you choose; the current set is listed in section 5.
Do not paste sensitive personal data — health details, financial records, government identifiers, or anyone else's private information — into an episode. The Service is not designed for special-category data under Art. 9 GDPR, and once content leaves for an AI provider it is subject to that provider's own handling.
We do not use your content or the generated output to train any model of our own. AI providers may retain submitted content for a limited period for abuse monitoring under their own policies; we do not control those retention periods and we cannot delete data from their systems on your behalf beyond asking them.
5. Who else receives data
We share personal data only with the providers needed to run the Service, each under a data processing agreement where the GDPR requires one:
| Provider | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. (Ireland), Stripe, Inc. (USA) | One-time payments and subscription billing | Email, name, card data entered directly with Stripe, billing address, transaction records |
| OpenRouter, Inc. (USA) | Gateway to the text and speech models | Episode content sent for script writing and narration |
| The model providers reached through that gateway — currently OpenAI, xAI, and Google, depending on the quality you choose | Generating script text and synthetic speech | The same episode content, passed on by the gateway |
| The managed web-search provider used by the gateway (currently Parallel) | Web research, only when you enable it | Search queries derived from your topic |
| OpenAI Ireland Ltd. / OpenAI, L.L.C. (USA) | Alternative direct AI provider, where the Service is configured to use it instead of the gateway | Episode content sent for script writing and narration |
| Cloudflare, Inc. (USA) — R2 | Storing generated audio files privately | Audio files and their metadata |
| Oracle Corporation (USA) — Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, servers in the Italy Central (Milan) region | Running the application and database | All stored data, as infrastructure |
| Google Ireland Ltd. / Google LLC (USA) — Gmail | Delivering address-confirmation, password-reset, and service emails | Email address and message content |
| Google Ireland Ltd. / Google LLC (USA) — Google Fonts | Serving the two web fonts used by the site | Your IP address and browser details, when your browser fetches a font |
| Google Ireland Ltd. / Google LLC (USA) — Google Analytics 4 | Counting visits and page views, only if you accept analytics cookies | Pages viewed, approximate location from a truncated IP address, device and browser, referrer, and the analytics cookie identifier. Never your account identity or episode content. |
| Cloudflare, Inc. (USA) — Turnstile | Blocking automated abuse of the sign-up, log-in, and password-reset forms | Your IP address, browser details, and behavioural signals from those three pages |
We may also disclose data where the law requires it, or to establish or defend legal claims.
6. Transfers outside the EU
Several providers above are established in the United States, so your data is transferred outside the European Economic Area. Those transfers rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, on the provider's certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where it holds one, or on both, together with the supplementary measures each provider documents. You can ask us for details of the mechanism applying to a specific provider.
7. How long we keep it
- Account data — until you ask us to delete your account, then removed within 30 days.
- Registrations never confirmed — an account whose email address is never confirmed is deleted automatically about a week after sign-up, once its confirmation link has expired.
- Analytics data — retained by Google for 14 months from your last visit, the shortest user-level retention Google Analytics 4 offers, after which it is deleted automatically. Aggregated reports may persist beyond that.
- Episodes, scripts, and audio — until you or we delete them, or until your account is deleted. There is no storage quota and no automatic expiry, so old episodes stay until removed.
- Invoices and accounting records — 10 years, as Italian law requires. This is a legal obligation and survives deletion of your account.
- Payment records held by Stripe — under Stripe's own retention policy.
- Contact messages — kept while the request is open and for two years after it is resolved, so a thread that comes back can be picked up again, then deleted automatically. Messages marked as spam are deleted within a month.
- Server logs — normally no more than 90 days, unless a specific security incident requires keeping them longer.
8. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to access your data, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to processing, to receive it in a portable format, and to withdraw any consent you have given.
Withdrawing analytics consent needs no email at all: the button on the Cookie Policy reopens the choice, and refusing takes effect immediately. You may also object at any time to the processing we base on legitimate interests — the anti-abuse checks and security logging in section 3 — by writing to us, though we may need to keep doing it where our grounds override your objection.
How to exercise them. Email [email protected] from the address on your account. We answer within 30 days. There is currently no self-service delete button in the app: account and episode deletion are handled manually on request, and we confirm in writing when it is done. Deletion removes your account, your episodes, your scripts, and your audio files; it does not remove accounting records we must keep, and it cannot recall content already processed by an AI provider.
If you believe we have handled your data unlawfully you can complain to the Italian supervisory authority, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (garanteprivacy.it), or to the authority in your own EU country.
9. Security
Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. New accounts stay inactive until the email address on them is confirmed, and the public forms are protected against automated abuse, so an address cannot be signed up or brute-forced by someone who does not control it. Traffic is served over HTTPS with HSTS. Session and CSRF cookies are marked secure and HTTP-only. Audio files are held in a private bucket that is not publicly readable; playback and downloads go through short-lived signed links, valid for about fifteen minutes, and only after we have checked that the episode belongs to you.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will notify you and the supervisory authority as the GDPR requires.
10. Children
The Service is for adults. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.
11. Changes
We may update this policy. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will tell you by email before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page always shows the current version.