Privacy notice

Who is responsible

[Your full legal name, as on your ID], trading as firelet.media, of Islamabad, Pakistan, is the controller of the personal data described here — an individual rather than a company, so the person answering a request under this notice is the same person responsible for it. Questions, and any request under this notice, go to support@firelet.media or through the support form.

Payments are a separate matter. Paddle is the merchant of record for purchases made here and is its own controller for the payment. Paddle collects and holds the card details and the billing address; we never see them, and never hold them. Paddle's privacy notice is at paddle.com/legal/privacy.

The gallery, on your own PC

Nothing from your library is uploaded. The gallery reads folders you point it at and builds an index beside itself, under your own user directory. Your photographs, the index, the thumbnails and the picture-understanding model all stay on your machine. There is no account to make, no cloud to be on, and no upload step that could be left switched on by accident. The program searches nothing on the internet.

Four things do travel, and this is all of them:

• Activating and re-checking a licence. The program sends your licence key, the product family, the version it is running, an optional name you gave the machine, and a 64-character hash that identifies the machine. That hash is computed and salted on your own PC: it tells us that this is the same machine as last time and nothing else about it. The re-check happens about once a month.
• Checking for a new release. The version you are running, so the server can say whether a newer one exists.
• A crash report, when it crashes. The program version, the platform, the Windows version, the architecture, the kind of failure, the module it happened in, the error message and a stack trace. No file names from your library, no image data and no account details are attached.
• Counters, if you switch them on. Usage counters are off unless you turn them on, and they are counts of things done rather than a record of what you did. The switch is in your account and takes effect immediately.

The account on this site

Buying creates an account to hold what you bought. It stores:

• Your name and email address.
• Your licences and the machines each is activated on, by that salted hash.
• Your orders — what was bought, when, and for how much. The receipt and the payment itself sit with Paddle.
• Support tickets you open and anything you attach to them.
• Sign-in records, kept so that you and we can spot access you did not make.
• A consent ledger: which optional things you turned on or off, when, and from where. It exists so that a permission can be shown to have been given and withdrawn, which is the point of asking for one.

The legal basis is the contract between us for everything needed to sell you a licence and let you use it; consent for anything optional; and our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure for the sign-in records.

Optional cloud sync

The account can also sync a media library between your own devices. It is off until you switch it on, separately and explicitly, and switching it off is one click on the same screen. When it is on, the entries you sync and the thumbnails that go with them are stored for you; when it is off, none of it is collected at all.

Cookies

This marketing site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. The only thing stored in your browser is the light-or-dark choice you made with the theme button, which never leaves it.

The account area sets one session cookie, which is what keeps you signed in. There is no advertising cookie anywhere, and nothing here is shared with an advertising network.

Who else sees any of it

Paddle, as merchant of record, for the payment. The company that hosts the service, as the machine the data sits on. Nobody else: we do not sell personal data, we do not share it for advertising, and there is no third-party tracker on this site or in the program.

How it is kept safe

Everything between your browser and this site, and between the gallery and this site, travels over an encrypted connection. Passwords are stored hashed rather than encrypted, which is to say nobody here can read one, us included — a password you forget is reset, never recovered. The database is not reachable from the internet; the application in front of it is.

The administrative side is granted from the server console and never by signing up, every administrative action is written to an audit log, and your own sign-ins are recorded so that access you did not make is something either of us can spot. None of that is a guarantee — no honest security section claims one. If something goes wrong in a way that puts your data at risk, you will hear it from us, and so will the authority we are obliged to tell.

How long it is kept

Your account and licences are kept while the account exists — a perpetual licence is a long relationship by design, and a key you can no longer be shown is a key you have effectively lost. Orders and the records behind them are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, which is usually several years and is not ours to shorten. Crash reports and counters are kept for a limited period and then dropped. Delete the account and the rest goes with it.

What you can do about it

Most of it is self-serve, deliberately — a right you have to ask permission to exercise is not much of a right:

• Export everything. Your account pages produce a full machine-readable copy of what is held about you, including your devices, consents, synced entries and thumbnails.
• Delete the account, from the same place.
• Turn the optional things on and off, individually, with withdrawal exactly as easy as granting.
• Correct anything wrong from your profile, or by asking us.

You also have the right to object to or restrict some processing, and the right to complain to your data protection authority. If you would rather ask us than click, write to support@firelet.media and we will do it for you.

Where the data is

We are in Pakistan; the servers are not. The account, its licences and everything listed above sit on hosting in the United States, so your data leaves the country we are in the moment you create an account — that is worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to infer it from an address at the top of the page.

Where data reaches Paddle, Paddle moves it under its own safeguards, described in its privacy notice. Wherever it is, the same rules on this page apply to it, and the rights above are exercised the same way.

Changes

If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it, and a change that affects what is collected is announced rather than slipped in.