Privacy Policy

Artaa.Media is a remote creative studio providing video editing, web design and visual identity services. This policy covers the Artaa.Media website at artaa.media and the Artaa.Media Client Portal, which is the signed-in application where clients manage projects, meetings, sample requests, files and approvals.

It applies to three groups of people, and not everything below applies to everyone:

• Visitors who only read the public website. We collect nothing from you beyond what your browser sends to load the pages.
• People who contact us — a project enquiry, a meeting booking or a sample request — whether or not they ever create an account.
• Clients with a Client Portal account.

Artaa.Media is responsible for the information described here. How to reach us is in section 15.

We collect the information you type into our forms, and nothing more from them. Depending on the form, that is:

• Project enquiry and meeting booking: your name, email address, company name if you give one, country, timezone, the service you are interested in, a description of your project, a preferred start date, a budget range if you choose one, and any reference link you provide.
• Sample request: your name, email address, company name if you give one, country, the service and the deliverable you want, a description of your project, a target deadline if you set one, and any reference or material links you provide.
• Meeting booking additionally records the time slot you choose and the timezone it was chosen in, so the meeting appears correctly for both of us.

Each of these forms records that you agreed to be contacted about your enquiry, and when. We keep that record because it is the basis on which we reply to you.

Optional fields are genuinely optional. A form will tell you which fields it needs.

If you create a Client Portal account, we store your display name, your email address, the organization name you choose, your preferred language, and the status of your account.

Some things are deliberately never stored as you gave them:

• Your password is never stored. What we store is a scrypt digest of it, which cannot be turned back into your password. We cannot tell you what your password is, and neither can anyone who obtains a copy of our database.
• Session tokens, email verification links and password reset links are never stored either. We store a keyed digest of each one, so a copy of the database taken without the key is not a set of usable credentials.
• Your IP address is never stored in readable form. Where we need to recognise repeated requests — to apply rate limits and to detect abuse — we store a keyed digest of the address instead of the address.

We keep a record of security-relevant events on your account: registration, email verification, successful and failed sign-ins, sign-outs, password resets, session revocations, connecting or disconnecting a sign-in provider, and profile or photo changes. These records hold the type of event and when it happened. They deliberately do not hold your password, your tokens, your email address or the contents of any change.

You can sign in to the Client Portal with Google instead of a password. If you do, the following is exactly what happens.

We use Google only to confirm who you are. We do not use Google to read, write or access anything else.

Specifically:

• The only permissions we request from Google are openid, email and profile. Nothing else is ever requested.
• We do not request access to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, or any other Google service. We could not read your mail or your files even if we wanted to, because we never ask for the permission that would allow it.
• We do not keep Google access tokens, refresh tokens, or the raw identity token Google issues. There is no place in our database for any of them. The identity token is checked when it arrives and then discarded.
• If Google confirms that your email address is verified, that address can be used to create an Artaa.Media account, or to securely connect Google sign-in to an Artaa.Media account that already uses the same address. If Google does not confirm the address as verified, we will not create or connect anything.
• We store the identifier Google uses for your account, because that identifier is what keeps the connection between your Google sign-in and your Artaa.Media account working. We store it together with the email address Google reported, so that the Client Portal can show you which Google account is connected.
• Information from your Google profile never silently overwrites your Artaa.Media profile. Your Google name is used only to fill in the display name of a brand-new account at the moment it is created. It never changes the name on an account that already exists, and you can edit your display name yourself at any time.
• Your Google profile picture is not used as your Artaa.Media profile photo, and we do not copy it. Profile photos in the Client Portal are only ever ones you upload yourself.

Connecting Google is optional. An account created with a password does not need it, and connecting Google does not disable your password — you can continue to sign in either way.

Signing in with Google means Google receives a request from your browser, and Google will handle that under its own privacy policy. We have no control over and no visibility into what Google records about it.

Once you are working with us, the Client Portal holds the information needed to run the work:

• Projects: the title and brief you submit, the versions we deliver, and the approval or change-request decisions you record against them, including any note you write with a decision.
• Meetings: the meetings you have booked, their status, and any reschedule or cancellation.
• Sample requests: the brief you submitted and the material attached to it.
• Your organization: its name, your role in it, and which other records belong to it.

Records belong to your organization, and the server checks that on every single request rather than trusting anything your browser sends. Your browser never tells us which organization you belong to; we resolve that from your session.

If you sent us an enquiry or a sample request before you created an account, and it used the same email address, verifying your email address links those earlier records to your account so you can see them in one place. Records already linked to someone else are never re-linked.

Files you upload — project material, sample-request material, and your profile photo — are treated as confidential and are handled as follows.

• They are stored in private storage on our server, outside any location a web server can reach directly. There is no public URL for an uploaded file.
• Each stored file is given a random identifier as its name, with no file extension. Nothing about a stored file can be guessed from what you called it, and the name you uploaded is kept only as a label to show back to you.
• The type of every upload is decided by inspecting the actual content of the file, not by trusting its name. A file whose name and content disagree is refused.
• Uploads are size-limited, and profile photos are limited separately and much more tightly — they may be JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 5 MiB.
• A file can only be downloaded through an authorized route, which confirms you are signed in and that the file belongs to your organization before any content is sent. Your profile photo is served only to you.

Replacing your profile photo stores the new one before removing the old one, so a failure part-way through cannot leave you with no photo. Removing it deletes the stored image and returns you to your initials.

We use the information described above to:

• reply to your enquiry and discuss your project;
• schedule, confirm, reschedule and cancel meetings;
• produce, deliver and revise the work you have asked for;
• operate your account, sign you in, and let you recover access;
• show you your own projects, files, meetings and approvals;
• keep the service working and secure — including rate limiting, preventing abuse of forms and uploads, and investigating suspicious activity;
• keep a record of what was agreed and delivered.

We do not use your information for advertising. We do not sell it, rent it or trade it. We do not build advertising profiles, and we do not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you.

We do not send marketing email. The email we send is transactional: verifying your address, resetting your password, and confirming or updating a meeting you booked.

Information is held in a PostgreSQL database on a private server. The database is not reachable from the public internet. Traffic to the website and the Client Portal is encrypted in transit.

The measures described in sections 3 and 6 are the substance of our security posture: passwords stored only as scrypt digests, credentials stored only as keyed digests, IP addresses stored only as keyed digests, uploaded files kept outside the web root under unguessable names, and authorization checked against the database on every request rather than trusted from a token or a browser.

Sessions are re-checked continuously. If your account is suspended or your password is reset, existing sessions stop working immediately rather than when they happen to expire.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you.

We do not sell your information and we do not share it with advertising networks.

Two third-party services can receive information, and only for the purposes described:

• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google. See section 4 for exactly what is and is not involved.
• Resend — our transactional email provider. It receives the email address and message content needed to deliver verification, password reset and booking messages.

Our server and database are operated on infrastructure provided by a hosting provider, which necessarily stores the data on our behalf.

There is no analytics service, no tag manager, no advertising pixel and no third-party tracking script anywhere on this website or in the Client Portal. Fonts are served from our own origin rather than from a third-party font service.

We may disclose information if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. If that ever happens we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.

Account information is kept for as long as your account exists.

Enquiries and sample requests carry a recorded retention period: sample requests are recorded with a twelve-month retention class and an expiry date, and project enquiries with a standard twenty-four-month class.

We want to be precise about what that means today, because it would be easy to imply more. Those retention periods are recorded and reportable, but they are not yet enforced automatically — there is no scheduled job that deletes expired records. In practice, deletion happens when you ask us for it, or when we review records. We would rather tell you that than describe an automatic process that does not exist.

Records of completed work, and the security event log described in section 3, may be kept longer where there is a legitimate reason — for example a record of what was delivered and agreed.

You can ask us to do any of the following, and we will:

• tell you what information we hold about you;
• give you a copy of it;
• correct anything that is wrong — your display name and profile photo you can change yourself in the Client Portal at any time;
• delete your information and close your account;
• disconnect Google sign-in from your account, provided you have another way to sign in;
• stop contacting you.

Depending on where you live, some of these may also be rights you hold under local law. We honour the requests above regardless of whether the law in your country requires it.

Write to accounts@artaa.media or use the contact page. We may need to confirm that the request comes from you before acting on it, particularly for deletion. We will respond within a reasonable time.

If we cannot fully act on a request — for example where we must keep a record of a completed engagement — we will tell you which part we cannot do and why.

This site sets no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies and no third-party cookies. Reading the public website sets no cookies at all.

The Client Portal sets cookies that are strictly necessary to sign you in and keep you signed in safely:

• artaa_account_session — your session. It cannot be read by JavaScript, which is what stops a scripting flaw from stealing it.
• artaa_account_csrf — the value our own pages send back to prove a request came from you and not from another site.
• artaa_account_exchange — short-lived, set only while a password reset link is being exchanged.
• artaa_account_oauth — short-lived, set only while a Google sign-in is in progress, and used to confirm that the sign-in finishing is the same one your browser started.

All four are removed or expire on their own. Blocking them will prevent you from signing in, because they are the mechanism by which signing in works.

Sessions expire after a set period and are ended immediately when you sign out, when your password is reset, or when an account is suspended.

Artaa.Media is a remote studio and works with clients internationally. Our server, our database and our email provider are located outside some of the countries our clients are in, so information you give us will be transferred to and processed in a country other than your own.

By using the service or sending us an enquiry, you understand that this transfer is necessary for us to provide it.

This policy is published in English. English is the authoritative version.

We will update this policy when the service changes, and the effective date at the top will change with it. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will make that clear rather than quietly revising the text.

Continuing to use the service after a change means the updated policy applies to you.

For any question about this policy, or to make any of the requests in section 11, write to accounts@artaa.media, or use the contact page at artaa.media/en/contact.

We read every message sent to that address.