Privacy Policy

Last updated: May 2026

This Privacy Policy explains what personal information Umbral Audio, LLC ("Umbral Audio," "we," "us," or "our") collects when you visit umbralaudio.com or use the Aether plugin, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it.

1. Who we are

Umbral Audio, LLC is a Virginia limited liability company. Our published business address is:

Umbral Audio, LLC
c/o Northwest Registered Agent, LLC
8401 Mayland Dr, Ste A
Richmond, VA 23294, USA

For privacy-related questions or to exercise the rights described below, contact privacy@umbralaudio.com.

2. Information we collect

Account information

When you register, we collect your email address and a password (stored only as a salted hash by our authentication provider, Supabase). We do not see or store your plain-text password. If you set a display name, that is also stored on your profile.

Purchase and billing information

Payments are processed by Paddle.com Market Limited, which acts as the Merchant of Record (seller) for Aether. Paddle collects your name, billing address, payment instrument details, and tax-relevant information directly. We never see your full payment instrument. We receive transaction metadata from Paddle (transaction ID, amount, currency, the email used at checkout, and a Paddle customer ID) so we can issue your license and respond to refund or support requests.

License and entitlement records

When you purchase Aether we record your license key, the order amount, the order date, the Paddle transaction reference, and which devices you have activated the license on (the activation count and an opaque per-device identifier — see "Plugin telemetry" below).

Website telemetry

With your consent (collected via the cookie banner), we use:

• Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights — aggregate, cookieless page-view and performance data. No content of forms, no IP addresses tied to user accounts.
• Sentry session replay — only on error. Replays are recorded with input and text masking enabled (we cannot read what you typed into form fields). Captured only for error sessions; not for ordinary browsing.

Without consent, all three are disabled. Sentry continues to capture error events (no replay, no session) under our legitimate interest in keeping the service working.

Plugin telemetry

The Aether plugin sends the following information to our servers:

• License activation: when you first activate Aether on a machine, we receive your license key, your operating system name, and your computer's machine name (the name you gave your computer in System Settings) so the activation is recognizable in your account's device list.
• License checks: the plugin periodically validates that your license is still active. These checks include an opaque, locally-derived SHA-256 machine-ID hash (truncated to 8 hexadecimal characters) so we can correlate activations to a single device without storing any directly identifying hardware information.
• Crash and diagnostic reports (opt-in):if you opt in via Aether's Settings → General → Privacy, the plugin sends two kinds of reports.
  • Crash reports when a crash occurs: the plugin version, the host DAW name, the operating system, the same opaque machine-ID hash, the crash signal, the stack trace, and the raw crash log.
  • Diagnostic reports when the plugin detects an AI generation failure (for example, a request that returns no usable output): the plugin version, the host DAW name, the operating system, the same opaque machine-ID hash, and a structured trace of how the request was processed. For diagnostic reports specifically, the trace can include the prompt you sent to the AI provider and the AI provider's response, because that data is what we need to diagnose the bug. We use these reports solely to fix the underlying issue and never for any other purpose.
  The single opt-in toggle covers both report types and is off by default. You can disable it at any time from the same Settings panel.

What we do not collect during normal use

Aether connects to third-party AI providers (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) using API keys you supply. During normal use we never see, store, or transmit your API keys, your prompts, or the AI's responses. Those communications go directly from your computer to the AI provider you chose. The one exception is the diagnostic-reports opt-in described above: when you have explicitly enabled it AND the plugin detects an AI generation failure, the trace uploaded with that specific failed request can include the prompt and response involved. We never receive prompts or responses from successful requests.

3. Legal basis (EU/UK visitors)

For visitors in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we process your information on the following legal bases under the GDPR / UK GDPR:

• Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)): processing your account, license, and order so we can deliver the service you bought.
• Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)): baseline error monitoring (Sentry error events without replay), fraud prevention, and keeping the service secure and operational.
• Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)): Sentry session replay, Vercel Analytics, Vercel Speed Insights, and opt-in plugin crash reports. You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)): retaining transaction and tax records as required by law.

4. How we use your information

• To create and manage your account and deliver license keys.
• To process purchases, refunds, and customer-support requests.
• To detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and license sharing.
• To diagnose crashes and fix bugs (only with your consent for the corresponding telemetry).
• To send essential service emails (purchase receipts, password resets, security notices). We do not send marketing emails without separate opt-in.
• To meet our tax, accounting, and other legal obligations.

5. Third parties we share with

We do not sell your personal information. We share specific data with the following processors strictly as needed to operate the service:

• Paddle.com Market Limited (Merchant of Record) — payment processing, tax handling, fraud screening, refunds.
• Supabase Inc. (US, runs on AWS) — authentication and database hosting for accounts, profiles, licenses, and webhook event records.
• Vercel Inc. (US) — website and serverless function hosting, plus consented Web Analytics and Speed Insights.
• Cloudflare, Inc. (US) — DNS, content delivery, and R2 object storage for plugin installer downloads.
• Functional Software, Inc. dba Sentry (US) — error monitoring and (with consent) session replay.

When you use Aether with a third-party AI provider, your prompts and API keys go directly between your computer and that provider — Umbral Audio is not involved in or aware of that traffic. Each provider has its own privacy policy.

6. International transfers

Our processors are located primarily in the United States. If you access the service from the EEA or the UK, your information will be transferred to the US. Where required, transfers are covered by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) and equivalent UK addenda, which our processors maintain with their sub-processors.

7. How long we keep it

Retention windows reflect what our system actually does today. Where windows are governed by a third-party plan, we list both our own action and the upstream limit.

• Account credentials and profile (email, name, billing customer IDs): kept while your account exists. Deleted from our active database immediately on account deletion.
• License records (key, amount, dates, transaction references): retained indefinitely for tax, accounting, and fraud-prevention purposes. The email field on the license record is scrubbed when you delete your account; the financial record itself survives.
• Download history (IP address, user agent, version downloaded): kept while your account exists; cascade-deleted when you delete your account.
• Webhook event records (incoming events from Paddle): personal-data fields inside the event payload (name, email, address, phone, receipt URL, dispute evidence) are stripped automatically after 7 days by a scheduled job. The structural metadata of the event (event type, status, internal IDs) is retained indefinitely so we can replay or audit the event flow.
• Waitlist entries: kept until you ask us to remove you, you create an account using the same email, or you delete your account.
• Crash reports (only if you opted in): retained indefinitely. Crash reports do not contain your name, email, IP address, or any field that directly identifies you. They contain a hashed device identifier that we cannot reverse, plus the technical crash diagnostics described in §2. If you delete your account, the linkage between any prior crash report and your former license is broken because the identifying field on the underlying license is scrubbed.
• Authentication sessions: access tokens valid for 1 hour; refresh tokens valid for 30 days (Supabase defaults). Invalidated when you sign out or delete your account.
• Database backups (Supabase Free tier): daily backups retained for 7 days. Deleted account data may persist in a backup for up to 7 days before backup rotation removes it.
• Server logs (Vercel Hobby tier): runtime logs are not persisted long-term — typically available for at most one hour for live debugging.
• Error events and session replays (Sentry Free tier): retained for up to 30 days, then deleted by Sentry per their plan.
• Web analytics (Vercel Web Analytics): aggregate-only, retained per Vercel's plan defaults; no per-visitor data is stored.

8. Your rights

Subject to applicable law, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Rectify information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Erase your personal information ("right to be forgotten"). You can delete your account from the account settings page; this triggers the deletion and scrubbing actions described in §7.
• Restrict or object to certain processing, including processing based on legitimate interest.
• Data portability — receive a copy of the personal information you provided in a machine-readable format.
• Withdraw consent at any time for processing that relies on consent (such as Sentry session replay or opt-in crash reports). You can do this via the cookie banner on the website or the Privacy section of the plugin's Settings panel.

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@umbralaudio.com. We will respond within 30 days.

If you are in the EEA or the UK and believe we have not handled your information lawfully, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority.

9. Cookies and tracking

We use only essential cookies for authentication session management. Tracking and analytics (Sentry session replay, Vercel Analytics, Vercel Speed Insights) are disabled until you accept them via the cookie banner. You can change your choice at any time by clearing the umbral-cookie-consententry from your browser's local storage; the banner will reappear on your next visit.

10. Children

Our service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us at privacy@umbralaudio.com and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date at the top will reflect the most recent change. We will notify registered users by email of material changes before they take effect. Continued use of the service after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

12. Contact

Privacy questions, data-subject requests, complaints: privacy@umbralaudio.com.

See also our Terms of Service and Refund Policy.