1. About this policy
This Privacy Policy explains how Castify LLC (“Castify,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, shares and protects personal information when you use the castify ai app, the castify.fm website, the castify web app, shared episode pages and related services (the “Service”). It is part of our Terms of Service. Words we define in the Terms have the same meaning here.
Castify is the “controller” (or “business”) responsible for your personal information. If you do not agree with this policy, please do not use the Service.
2. Information we collect
Information you give us
- Account and sign-in information. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive a unique user identifier and, if you choose to share them, your first name, last name and email address (which may be an Apple private relay address). If you continue as a guest, we create a random guest identifier. If you edit your profile, we store the name you enter. A profile photo you add stays on your device.
- Onboarding answers. For example your age, your age range, what you study or do (such as high school, college, nursing, grad school, work or teaching), how often you get new material, how you heard about us, and the host you prefer.
- Material you upload or enter. Documents, PDFs, slides, spreadsheets, photos and images (including photos of notes, textbooks and whiteboards), audio and video files, pasted text, links, books you search for, topics, follow-up answers, focus choices, and instructions such as “make it better” requests. This material may contain personal information about you or others.
- Voice and conversations. When you use voice typing or talk to a host, we process recordings of your voice and the text of what you and the host say. See Section 6.
- Public and social information. Your username or handle, display name, bio, episodes and collections you share or publish, classes and study groups you create or join, follows, reports you submit, and your daily digest settings (such as the time and your time zone offset).
- Study activity. Progress through episodes and classes, quiz answers and scores, questions you missed, and collections and exams you create (exam names and dates are stored on your device).
- Feedback and communications. Ratings, likes, written feedback, support requests, survey answers, and anything you send us by email.
- Purchases. Purchases are made through Apple. We do not receive your full payment card details. We receive information such as the product you bought, transaction identifiers, price and currency, subscription status, renewal and trial dates, and credits. If we offer web purchases, our payment processor handles your card and shares with us your email, purchase and subscription details.
- Referrals and promotions. Your referral code, codes you redeem, and who referred whom.
Information collected automatically
- Usage information. How you use the Service, such as screens viewed, features used, buttons tapped, episodes created, played, finished or shared, listening progress, hosts, formats and lengths chosen, paywalls viewed, trials and purchases, errors and performance, and the dates and times of these events. This can include details such as episode titles and the names, types and sizes of files you upload.
- Device and technical information. Device type, operating system and version, app version, language and region settings, time zone, approximate location inferred from your IP address (city or country level), network information, and identifiers such as app-specific user IDs, analytics IDs, push notification tokens and, if you allow tracking, the device advertising identifier (IDFA).
- Advertising and attribution information. Information about the ad, campaign or link that led you to install or open the app, and whether you made a purchase or started a trial afterwards. See Section 5.
- Permissions you grant. Your choices about notifications and tracking, and, when you use them, camera and microphone input. We do not access your contacts or precise GPS location.
- Web storage. On our website and web app we use your browser's local storage to keep you signed in and remember settings (such as a guest ID, language and audio quality). We do not currently use advertising cookies or tracking pixels on our website, but embedded content we show (such as TikTok videos) and sign-in buttons (such as Google) may set their own cookies.
Information from others
- Apple, Google and other sign-in providers (as described above).
- Apple and our subscription tools, about purchases, renewals, cancellations and refunds.
- Advertising and attribution partners, about the campaigns that led to your install.
- Other users, for example when someone invites you to a class, shares an episode with you or reports content.
- Public sources, such as websites and search results our research features read on your behalf.
3. How we use information
We use personal information for the following purposes:
- To provide the Service: creating your account; reading and extracting text from your material (including by optical character recognition and speech-to-text); researching topics; writing scripts; generating voices, audio, transcripts, captions, covers, summaries, flashcards and quizzes; running voice conversations; remembering your episodes, collections and preferences; syncing across devices; and delivering shared and published content.
- To personalize the Service: suggesting topics, next parts, hosts and formats; adapting episodes to your level, language and goals; and organizing your episodes into collections.
- To improve and develop: understanding how the Service is used, fixing bugs, testing new features (including A/B tests), measuring quality, and building new products and features.
- To train and improve AI: using Your Content, Output and usage information, in de-identified or aggregated form where reasonably possible, to train, fine-tune, evaluate and improve the AI models, prompts, voices and systems we use or build. You can opt out (Section 4).
- To communicate with you: notifications that an episode is ready, reminders you set, daily digests, service and account messages, responses to your requests, and, where allowed, news and offers.
- To process purchases and benefits: managing subscriptions, free trials, credits, referral rewards and promotions, and preventing abuse of them.
- Marketing and advertising: measuring and improving our advertising, finding new users who may like castify, and promoting the Service, including by featuring public content and public reviews as described in our Terms.
- Safety, security and integrity: detecting and preventing fraud, abuse, spam, prompt-injection and other attacks, moderating content, enforcing our Terms, and protecting users, Castify and the public.
- Legal: complying with law, responding to lawful requests, establishing or defending legal claims, and keeping records.
- With your consent or at your direction: any other purpose we describe to you when we collect the information.
We may also create de-identified or aggregated information that does not reasonably identify you and use it for any lawful purpose. We will not attempt to re-identify de-identified information except as permitted by law.
4. AI training and your choices
castify gets better by learning from how it is used. Unless you opt out, we may use Your Content (such as material you upload, topics and instructions), the Output generated for you, your feedback and your interactions with hosts to train, fine-tune and evaluate AI models and to improve our prompts, voices and systems. We take reasonable steps to remove or reduce direct identifiers before using data for training, and we do not use the contents of your private uploads to train models that generate content shown publicly with your identity attached.
To opt out of having your content used to train AI models, email nate@castifyapp.com with the subject “AI training opt-out” from the email associated with your account (or include your account details). Opting out applies going forward; it does not affect models already trained. We will still process your content as needed to provide the Service to you, keep it safe and comply with law.
Our AI service providers process your content to provide their services to us. We choose providers and settings intended to prevent them from using your content to train their own general-purpose models, but their practices are governed by their own terms.
6. Voice features and recordings
- Talking to a host. When you talk to a host, your microphone audio is streamed to our servers and sent to our speech provider to turn it into text. The text, together with the episode's title and transcript and your recent conversation, is sent to an AI model to write the host's reply, which is then turned into speech. We do not store your raw voice recordings from these conversations on our servers; the text of your conversation may appear temporarily in our system logs, and your recent conversation history is saved on your device so the host can remember it.
- Voice typing. When you dictate a topic, your device's speech recognition (provided by Apple) converts it to text. Apple may process that audio under its own privacy policy.
- Uploaded audio and video. Audio or video files you upload are transcribed by our speech provider so they can be turned into episodes.
- Voices of others. Do not record or upload other people's voices without permission where it is required.
We do not use voice recordings to identify you by your voice (we do not create voiceprints).
7. Public content and what others can see
Episodes are private to you unless you share or publish them, but please understand how sharing works:
- An episode's page and audio can be opened by anyone who has its link or identifier. Treat a share link like the episode itself.
- Episode details available through a shared link may include its title, hosts, length, creation date and the list of sources it was made from, including links to files you uploaded. Do not upload material you would not want viewed by people you share an episode with.
- Published content is reviewed before it appears on Explore and may be removed or hidden at any time.
- Unsharing or unpublishing stops new access through castify, but copies may remain where others saved, downloaded or shared them, in caches, and in our backups for a period.
8. How long we keep information
We keep personal information for as long as your account is active and for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy, including to provide the Service, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, prevent abuse and comply with legal, tax and accounting obligations. In general:
- Account and profile information: while your account exists, then deleted or de-identified after you delete your account, except as described below.
- Your uploads, episodes, transcripts and generated content: while your account exists or until you delete them, plus a limited period in backups. Content that you shared or published, or that was incorporated into de-identified data or trained models, may persist as explained in our Terms.
- Usage, analytics and log data: generally for up to 36 months, or longer in aggregated or de-identified form.
- Purchase and subscription records: as long as required for tax, accounting and legal purposes (often up to 7 years).
- Security and abuse records: as long as reasonably necessary to protect the Service.
Information stored on your device (such as downloaded episodes, collections and voice conversation history) stays until you delete it or the app.
9. Your controls
- Download your data: in the app, go to Settings › Privacy › Download my data. You can also email us for a copy of the information we hold.
- Delete your account: in the app, go to Settings › Privacy › Delete account, or email nate@castifyapp.com with the subject “Delete my account.” We will delete or de-identify your personal information within 30 days of a verified request, except information we must or may keep under Section 8 or applicable law. Deleting your account does not cancel your Apple subscription; cancel it in your Apple ID settings.
- Delete individual episodes in your library.
- Tracking: control whether apps can track you in iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking.
- Notifications: turn them off in iOS Settings or in the app.
- Camera and microphone: you can revoke access at any time in iOS Settings; some features will stop working.
- AI training: opt out as described in Section 4.
- Marketing emails: unsubscribe using the link in the email or by contacting us.
10. Security
We use administrative, technical and physical measures designed to protect personal information, such as encryption in transit, access controls and reputable cloud providers. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of your information. You are responsible for keeping your device and sign-in methods secure. If we learn of a security incident affecting your personal information, we will notify you and authorities where required by law.
11. Your rights in the United States
Depending on where you live (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon and other states with consumer privacy laws), and subject to exceptions and applicability thresholds, you may have the right to:
- know what personal information we have collected about you, its sources, our purposes, and the categories of third parties we disclose it to;
- access and get a copy of your personal information in a portable format;
- correct inaccurate personal information;
- delete your personal information;
- opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information and of targeted advertising;
- opt out of profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects (we do not make such decisions);
- limit the use of sensitive personal information (we do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you); and
- not be discriminated against for exercising your rights.
Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. We do not sell personal information for money. We do share limited information with advertising partners as described in Section 5, which may be a “sale” or “sharing” under some laws. To opt out, choose “Ask App Not to Track” when prompted (or turn off tracking for castify in iOS Settings), and email nate@castifyapp.com with the subject “Do not sell or share.” We also honor Global Privacy Control signals on our website where required.
We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16.
Categories (California notice). In the past 12 months we have collected: identifiers (such as name, email, user IDs, device and advertising IDs); customer records (name, email); characteristics of protected classifications (age); commercial information (purchases, subscriptions, credits); internet or other electronic network activity (usage and interaction data); approximate geolocation (from IP address and region settings); audio and electronic information (voice recordings, uploaded audio and video); professional or education information (such as your school level, field of study, classes and quiz results); and inferences drawn from the above (such as interests and preferences). We collect these from the sources and for the purposes described in Sections 2 and 3, and disclose them to the categories of recipients in Section 5. Identifiers, commercial information and network activity may be shared with advertising partners.
Making a request. Email nate@castifyapp.com with the subject “Privacy request” and tell us what you want. We will verify your request by matching information you provide with what we hold, and may ask for more information to do so. You may use an authorized agent, who must provide proof of authorization. If we deny your request, you may appeal by replying with the subject “Privacy appeal”; if you are not satisfied, you may contact your state attorney general.
12. Your rights in the EEA, UK and elsewhere
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or another country with similar laws, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the processing of your personal information, to data portability, to withdraw consent at any time (without affecting earlier processing), and to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. Contact us as described in Section 11 to exercise these rights.
Legal bases. We process personal information where it is necessary to perform our contract with you (providing the Service); for our legitimate interests (such as improving and securing the Service, analytics, preventing abuse, developing and training AI models, and marketing our own Service), which we balance against your rights; with your consent (such as tracking for advertising, push notifications, and where required for analytics or marketing); and to comply with legal obligations. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests, including AI training and direct marketing.
International transfers. Castify is based in the United States, and our service providers may process information in the United States and other countries whose laws may differ from yours. Where required, we rely on safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or other lawful transfer mechanisms.
13. Children and teens
The Service is not directed to children under 13, and our age selection starts at 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or under the minimum age required in your country). If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it. Teens aged 13 to 17 should use the Service only with a parent's or guardian's permission. Parents and guardians can contact us to review or delete their teen's information. Mature hosts are intended for adults only.
14. Third-party sites and services
The Service may link to or embed third-party websites, videos, sources and services. We are not responsible for their privacy practices. Please read their policies.
15. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. We will post the updated version with a new “Last updated” date and, for material changes, give notice in the app, on our website or by email, and obtain consent where required by law. Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it.
16. Contact us
For questions, requests or complaints about privacy, email nate@castifyapp.com.
Castify LLC, Massachusetts, United States.