Last reviewed 9 October 2026
Privacy policy
ArtDaddy is a desktop application. Your footage, your projects and your edits stay on your computer. The only things that leave are the AI requests you explicitly make, plus a small amount of usage data described in full below.
What never leaves your machine
- Your media. Files are referenced where they already sit on disk. They are not copied to a cloud library and they are not uploaded in order to be edited.
- Editing and export. Rendering runs locally through a bundled copy of ffmpeg. Exported files are written to a folder you choose.
- Transcription. Speech-to-text runs on your own machine using Whisper. Audio is not sent anywhere for captioning or search.
- Your projects. A project is an ordinary folder on your disk.
The application is open source under GPL-3.0, so none of the above has to be taken on trust — the code that touches your files is public.
What is sent, and when
When you use an AI feature
Asking the agent to do something, generating a shot, or asking a question about footage sends a request through our hosted service to an AI provider. Depending on the feature, that request contains:
- the text of your prompt;
- a description of your current timeline and media, so the agent knows what it is editing;
- for questions about footage specifically (for example "find the moment where she laughs"), frames or audio from the clip you asked about.
If you never use an AI feature, none of this happens. ArtDaddy is a complete editor without it.
Your account
Signing in stores your email address and display name, handled by Clerk. We use the email to identify your credit balance and to contact you about the product.
To keep you signed in, the app saves a sign-in token on your computer, in your system's credential store (Keychain on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows, the Secret Service keyring on Linux). On Linux with no keyring service, it is saved instead in a file only your user account can read, in the app's settings folder. Signing out deletes it.
Usage records
We record the following so we can tell a product that is working from one that is quietly broken for everybody:
- credits consumed, and the AI model each request used;
- the text of prompts you send to the agent, stored against your account;
- which editing tools the agent called, the arguments it passed them, whether each succeeded, and the text of the agent's replies;
- application events — launch, project opened, media imported, export finished or failed, and a sample of how fast speech transcription ran and on which kind of processor (never what was said) — and error messages, which can include file paths on your machine;
- crash and error reports, via Sentry.
We keep prompt text indefinitely rather than expiring it, because it is the record of what people actually ask the product to do. Agent activity is kept for 400 days. None of it is sold, shared with advertisers, or used to train any model.
When you send feedback
Rating a reply or choosing Report this problem uploads that conversation, your timeline, and your project files — never the media itself — so we can reproduce what went wrong. It is only sent when you take that action, and it is deleted automatically after 60 days.
This website
artdaddy.app sets no cookies and stores no IP addresses. A visitor is counted as a salted hash that is regenerated every day, so visits cannot be linked to a person or followed across days. We record the page, the referring site, and coarse browser and operating-system buckets.
Who else processes your data
| Service | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Google (Gemini / Vertex AI) | Video, image, music and voiceover generation; questions about footage; the agent when a Gemini model is selected |
| Microsoft Azure OpenAI | The agent when a GPT model is selected; GPT-Image generation |
| Microsoft (MAI) | MAI image generation |
| Microsoft Azure | Hosting and the usage database |
| Clerk | Sign-in, email address and display name |
| Sentry | Crash and error reports |
| Cloudflare | Serving this website |
| GitHub | Hosting the source code and the release downloads |
AI providers process the content of requests you make under their own terms. We do not grant them permission to train on your content, and we do not sell data to anyone.
What we have not done yet
Being straight about the gaps rather than implying a maturity we do not have:
- There is no switch to turn off usage reporting yet. Usage events are only sent while you are signed in; crash reports are sent whenever the app hits an error, signed in or not.
- This policy is shown during installation on Windows. The macOS and Linux downloads have no installer to show it in, so there it is linked from this website only.
- There is no self-service data export or deletion. Email us and we will do it by hand.
This page will be updated when any of these change, not before.
Deleting your data
Email support@artdaddy.app and we will delete your account, your credit records and your stored prompts. Your projects and media are on your own disk and were never ours to delete.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is sent off your machine, the date at the top changes and the change is noted in the release notes for the version that introduces it.