Privacy
Merlynux is built on one promise: your work remains your work. This page says what we keep, what we do with it, who else touches it, and how to get rid of it. It describes the product as it is built today, during the Founding Author beta, not as we hope it will be.
Last updated 29 September 2026
What we keep
| Your email address | To create your account, sign you in, and send sign-in and password emails. |
| Your name | Optional. Used to address you in the interface and to show collaborators who did what. |
| What you bring — recordings, documents, photos, notes | This is the material Merlynux reads for you. It is the reason the product exists. |
| What is derived from it | Transcripts, summaries, memories, connections, outlines, chapter drafts, your manuscript and its history. Stored alongside your material, in your studio. |
| Your conversations with Merlynux | Kept so you can return to them. They are part of your studio, not a separate record. |
| Transcription minutes used | Audio is metered by the minute, so we record how many minutes each studio has used. |
| Feedback you send | Your words, the page you were on, your browser and screen size, the time, and the version of Merlynux you were using — only if you leave that on. Never your material. |
| A few milestones | Whether an account has made its first capture, opened the Laboratory, kept a connection, made a book, saved a manuscript, and come back — as timestamps only, so we can tell whether the product is working for founding authors. Never what was captured or written. |
| Payment records | If you buy something: what and whether it is active. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach our servers. Founding authors are not charged. |
We use no tracking pixels, no advertising identifiers and no third-party analytics. The only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in. Your browser may keep an unsent draft of a chapter or a message locally so that nothing is lost if a page closes.
What we do not do with it
We do not train AI models on your work, and we have no training pipeline that could. Your material is read to help you and for nothing else. It is not pooled with other people’s material, not used to improve a shared model, and not sold or licensed to anyone.
People who run Merlynux can technically reach the database that holds your studio; they do not open your material except when you ask for help with something specific, when it is needed to fix a fault you have reported, or where the law requires it. Operator screens show counts, timestamps and the feedback you chose to send — not your writing.
Who else touches your data
Merlynux is assembled from a small number of services. Each receives only what it needs to do its job:
| Supabase | Holds your account, your files and everything derived from them, in a private store scoped to your studio. Sends the sign-in, invitation and password emails. |
| Vercel | Hosts and serves the application. |
| Merlynux's own studio machine | During the beta, transcription, reading and thinking run on a computer we operate ourselves, with models that run on that machine. Your material goes there to be read and comes back as results; nothing about it leaves that machine for a model provider. |
| Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), Deepgram | Cloud model and transcription providers Merlynux can be switched to. They are not used for beta accounts today. If that changes, this page will say so first, and only providers whose terms do not permit training on customer material will be used. |
| Google Fonts | Serves the typefaces. Google sees the request for the font file, as with most websites. |
| Expo | Delivers notifications to the iPhone app, if you use it. A notification may name the recording or document it is about. |
| Stripe | Processes payment if you buy something. Receives your card details directly — we never see or store them. |
Sharing a studio
A studio can have more than one person in it. Everyone in a studio sees its shared material, books, notes and Laboratory sessions, with their name on what they did. A capture you mark private is seen by you alone; it is never read into shared work, and it leaves with you if you leave. Only the owner can invite people or change what they may do.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account at any time from Settings, on the web or in the iPhone app. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. It removes your account, every studio you alone own with everything in it — files, transcripts, memories, books, drafts, conversations — and your private captures anywhere else.
A studio you share with someone else is not destroyed, because their work is in it too: it passes to the longest-standing other member, and your name is removed from that studio’s history — the record of what was done stays, without saying who.
Database backups are kept for up to seven days and then roll off; deleted material may exist in a backup for that long and is not restored from it. Payment records are kept where the law requires it; they contain none of your material.
Taking your work with you
Download everything in Settings gives you your studio as files: each source with its transcript, each book’s chapters, and what Merlynux has come to know. Original recordings and documents can be downloaded one by one from the Library; a bundle of all originals is on the way. A book can be exported as a document at any time.
Where your data lives
Data is stored and processed in the United States. If you use Merlynux from elsewhere, your material is transferred there.
Children
Merlynux is not intended for anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information.
Changes
If this notice changes in a way that affects what we do with your material, we will say so in Merlynux before the change takes effect, and by email where we can reach you.
Contact
Questions about anything here, or a request about your data: contact@fairycauldron.com. See also the beta terms.
