Privacy Policy

Effective and last updated: July 20, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Joseph Ou, operating as Solvenar, in California, USA (Solvenar, we, us) handles information in the public Solvenar application, on the Solvenar website, and through purchases, support, and license recovery. Solvenar is the controller of the information described here. Contact: me@josephou.com.

The short version

1. Information that stays on your device

Your photos, videos, thumbnails, extracted frames, captions, search queries, embeddings, face crops, face embeddings, person names and labels, file names, file paths, location metadata read from media, and search index remain on your device when you use the public app. Solvenar does not transmit them to us or to our service providers.

2. Information we and our providers process

Purchases and licenses. Paddle is our authorized reseller and merchant of record. Paddle processes the identity, billing, payment, tax, fraud-prevention, and transaction information needed for checkout. We do not receive your full payment-card number. We receive and store your email address, purchased tier, license key, transaction reference, and refund or chargeback status so we can deliver, recover, upgrade, and administer your license. Supabase hosts the license records and Resend delivers license emails.

Waitlist and support. If you join the waitlist or contact us, we process the email address, message, and other information you choose to provide. We use it to send the requested launch messages or respond to you. You may unsubscribe from non-transactional email at any time.

License recovery and upgrade requests. Our endpoints process the email address, license key or transaction reference submitted, along with IP address, timestamp, and basic request data. Short-lived logs are used for security, abuse prevention, troubleshooting, and rate limiting.

Website and downloads. A website or download host ordinarily receives IP address, requested URL or file, date and time, browser or client type, and similar connection data. Our site loads Paddle.js on commerce pages so Paddle may receive this type of data before you open checkout. GitHub receives connection data when you download a Solvenar release, or if you turn on the app's optional update check (off by default — see below). Model hosts receive it when the app downloads a model. We serve fonts and other page assets from our own site rather than a third-party font network. We do not use website analytics or advertising trackers. Our commerce pages use cookies or similar local storage that Paddle needs to run and secure checkout; we do not set advertising or analytics cookies.

Interactive website demo. The search demo on our website ranks results in your browser, but the words you type into a free-form demo search are sent to our embedding service, and its third-party model provider, to convert your text into a numeric vector. We use that text only to return demo results in the moment; we do not use it to identify you and do not keep it as a record tied to you. Preset example searches use precomputed vectors and send nothing. This demo is separate from the downloadable app, which searches entirely on your device.

3. Network connections made by the public app

The public app's external connections are limited to downloading local AI or face models when a feature first needs them, and (only if you enable it in settings) checking for a newer release. The update check is off by default — the app never contacts GitHub on its own until you turn it on — and even when enabled it only compares the installed version number against the latest release tag; no code is downloaded automatically. Those requests contain no information about your library. Activation, captioning, indexing, search, and face processing work offline.

Developer and evaluation tools present in the source repository may support other backends, but they are not part of the public distributed application or the local-only commitments in this Policy.

4. Why we process information

Depending on your location, we rely on:

• Contract performance: checkout coordination, license delivery, recovery, upgrades, refunds, and support requested by you.
• Legitimate interests: securing our endpoints, preventing abuse and fraud, maintaining transaction records, diagnosing delivery problems, and operating the website, balanced against your privacy rights.
• Consent: optional waitlist or marketing messages where consent is required. You may withdraw consent at any time.
• Legal obligations: tax, accounting, fraud, sanctions, consumer-protection, and lawful-request requirements that apply to us or Paddle.

5. Providers and disclosures

We use Paddle (checkout, merchant of record, and payment support), Supabase (license and waitlist storage and serverless endpoints), Resend (email delivery), GitHub (release hosting), our website host, the embedding service and its model provider that power our website search demo, and the applicable model download hosts. Each provider processes information for its stated function under its own terms and privacy notice. None receives your media library from the public app.

We may disclose limited information when required by law, to protect users or the security and rights of Solvenar, or as part of a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale of the Product subject to appropriate safeguards. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Providers may process information outside your state or country. Where legally required, we and our providers use recognized safeguards for international transfers, such as adequacy decisions or approved contractual clauses.

6. Retention

We retain license and transaction records while needed to provide recovery and administer the license, and longer where required for tax, accounting, fraud, or legal obligations. Recovery and security logs are retained only as long as reasonably necessary for abuse prevention and troubleshooting. Waitlist data is kept until you unsubscribe or request deletion. Support correspondence is kept as long as reasonably needed to resolve and document the request.

We delete or de-identify information when it is no longer needed for these purposes. If you ask us to delete the only server-side copy of a license record, lost-key recovery and future upgrades for that purchase will permanently stop; an unrevoked key you retained will continue to verify offline.

7. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to processing, and receive a portable copy of personal information. You may withdraw consent and unsubscribe from marketing. You may also complain to your local privacy or data-protection authority.

Send requests to me@josephou.com. We may need to verify your identity. We will not discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right. Some information may be retained where required by law or needed to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

Because your library information never reaches us, we cannot access, export, or delete it for you; use the Product's local controls or delete its local data.

8. Security

We minimize the information we keep, use encrypted transport for our public endpoints, restrict database access, and protect the private signing key used to create licenses. No storage or transmission method is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

9. Children

Solvenar is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Where local law requires a higher age for a child to consent to data processing, a parent or guardian must act for the child. Contact us if you believe a child provided information improperly.

10. Changes

We will post revisions here and update the date above. If a change materially affects how we use information already collected, we will provide reasonable advance notice when practicable and obtain consent where required by law. If the Product's local-only architecture or telemetry practices change, we will update this Policy before that change reaches the public app.

Privacy questions or requests: me@josephou.com.