Privacy Policy

Podify ("we", "us") turns a YouTube channel into a searchable set of pages — one per episode, plus search across the whole catalog. This page explains what we collect to do that, who we share it with, and how to have it deleted.

Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is Cristian Filimon, trading as Amaze Labs (NZBN 9429053396341), New Zealand, at Unit G06, 1 Potiki Place, Glen Innes, Auckland 1072, New Zealand. For anything on this page — a question, an access request, a deletion request — email [email protected].

Why we're allowed to hold it

If you are in the UK or the EU, data protection law asks us to name a lawful basis for each thing we do with your data. Here they are.

Account information

You can create an account with Google or with an email address and password. Either way we store your email address, and — if you used Google — the name and profile picture Google shares with us. Your email is your identity in Podify: it is how we recognize you across sign-in methods.

Signing in with Google

When you sign in with Google, we request exactly three scopes: openid, email and profile. That gives us your Google account's email address, name, and profile picture — nothing else. We do not request offline access, and we never see or store your Google access or refresh tokens, so we cannot read your Gmail, Drive, YouTube account, Calendar, or anything else in your Google account.

Your channel and content

To build your hub we pull public information about the YouTube channel you connect: its video catalog, titles, thumbnails, publish dates, and captions. On the free trial and on paid plans, when we upgrade your episodes to Enhanced Transcript, that also means audio sent to our transcription provider for that purpose only — this happens automatically as part of the plan, not as something you turn on separately. This is the same content already public on your channel — we don't access anything private to your Google account to get it.

Images you upload

If you upload a banner or avatar image for your public hub, we store the file on our own server (not a third-party image host), scoped to your account. Uploads are limited to 5MB and to JPEG, PNG, or WebP images.

Searches

When someone searches a public hub, we keep the words they typed so the creator can see what their audience searches for. We keep it in aggregate: one row per hub per distinct phrase, with a counter for how many times it was searched and the first and last time we saw it. Alongside that total we keep a counter per outcome for the same phrase — how many times it found nothing, how many times it found only weak matches, and how many times it found a good answer — so a phrase that once failed and later succeeds shows both, instead of one erasing the other. We do not store who searched, we do not link it to an account or a visitor, and we do not keep a per-search timeline. A creator searching their own archive from the dashboard is not recorded at all: that endpoint writes nothing, so those phrases never enter any list. We keep this for 24 months from the last time a phrase was searched, then delete it automatically.

We store these phrases in our own database. To find matches, a meaning search also sends the words typed to OpenAI, which turns them into the search vector; nothing about who searched goes with them. They are never sent to Google Analytics or to any other analytics tool, which only ever receive the length of a search, how many results it returned, whether it was a keyword or a meaning search, and which hub it ran on — never the words themselves.

Emails collected before you have an account

Our homepage lets you preview your channel before signing up: paste your channel link and email, and we show you what your hub would look like. We store that email together with the channel link you pasted and the public facts we looked up about it — its ID, title, and video count — plus when you gave consent. All of it is stored separately from any account: it does not create an account, does not sign you in to anything, and doesn't grant access to anything. We use it only to follow up about your hub.

Because this email exists with no account behind it, deleting it is a separate request from deleting an account (see "Deleting your data" below) — email us and we'll remove it, whether or not you ever signed up.

Who we share data with

We use a small set of service providers to run Podify, each only for the purpose below. None of them are permitted to use your data for their own purposes.

• OpenAI — generates the search embeddings and summaries behind your hub's search and episode pages, from your channel's public video content, and receives the words typed into a meaning search, which it turns into the search vector, as well as the query a creator types for a topic they add by hand.
• Google (YouTube Data API) — we query it for your channel's public catalog and metadata.
• Google (Tag Manager / Analytics) — with your consent, measures how the product is used in your browser. Accepting only Marketing loads our container too, and its analytics tags then send Google cookieless pings, without Analytics cookies. Separately, our server sends it a few billing events tied to an internal account identifier, but only if you accepted Analytics at your latest checkout: they carry the browser identifier recorded there, and switching Analytics off later does not withdraw it from them. See our Cookie Policy for exactly what that means and what your choice does and does not control.
• SocialKit — on the free trial and on paid plans, when we upgrade your episodes to Enhanced Transcript, it turns your video link into a temporary audio link. The audio never passes through our servers.
• AssemblyAI — on the free trial and on paid plans, when we upgrade your episodes to Enhanced Transcript, it receives that temporary link and fetches the audio directly to transcribe it.
• Lemon Squeezy — our merchant-of-record for paid plans. They handle your payment details directly; we only ever see the resulting subscription status, never your card number.
• Resend — sends transactional email on our behalf (email verification links, password resets, billing and sync notifications). We never email you a link that signs you in.

We do not sell your data. We use Google Analytics to understand how the product is used — see "Cookies" below and our Cookie Policy for what runs only with your consent and what does not.

Cookies

We set the cookies sign-in needs without asking: one that keeps you signed in for 30 days, plus a few our authentication library uses to protect the sign-in form against cross-site request forgery and to complete the Google round-trip — those end with your browser session, or within 15 minutes for the Google round-trip. They are HTTP-only (not readable by page scripts); the one that keeps you signed in is cleared when you sign out or delete your account.

Beyond those, a banner asks for your consent before we store or read anything else in your browser, with three exceptions we name rather than hide: YouTube's own cookies, in the paragraph below; the small marker that keeps a creator's own visits out of their counts, under "Counting visits to your hub"; and "ykb.hub-q", a cookie that carries the text you searched for in a creator's widget to their hub, kept for 60 seconds at most and deleted the first time the results show. Nothing we run through Google Analytics or for marketing starts in your browser until you accept it, and you can change your choice at any time. Our own visit counts, under "Counting visits to your hub", and the search phrases, under "Searches", do not wait for that choice: they go to our own server without a cookie, and a meaning search passes its words on to OpenAI as described there. The billing events our Cookie Policy describes follow the Analytics choice at your latest checkout, not your current one. Our Cookie Policy covers exactly what we store, the two categories your choice controls, and how a revoked choice takes effect.

One thing worth naming, because it happens on our domain: episode and topic pages, a search result once you play it, and a creator's widget once you open a video in it, embed the YouTube player. We load the player in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode, from youtube-nocookie.com, where YouTube sets no cookies when the player loads. But episode and topic pages also load YouTube's player script from youtube.com as soon as they open, and youtube.com can set its own cookies then; once you press play, YouTube may also keep data in your browser's local storage. Those are Google's, governed by Google's privacy policy, and we can neither read nor control them.

On a hub, the creator can also run a Google Analytics property of their own, separate from ours — governed by the Analytics switch on our banner, not a second one. It is theirs, not ours: we never read what it collects. Our Cookie Policy names exactly what it sends and how a revoked choice takes effect for it.

Counting visits to your hub

We count visits to your public hub — page views, jumps to a transcript timestamp, and searches — without a cookie and without any identifier that follows a visitor from one day to the next.

To tell how many distinct people visited on a given day, we briefly process each visitor's IP address and browser user agent when a page is opened or a timestamp is jumped to: we combine them with a value that rotates once a day and hash the result immediately, so a repeat visitor can be told apart from a new one without the IP address or user agent being stored with the count. Only that one-way hash is stored, and it — along with the daily value it is built from — is deleted within 3 days. Separately, to hold the rate limit, your IP address is kept in our server's memory: it is not written to our database, and it is gone when the server restarts at the latest. Like any web server, ours also records request metadata in its logs — see "Server logs" under "How long we keep it".

Searches are not part of that. A search never produces one of those hashes, so nothing we keep can tell one searcher from another or tie a search to a visit. Your IP address and browser user agent are read when you search — to hold the rate limit, and to leave out the searches that come from bots rather than from people — and neither is written to our database, hashed, or attached to the words you typed. Beyond the server logs, the IP address is kept only in the rate limit's memory, as described above. What is kept is the counter for the hub and the words themselves, aggregated, as described under "Searches" above.

Deleting your account removes this the same way it removes everything else — see "Deleting your data" below.

Separately, one small marker is saved in the browser without the consent banner asking first, and it exists to leave a creator's own page views and timestamp jumps out of their own counts. Searches are not affected by it: a creator searching their own public hub is counted like anyone else. It is set when a creator opens their hub from their dashboard, and also for anyone who opens a hub link that carries our preview parameter — in that case it lasts only until the browser tab is closed. The dashboard one holds the date it expires — 30 days after the creator last opened their hub from the dashboard — and the tab one holds the value "1". Each is saved under the name of the hub it applies to, and holds nothing else: no identifier, nothing about who you are, and nothing that is ever sent to us. Because it lives in your browser rather than on our servers, deleting an account does not reach it; clearing your site data does.

Deleting your data

If you have an account, you can permanently delete it from your account settings at any time. This removes your channel, videos, transcripts, uploads, hub visit and search counts, and your plan and subscription details. It is irreversible and takes effect immediately.

A few things outlive the account, and we'd rather say so than let you find out afterwards. We keep our billing payment records — the transaction history we receive from our payment provider, which includes the email used to pay — because we're required to retain them for accounting and tax purposes. If you ever previewed a channel on our homepage before signing up, we keep that submission — the email and channel link you gave us, and the public facts we looked up about the channel — separately from any account, so deleting the account does not remove it. If you applied to our private beta, we keep that application — your name and email, the channel link, any answers you gave about your show, the permission you gave us to feature your channel and use your name in our marketing, and the public facts we looked up about the channel — separately from any account, so deleting the account does not remove it. If the account had a paid subscription, deleting it leaves behind a note telling our payment provider to cancel that subscription — it holds the subscription reference and no details about you. We keep a note that your YouTube channel has already used its free trial, so deleting the account does not give the same channel a second trial; that note holds the channel identifier, an internal reference to the account that used the trial, and the date it was claimed. And if email to your address ever hard-bounced or was reported as spam, the address stays on our suppression list, so we don't keep sending mail somewhere it can't be delivered. Write to us at [email protected] about any of them and we'll tell you what we hold, but not all of them are negotiable. We are legally required to retain the payment records. The cancellation note has to outlive the account: it is what actually cancels the subscription, so removing it would leave you being billed. The trial note stays too — erasing it would hand the same channel the second trial the note exists to prevent. The homepage preview submission is yours to remove as well: ask us and we'll delete it, account or no account. The private-beta application is yours to remove as well: ask us and we'll delete it, account or no account. The suppression entry is the one you control: tell us you want our email again and we'll take your address off that list.

If you only submitted your email through the homepage preview and never created an account, there is no account to delete — email us at [email protected] and we'll delete that record for you.

Your other rights

Deleting your account is the right most people want, so it has its own section above. You also have these, and you exercise all of them the same way — email [email protected] from the address on your account:

• Access — ask what we hold about you, and get a copy.
• Correction — have anything wrong fixed. Your name and email you can edit yourself in account settings.
• Portability — get the data you gave us in a machine-readable file, or have us send it somewhere else where that's technically possible.
• Objection and restriction — ask us to stop, or pause, a use that rests on our legitimate interests. We look at each request on its own, and we'll explain our answer. Where a record exists to stop the same free trial being claimed over and over, we keep it: removing it on request would defeat the only thing it does.
• Withdrawing consent — where we rely on your consent, you can take it back, and that doesn't affect what we did while it stood.

We answer within 30 days, and we don't charge for it. If you think we have got something wrong, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live — in the EU that is your national supervisory authority, in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office, and in New Zealand the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. You don't have to come to us first, though we would rather you did.

Where your data goes

We operate from New Zealand, and the providers listed above are mostly in the United States. So if you are in the UK or the EU, your data leaves that area to be processed. We only use providers who commit to appropriate safeguards for that transfer — in practice the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, or an adequacy decision covering the country they operate from. Ask us and we will tell you which one applies to a given provider.

How long we keep it

• Your account and hub — for as long as the account exists. Delete it and this goes immediately.
• Episodes indexed on a free trial — for 7 days after the trial ends, if you never start a plan. Then the episodes, their transcripts, topics and search index are deleted. Unlike the preview-email and server-log entries below, this one does have a mechanism behind it: a daily job runs it, and we email you the date twice before it does. On a paid plan nothing here expires.
• Billing records — for 7 years after the payment, because tax law requires it. This is why deleting your account does not erase them.
• An email from the homepage preview — until you ask us to remove it. We don't expire these automatically yet, so if you want it gone, email us and it goes.
• Hub visit and search counts — kept indefinitely, in aggregate, tied to your channel: it's the growth curve we show you. Deleting your account deletes it immediately along with everything else. The per-visitor hash behind the daily count, and the value it is built from, are deleted within 3 days regardless of whether the account still exists.
• Server logs — kept while they are operationally useful. They hold request metadata, not your channel content, and we don't mine them.
• Search phrases — 24 months from the last time a phrase was searched, then a daily job deletes it automatically. They are phrases with counters, tied to no person, and deleting the account deletes them immediately regardless of that window.

How we protect it

Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are stored hashed, never in a form we could read back. Access to the production database is limited to the people who run the service, and each account's data is separated from every other account's at the query level, so one tenant cannot reach another's. We never see your card number — that lives with our merchant of record. No service can promise perfect security, and we don't; if a breach ever affects your data, we will tell you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

Children

Podify is for creators running their own channel, and you must be at least 18 to hold an account. We don't knowingly collect data from children. If you tell us an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete its data — the same wording as our Terms of Service, deliberately: this is the account-deletion route, not a wider promise.

Changes to this policy

If we materially change what we collect or who we share it with, we'll update the date at the top of this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a deletion request for either kind of data above, go to [email protected]. See also our Terms of Service.