Privacy Policy

Account & profile: name, email address, phone number, password (stored as a salted hash), username, profile photo, professional title, location (city, region, country), time zone, languages, social-login identifiers if you sign in with Google or Apple.

Talent profile: resume, work history, portfolio samples (images, video, audio, code, documents), skills and self-rated proficiencies, certifications, education, hourly Set Rate, project rates, availability, work-authorization preferences (e.g., remote-only, onsite, travel willingness), and any other information you choose to add.

Client profile: company name, industry, team size, billing address, project-history information, role of the person creating the Account.

Job content: descriptions, deliverables, budgets, timelines, required skills, attached briefs, and any communications attached to a Job.

Engagement content: messages exchanged with other Users, files transferred, time entries, milestone submissions, deliverables, reviews, and ratings.

Payment information: for Clients — billing name and address and the last four digits of the payment card, with card numbers and bank-account details collected and stored directly by Stripe, Inc. ("Stripe") and not by Studiomate. For Talent — payout-method details (bank account, debit card, or other supported method) collected directly by Stripe through Stripe Connect, plus tax-identification information (e.g., U.S. SSN/EIN, IRS Form W-9, IRS Form W-8BEN, or non-U.S. tax ID) where required for tax reporting.

Identity verification: government-issued ID, selfie, or business registration documents that you or your verification provider supply to confirm your identity, when verification is required.

Communications: content of emails, support tickets, chat messages, and any other communications you send to us, including any feedback, suggestions, complaints, or survey responses.

Marketing preferences: subscriptions to newsletters, product updates, or transactional notifications, and your opt-in/opt-out choices.

When you interact with the Service we may collect:

Device information — device model, operating system, browser type and version, screen resolution, language, time zone, and unique device or installation identifiers.

Log information — IP address, access times, pages or screens viewed, referring/exit URLs, and crash logs.

Usage information — features used, search queries, filters applied, profiles viewed, Jobs posted or saved, applications submitted, click events, and similar interaction data.

Cookies and similar technologies — see Section 9.

Approximate location — derived from IP address. We do not collect precise GPS location unless you explicitly enable location-based features.

Single sign-on / OAuth providers (e.g., Google, Apple, Microsoft) — your name, email, and profile photo if you sign in with one of these providers.

Identity-verification providers — verification status and limited identity information.

Payment processor (Stripe) — payment confirmations, payout statuses, dispute notices, and limited risk signals.

Analytics, advertising, and attribution partners — see Section 9.

Public sources — public business directories, professional networks, and similar sources, where we use them to enrich Client or Talent profiles.

Other Users — reviews, ratings, dispute reports, and references.

Create and maintain Accounts; authenticate you; recover access.

Display Talent profiles in search and to Clients you engage with; display Client Jobs to Talent.

Facilitate communications, applications, hires, time tracking, deliverable submission, and reviews.

Process payments, payouts, refunds, chargebacks, and tax forms (with Stripe).

Provide customer support and respond to your inquiries.

Generate matches between Talent and Jobs.

Parse resumes, portfolios, and Job briefs.

Surface recommended Jobs in AI Job Finder.

Evaluate the quality of matches and recommendations.

Train, fine-tune, evaluate, and improve our matching, ranking, and content-extraction models, using identifiable personal information only where lawful and where you have not opted out (see Section 11), and otherwise using de-identified or aggregated data.

Send transactional emails (e.g., account changes, security alerts, payment receipts, dispute notices).

Send service announcements (e.g., changes to these Terms or Privacy Policy, scheduled maintenance).

Send marketing emails about features, content, and offers, where you have not opted out. You can opt out of marketing emails at any time using the unsubscribe link in those emails or by emailing privacy@studiomate.com.

Conduct surveys, research, and customer-satisfaction outreach.

Verify identity, detect and prevent fraud, abuse, security incidents, and violations of our Terms.

Enforce our Terms, including the Off-Platform Conversion Fee in Section 8.6 of the Terms.

Investigate and respond to law-enforcement and regulatory requests.

Comply with legal obligations (including tax, anti-money-laundering, and Know-Your-Customer requirements run through Stripe).

Establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

Understand usage and trends; perform analytics; measure marketing performance.

Develop new features, products, and services.

Carry out due diligence and corporate transactions (e.g., financings, acquisitions). In a corporate transaction we will continue to honor the commitments in this Privacy Policy or notify you of any change.

We may use information for any other purpose disclosed to you at the time of collection or with your consent.

A Talent's profile, portfolio, public reviews, and aggregated activity are visible to Clients and (depending on your visibility settings) to other Users and Visitors.

A Client's company information, public Job posts, and public reviews are visible to Talent and other Users.

Information you submit to a Job application or Engagement (cover note, attachments, time entries, deliverables, messages) is visible to the counter-party of that Engagement.

Reviews and ratings you post about another User are visible to other Users.

We share personal information with vendors that perform services on our behalf, under written contracts that restrict their use of the information to providing services to us. These include:

Stripe, Inc. — payments, payouts, KYC, fraud screening, and tax-form generation.

Cloud hosting and infrastructure providers (e.g., Supabase / PostgreSQL hosting, content-delivery networks).

Email and messaging providers (e.g., transactional and marketing email).

Analytics, error monitoring, and logging providers.

Customer support tools and live-chat providers.

Identity-verification providers.

AI model providers that power Aura AI (under contractual restrictions, including no-train commitments where available).

Marketing, advertising, and attribution partners.

Legal, accounting, and other professional advisors under duties of confidentiality.

When you choose to integrate or share with another service (e.g., social-login, calendar integrations, sharing a profile link), we share information at your direction.

We may share information when we believe in good faith that it is necessary to: (a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; (b) enforce our Terms, including investigation of potential violations; (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues; (d) protect against harm to the rights, property, or safety of Studiomate, our Users, or the public.

In connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, sale of assets, reorganization, bankruptcy, or similar transaction, personal information may be transferred to the counterparty or successor entity. We will provide notice and a chance to object where required by law.

We will share information for other purposes with your consent.

We may share aggregated or de-identified information that cannot reasonably be used to identify you (e.g., industry trend reports, marketplace statistics) without restriction.

Subject to verification, you may request to:

Know / Access — confirmation of whether we process your personal information, the categories collected and shared, the categories of sources, the business purposes, the categories of third parties, and the specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you.

Correct — inaccurate personal information.

Delete — personal information we have collected, subject to legal exceptions (e.g., to complete a transaction, to comply with law, to detect fraud).

Opt out of "Sale" or "Sharing" — you can opt out of the sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising; we honor GPC.

Limit Use of Sensitive Personal Information — to the extent we use such information beyond what is permitted without consent.

Non-discrimination — we will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

You may submit a request by emailing privacy@studiomate.com or through the privacy controls in your Account settings. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request on your behalf; we will require evidence of authority. We will respond within forty-five (45) days, with one (1) extension of up to forty-five (45) days where reasonably necessary.

Categories of personal information collected, sold, or shared in the prior twelve months: identifiers, customer records, commercial information, internet activity, geolocation (approximate), professional or employment information, education information, audio/visual content (in profile uploads), and inferences. We do not sell personal information for money. We may "share" identifiers and internet-activity information with advertising partners for cross-context behavioral advertising; you may opt out.

You may have the right to: confirm processing; access; correct; delete; obtain a copy of personal data in a portable format; opt out of targeted advertising, sale of personal data, and certain profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. Submit requests to privacy@studiomate.com. We will respond within forty-five (45) days, extendable as permitted by law. You may appeal a denial by replying to our response email; we will respond to appeals within sixty (60) days.

You have the right to: access; rectification; erasure ("right to be forgotten"); restriction of processing; data portability; objection to processing based on legitimate interests; withdrawal of consent; and lodging a complaint with your local supervisory authority. To exercise these rights, email privacy@studiomate.com.

To the extent any feature involves solely automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects on you, you have the right not to be subject to such a decision and to request human review. We design our hiring-related Aura AI features to assist, not replace, human decision-makers, and we contractually require Clients using Aura AI to provide human review before any consequential employment decision. If you believe an Aura AI output has affected you and want a human review, contact privacy@studiomate.com.

You can also opt your identifiable personal data out of being used to train our Aura AI models (we will continue to use de-identified or aggregated data) by visiting the "AI Preferences" page in your Account settings or emailing privacy@studiomate.com.

To protect your information, we may verify your identity before responding to a privacy-rights request. The level of verification will be proportionate to the sensitivity of the data involved.