Privacy Policy

1. Who operates ProofLark

ProofLark is a service operated by Ihor Kudrenko, an individual sole proprietor based in The Nation, Ontario, Canada. ProofLark is not a company, corporation or incorporated entity. Where this policy says "we", it refers to that sole proprietor.

Ihor Kudrenko is also the person accountable for personal information handled through the service. All privacy questions and requests go to contact@prooflark.com.

2. Scope of this policy

This policy covers the website at prooflark.com and the ProofLark application. It applies to information about account holders and to anything account holders upload while using the service. It is written to meet Canada's federal privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

3. Information collected

We collect the following:

• Account details — your name, studio name if you give one, email address, and a hashed version of your password. We never store your password in readable form.
• Uploaded photographs — the selected images you add to a session.
• Session notes — text you type, and voice notes together with the transcripts produced from them.
• Session details about your clients — client names, venue names, dates, event details and anything else you enter so the writing can be specific.
• Writing samples — the emails, captions or posts you paste in to build a voice profile.
• Generated text — the delivery emails, image titles, alt text, write-ups and captions produced for you.
• Billing information — handled by our payment processor. We receive confirmation of payment, the plan, the last four digits of the card and its expiry. We never see or store your full card number.
• Technical data — IP address, browser and device type, operating system, and the pages and actions recorded in usage logs.
• Cookies — as described in the Cookie Policy.

4. Photographs of identifiable people

This is the most sensitive part of the service, so it is worth setting out plainly.

Images uploaded to ProofLark will usually show your clients and their guests. At a wedding that can be several hundred people. At a family or newborn session it will include children. Those photographs are personal information about the people in them, and they arrive here because you chose to upload them.

What we do with those images is narrow and fixed:

• They are used solely to generate the written output for your account — the description, the alt text, the write-up.
• No facial recognition, face matching or biometric identification of any kind is performed on them. We do not build face templates and we do not try to identify anyone.
• They are not used to train third-party models. Our AI providers are engaged under terms that prohibit training on customer content submitted through the service.
• They are not sold, licensed, published or shared with anyone other than the providers listed in section 10, and only to the extent needed to produce your text.
• They are deleted automatically 30 days after the session is generated, and you can delete them sooner.

5. What to upload, and what not to

Two habits keep the amount of personal information here as small as it can usefully be:

• Upload web-sized selects, not full-resolution originals. A handful of images at web resolution is enough for the writing. Full-size files add nothing to the output and put a much larger copy of someone's likeness on a server.
• Where the writing can come from notes alone, write from notes. This applies particularly to images of children. A newborn session can be written from "eight days old, at home, grandmother's quilt, the dog kept getting in the frame" without uploading a single photograph of the baby.

Do not upload identity documents, contracts, invoices or screenshots of client correspondence. ProofLark needs the picture and the notes, not the paperwork.

6. Why the information is collected and consent

Each type of information has a purpose:

• Account details — to create and secure your account, and to contact you about the service.
• Photographs, notes and session details — to generate the delivery email, titles, alt text and write-up for that session.
• Writing samples — to build the voice profile that shapes how your output reads.
• Billing information — to take payment, apply your plan and meet record-keeping obligations.
• Technical data and logs — to keep the service secure, diagnose faults and prevent abuse.

Under PIPEDA we rely on your consent. Creating an account and uploading a session is express consent for the purposes above. Consent for anything optional — analytics cookies, product emails — is asked for separately, and you can withdraw consent at any time, subject to the limits described in section 12.

7. Email and CASL

Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) governs the commercial email we send. Transactional messages — receipts, renewal notices, password resets, service alerts — are sent because you hold an account and are needed to operate it. Promotional email is sent only if you opt in, and every promotional message carries an unsubscribe link that works immediately.

8. How your content is used

Your photographs, notes, voice profiles and generated text are yours. We do not sell them, rent them, or share them for advertising, and they are not used to train third-party models.

We use aggregate, de-identified figures — how many sessions were generated in a week, how often a feature is used — to run and improve the service. Those figures cannot identify you, your clients or a specific photograph.

9. How long information is kept

• Uploaded photographs — deleted automatically 30 days after the session is generated. This happens whether or not you cancel, and it cannot be extended.
• Session text — generated emails, alt text and write-ups are kept while your account is active so your delivery history stays searchable.
• Voice profiles and writing samples — kept while your account is active, and deletable at any time.
• Account data — deleted within 90 days of the account being closed, apart from records we must keep for tax and accounting purposes, which are limited to transaction dates and amounts.
• Voice notes — deleted once transcribed, unless you choose to keep them.
• Security logs — kept for 12 months.

You can delete any image, session or profile yourself at any time. Deleted material is removed from active storage immediately and purged from backups within 30 days.

10. Service providers and transfers outside Canada

Running ProofLark means using other providers. Each receives only what it needs:

• a payment processor, for subscriptions and billing;
• a hosting provider, for the application, database and image storage;
• a transactional email provider, for receipts, resets and service notices;
• an AI model provider, for generating written output from your images and notes;
• a speech-to-text provider, for transcribing voice notes;
• an analytics provider, if you have accepted analytics cookies.

We use providers that offer a comparable level of protection, bind them by contract to use the information only for the service they provide, and limit what is sent to each one.

11. Security

Information is encrypted in transit with TLS and encrypted at rest. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Images are served through signed URLs that expire, so a link to a client's photograph cannot be shared or guessed after it lapses. Administrative access is limited to the operator, protected by multi-factor authentication, and granted on a need-to-know basis.

No system is perfectly secure. Use a strong, unique password and tell us at contact@prooflark.com if you suspect an account has been accessed without permission.

12. Your rights

Under PIPEDA and applicable Ontario law you may:

• ask what personal information we hold about you and get a copy;
• ask us to correct information that is wrong or incomplete;
• ask us to delete your account and its contents;
• withdraw consent for optional processing, and for processing generally — noting that withdrawing consent for essential processing means the account can no longer be provided;
• ask for your data in a portable, machine-readable format;
• complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario where that office has jurisdiction.

You are welcome to raise a concern with us first, but you are not required to.

13. How to exercise your rights

Write to contact@prooflark.com from the email address on your account and say what you want to do. We may ask a question or two to confirm it is really you, particularly for deletion requests.

We acknowledge requests within 5 business days and answer within 30 days. If a request is complex and needs longer, we will tell you before the 30 days are up and explain why. Access requests are answered free of charge.

14. Requests from photographed individuals

If you appear in a photograph and want your image or details removed, contact the photographer or studio who uploaded it. They hold the client relationship, they decide what happens to their images, and in most cases the photograph will already have been deleted under the 30-day schedule in section 9.

You can also write to us at contact@prooflark.com. We will help the account holder locate and delete the material, and we will confirm to you when it has been done. We cannot identify which account holds a photograph of you from a description alone, so telling us who the photographer was makes this much faster.

15. Cookies

Cookies and similar technologies are covered in full in the Cookie Policy, which lists every cookie, its purpose and its duration. Non-essential cookies stay off until you turn them on.

16. Age requirement

ProofLark is not directed at anyone under 18 as a user, and accounts require you to be 18 or older. This is separate from the children who may appear in photographs you upload as a photographer, which is covered in sections 4 and 5. If we learn that we hold personal information collected directly from a person under 18 as an account holder, we will delete it.

17. Breach notification

If a breach of security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the affected individuals as soon as feasible, and keep a record of the incident as PIPEDA requires. The notice will describe what happened, what information was involved, what we have done, and what you can do to protect yourself. Where a breach affects photographs or details of your clients, we will notify you so you can inform them.

18. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date at the top changes with it. For changes that materially affect how your personal information is handled, we will email account holders at least 30 days before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means the updated policy applies.

19. Contact

Questions, requests and complaints about privacy go to the operator of the service: