Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how Cloutal, Inc. handles information across Cloutal Media, Cloutal Tether (formerly Cloutal Photo Tether) and the Cloutal website. Each product has its own section below, because they collect very different things; the sections after them — payments, retention, your rights — apply to all of it.

Cloutal Media

Cloutal Media is where photographers and studios (“Sellers”) deliver and sell their work, and where their customers view and buy it.

Who decides what

The Seller decides what is uploaded, who it is shared with, and when it is deleted. For the media in their albums and their relationships with their own customers, the Seller is the controller; Cloutal processes it on their behalf to run the service. Questions about a particular album — why you can see it, why you cannot, or a request to remove it — go to the Seller. For your own Cloutal account, your purchases and Cloutal’s own services, Cloutal is the controller.

What we hold

• Media. The photographs and video a Seller uploads, and the renditions generated from them — thumbnails, watermarked previews, video transcodes.
• Accounts. Your name, email address and sign-in credentials, and for a Seller, their studio details and settings.
• Access. Who has been granted access to what, by email address, and the share links that carry it.
• Orders. What was bought, from whom, for how much, and the delivery contact given at checkout.
• Delivery and security records. Download events and access attempts, kept so a Seller can see their sales are being delivered and so leaked links can be rate-limited.

Cloutal does not sell personal information, does not use uploaded media to train machine-learning models, and does not use it for advertising.

What we do not hold

Cloutal does not receive full card details — payments are processed by Stripe. And the platform-administration console deliberately holds no album titles or filenames: preserved files are identified there by a salted, non-reversible reference derived from the file’s storage identity, so support can discuss a file without reading anything about whose it is.

Email

Service email about an order, a share, an album being archived or a preservation term is sent on the Seller’s behalf and carries their branding. Email about billing for Cloutal’s own services comes from Cloutal.

Cloutal Tether

Cloutal Tether (“the Software”) is macOS software Cloutal writes and sells. This section reflects the Software’s actual behavior.

What the Software sends over the network

License verification. To activate or refresh a license, the Software sends over HTTPS to the Cloutal licensing endpoint: your license key; a device identifier derived from your Mac’s hardware identifier, hashed with a salt (the raw hardware identifier is not transmitted); a device label (your computer’s name); and the application version. The server returns a signed entitlement token stored locally and verified offline. As with any web request, the server may process your IP address and keep ordinary server logs.

The Software is not fully offline: first-launch/license verification makes a network request. After successful activation, camera operation and tethered capture can work offline within the licensing rules.

What stays on your Mac

• Captured photographs remain on the local storage you select. Cloutal does not receive or store your photographs.
• Application preferences and your accepted-terms record are stored locally.

What the Software does not do

• No analytics or telemetry.
• No device fingerprinting beyond the salted, hashed licensing identifier.
• No integrated crash-reporting service.

Acceptance records

You are asked to accept the Software’s terms when you first sign in, and the Software stores locally the accepted version, a timestamp, the application version, and acceptance status. If activation is server-backed, the server may also record the license/account identifier, terms version, acceptance timestamp, and application version. This record is not sent to Canon.

Purchases

Payments are processed by Stripe. Cloutal receives the order and subscription details needed to deliver what was bought and to manage a license or a preservation term, and does not receive your full card details. A purchase from a Seller on Cloutal Media is paid into that Seller’s own Stripe account; Stripe processes it under its own privacy terms for both of them.

Retention, deletion, and your rights

• Media is kept while the Seller keeps it. A Seller can archive it, remove it, or close their account, and it is deleted after that. Media covered by a paid preservation term is kept for that term, then removed after a short grace period once it ends.
• Deleted media sits in a recoverable trash for a limited window before it is permanently purged.
• Order and payment records are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires, which is longer than the media itself and independent of it.
• Account records are kept while the account is open. Closing an account removes it, with an explicit choice about what happens to any albums it owns.
• Licensing records for Cloutal Tether are kept while the licence is active and for as long afterwards as is needed for support and accounting.

You can ask for a copy of your data or for it to be deleted. Sellers can export or erase a client’s data from their own console; anyone else can open a case from the support page. Deletion cannot reach records we are required to keep, and it does not delete a Seller’s own copies of their work.

Changes and contact

We may update this Policy; the document version above changes when we do. To reach us about it, use the support page.

Cloutal Tether is developed and supported by Cloutal and is not sponsored, endorsed, certified, or supported by Canon. Support is provided by Cloutal, not Canon. “Canon” and “EOS” are trademarks of Canon Inc., used only as nominative references to describe compatibility with selected Canon cameras, subject to the applicable camera, SDK, and macOS support matrix.