Legal
Privacy policy
What Solon collects, why, who else receives it, how long we keep it, and how to have it erased.
The short version
- We keep your account, your projects and what you put in them. We don’t sell data or show ads.
- Solon runs on AI. Your brief, your materials, the session and your questions are sent to Anthropic, our AI provider, to run it.
- The people on a panel are synthetic. They are built on anonymous public Census records and describe nobody real.
- If you describe a real person in My People, you need their permission, and you can remove them at any time.
- This site, www.solon.studio, sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser.
- To have data erased, email privacy@solon.studio. Deleting a project in the app doesn’t erase its data.
Who we are
Solon is run by AGBK Productions LLC, 240 Harriman Road, Irvington, NY 10533, USA (“we”, “us”). We decide how the data on this page is used, which makes us its controller. Email us at privacy@solon.studio.
This policy covers www.solon.studio and the Solon app at app.solon.studio. The app runs on Iridiom, the software platform Solon is built on, so some screens and emails there may use the Iridiom name.
What we collect about you
Everything below comes from you, or from Stripe and your sign-in provider. We don’t buy data about you.
Your account
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Account details | Your name, email address and password, which we store only as a one-way hash. If you sign in with Google or Microsoft instead, the name, email address and profile picture they share with us. Also your workspace. Used to sign you in and run your account. | Until you ask us to delete your account. |
| Sign-in and security records | Each sign-in and failed attempt, with your email address, IP address and browser details. Used to keep accounts secure and to limit repeated attempts. | 90 days, then deleted by the weekly clean-up. A count of failed attempts is kept on your account until you next sign in or change your password, and the time of the last failed attempt until your account is deleted. Counters that limit repeated attempts last at most an hour. |
| Purchases | What you bought, when, and how much you paid, plus the customer record Stripe keeps for us: your email address and our internal account IDs. You type your card and billing details into Stripe’s own form, and they never reach us. Used to take payment, give you what you bought, and keep accounting records. | Kept as accounting records. We don’t delete them on request while tax or accounting law requires us to keep them. |
Your projects
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Your brief | The project’s name, what you want to learn, anything you tell Solon to keep from the panel, and the run length you choose. Used to recruit the panel, write the moderator’s guide, run the session and write the report. | Until you ask us to erase it. Deleting a project in the app doesn’t erase it. |
| Materials you upload | Documents (PDF, Word, text or Markdown, up to 25 MB), images (resized in your browser first), and stills from a video, taken in your browser: the video file itself never leaves your computer. Also each material’s name, the notes you add, and a written description of it that Solon makes so the moderator and the panel can discuss it. Used to show the materials to the panel and to write the report. | Until you remove the material in the app, which deletes its files. Otherwise kept until you ask us to erase it. |
| The guide and the recruiting brief | The moderator’s discussion guide and the recruiting brief, both written from your brief and changed by you. Used to run the session and recruit the panel. | Until you ask us to erase it. |
| The panel | The people Solon makes for the project: each one’s profile, life story, group style, shopping profile, way of talking, starting attitude and portrait, and the anonymous Census record a person was built on. They are synthetic and describe no real person, except anyone you seat from My People (below). | Until you ask us to erase it. |
| The session, report and follow-up questions | Everything said in the session, each person’s private reactions, ratings and thoughts, the moderator’s notes, the report, and the questions you ask afterwards with their answers. Used to show you the session, write the report and answer your questions. | Until you ask us to erase it. |
| Project cards | For each project, what it’s about in a line, how far it has got, and the portraits of its panel. Used to draw the project’s card on Your projects. | Until you ask us to erase it. |
My People
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| People you describe | For each person you add to My People: their name, an optional photo, their age, sex, background, where they live, household, work, education, household income band and how money feels to them, and, only if you add them, any disability, the language they speak at home and where they were born. Also their answers to the group-style and shopping questions, their answers in their own words, and the check questions. Used to build their twin and seat it on your panels. | Until you remove the person from My People, which deletes their record. Projects they were seated in keep their copy until you ask us to erase it. |
| Twin checks | The answers the twin gives to the check questions, how well you said each one matched, and any corrections you write. Used to show you the comparison and to correct the twin. | Deleted with the person. |
Records of use
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Usage and cost records | For each AI request: your email address, workspace, the provider, what was used and what it cost. Also a record of each request the app makes to our platform. Used to run the service and control costs. | Kept as business records. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your email address from them. |
| Logs and error reports | Technical records of requests and errors, which carry IDs and error messages but not your brief, materials or transcripts. Some errors go to Sentry, our error-monitoring service. On app.solon.studio’s own pages (sign-in, checkout and the frame around the app), Sentry may also record a small share of visits, with anything typed into forms hidden. It doesn’t record inside the Solon app itself. | Deleted by a weekly clean-up once they’re old enough: app logs after 7 days, error records after 90 days, audit records after 1 year. Error records we flag for an investigation are kept until we unflag them. What Vercel and Sentry keep follows their own retention. |
| Emails to us | Anything you send to hello@ or privacy@. Used to answer you and handle your requests. | As long as we need it to answer you or to show we handled your request. |
To have an account, you need to give us your name, email address and a password, or sign in with Google or Microsoft. To buy a plan, you give your payment details to Stripe. Without these we can’t provide Solon. Everything else is up to you.
Please don’t put sensitive information about real people in a brief or a material, such as customers’ names, contact details or health information. Solon doesn’t need it to run a focus group.
The people on a panel
The people Solon recruits are synthetic. Each starts from one record in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey public-use microdata, which the Bureau anonymises before it publishes it, and which identifies nobody. Solon writes a name, a face, a life story and opinions to fit that record. Any resemblance to a real person is a coincidence. Their pay is compared with public federal wage statistics for their occupation. Nothing about a panel is sent to any government agency.
People you describe in My People
My People lets you describe a real person, such as a colleague, a customer or yourself, so their twin can sit on your panels. What you enter is listed under My People above. It is stored for your workspace, so anyone who can open your workspace’s projects can see and seat the people in it.
Ask first. Describe someone only with their permission, and only add a disability, their language or where they were born if they’re happy for you to. Their photo is optional; it is shown beside the panel and never sent to the AI provider.
If you’ve been described in someone’s My People and want it removed, ask the person who added you, or email privacy@solon.studio. You don’t need an account or a reason.
What we use it for, and the AI
- Running your focus group. Your brief and materials are used to recruit the panel, write the moderator’s guide, run the session, write the report and answer your follow-up questions. Each of those steps is done by an AI model, Claude, made by Anthropic, so what each step needs is sent to Anthropic. Images and PDFs reach Anthropic through short-lived links to our storage; other documents as their text.
- Running the service. Signing you in, taking payment, counting the projects your plan has used, stopping abuse and fixing faults.
- Answering you. Support and privacy requests.
We don’t sell personal data, share it with advertisers, or show ads. We don’t use your data to train AI models ourselves. How Anthropic handles what it receives is governed by its terms for business customers.
Solon makes no decision about anyone that has legal or similarly significant effects. Its reports are research material for you to judge.
Legal bases (UK and EU GDPR)
- Contract: running your account and projects, and taking payment.
- Legitimate interests: security and preventing abuse; logs, error monitoring and page analytics.
- Consent: the details of a real person you add to My People, which you collect with their permission.
- Legal obligation: keeping purchase records, and answering rights requests.
Who else receives it
These providers process data for us, to run Solon. Each gets what its job needs.
| Who | What they do | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database | Everything described on this page except uploaded files: accounts, projects and what is in them, My People, purchase records and logs. |
| Cloudflare | Runs the Solon app, stores uploaded files, and serves the portrait library | Every request the app handles, including your name and email address. Stores the materials you upload. Serves the portraits the app shows, so it receives your IP address and browser details when they load. |
| Vercel | Hosting for this site and for app.solon.studio, and page analytics on app.solon.studio | Standard request data (IP address, browser, the page asked for), all traffic to app.solon.studio, and page views and load times there. |
| Anthropic | The AI that recruits, moderates, plays each panelist, analyses and answers your questions | Your brief, your materials (images and PDFs through short-lived links, other documents as text), the guide, the panel and everything said in the session, your follow-up questions, and the answers of anyone you seat or check from My People. Never the photos in My People. |
| Stripe | Payments | Your email address, our internal account IDs, what you’re buying and the amount, plus the card and billing details you type into Stripe’s form. |
| Resend | Account emails, such as welcome and password reset | Your name, email address and the email’s content. |
| Sentry | Error monitoring | Error details and browser information. From a small share of visits to app.solon.studio’s own pages, a recording of what was on screen, with form fields hidden. |
| Upstash | Limits on repeated requests, and short-lived caching | Your email address or IP address, as a counter that lasts at most an hour, and short-lived copies of some account settings. |
| Google or Microsoft | Sign-in, only if you choose it | Your sign-in with them. They send us your name, email address and profile picture. |
| Google (Fonts) | Serves typefaces on app.solon.studio and inside the app | Your IP address and browser details, when a page loads its fonts. |
| DreamHost | Email for hello@ and privacy@ | The emails you send us. |
We’ll also disclose data when the law requires it, to protect our rights or someone’s safety, or to a buyer if the business is sold. In a sale, this policy keeps applying until you’re told otherwise.
How long we keep it
The tables under What we collect about you give the period for each kind of data. In short:
- Project data (brief, materials, panel, session, report and questions) isn’t deleted automatically, and stays when you delete a project. It’s erased when you remove it in the app, where the app lets you, or when you ask us.
- My People stays until you remove the person. Projects they sat in keep their copy until you ask us to erase it.
- Logs are deleted by a weekly clean-up, at its first run after they reach their age:
- App logs: 7 days.
- Sign-in and security records: 90 days.
- Error records: 90 days (any we flag for an investigation are kept until we unflag them).
- Audit records: 1 year.
- Purchase records are kept for accounting.
- Backups. Our database provider keeps backups so data can be recovered after a fault. Data you’ve asked us to erase can remain in those backups until they expire.
Cookies and browser storage
www.solon.studio sets no cookies, runs no analytics and stores nothing in your browser. Its typefaces and pictures are served from this site itself, not from a font service or anyone else.
The app at app.solon.studio uses the cookies and storage below. None of them is for advertising.
| Name | What it’s for | How long |
|---|---|---|
__Secure-Cookie | Keeps you signed in. | 24 hours. |
next- __Secure-Cookies | Protect the sign-in form, and return you to the page you were on. | Until you close the browser. |
tenant-Cookie | Knows you’re signing in to Solon. | 1 hour. |
iridiom-Cookie | Remembers whether you chose light or dark. | 1 year. |
theme activeWorkspaceIdLocal storage | Your light or dark choice, and the workspace you last used. | Until you clear it. |
iridiom:Session storage | Which error notices you’ve already seen. | Until you close the tab. |
sl:Local storage, inside the app | Carries the name you gave a new project from Your projects into the project. | Removed once used, and ignored after 2 minutes. |
| Stripe’s own cookiesAt checkout | Set by Stripe to process payment and prevent fraud. | See Stripe’s privacy policy. |
app.solon.studio also runs Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights, which count page views and measure how fast pages load, and Sentry, described under Records of use. Its pages and the app load fonts from Google Fonts, and the app loads the panel’s portraits from our own storage at Cloudflare, so those services receive your IP address and browser details. See Who else receives it.
A report you download as a PDF is made in your browser and saved to your own machine.
Deleting your data
- A material. Remove it in the project’s brief. Its files are deleted.
- A person in My People. Remove them from My People. Their record is deleted. Projects they were seated in keep their copy; ask us to erase those.
- A project. Deleting a project removes it from your list, but doesn’t erase its data from our systems.
- Everything else. To erase a project’s data, or your whole account, email privacy@solon.studio from the address on your account. We’ll confirm when it’s done.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask us to:
- tell you what data we hold about you, and give you a copy;
- correct it;
- erase it;
- limit how we use it;
- give it to you in a machine-readable form to take elsewhere; or
- stop using it where we rely on legitimate interests.
Email privacy@solon.studio. It’s free. We may ask you to confirm who you are first. We answer within one month. If a request is complex, we may take up to two more months, and we’ll tell you why.
If you’re in the UK or EU and not happy with our answer, you can complain to your data protection authority: the ICO in the UK, or the authority where you live in the EU.
US state privacy rights
If you live in a US state with a consumer privacy law, such as California:
- What we collect: identifiers (name, email address, IP address), commercial information (purchases), internet activity (sign-in and usage records, logs), and the content you give us, including anything you enter about people in My People. The sources and purposes are described above.
- Who receives it: only the service providers listed above, for those purposes. We don’t sell personal information, or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
- Sensitive information: we collect your Solon sign-in (email address and password), which the law counts as sensitive, and use it only to sign you in and keep your account secure. If you add a person’s disability in My People, it is used only to shape their twin. We don’t use either to infer anything about anyone.
- Your rights: to know, correct and delete what we hold. Email privacy@solon.studio, yourself or through an authorized agent. We’ll confirm who you are, answer within the time given under Your rights and never later than the law allows, and won’t treat you differently for asking. If we turn a request down, you can appeal by replying to our answer.
Security
Every page and request uses HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. Card details never reach us. Uploaded materials are kept in private storage and reached only through links that expire.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data, we’ll tell you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.
Where data is processed
We’re based in the United States, and our providers process data in the United States and in other countries where they operate. If you’re in the UK or EU, your data is transferred to the United States.
Children
Solon is for people 18 and over. We don’t knowingly collect data from anyone younger, and you mustn’t describe a child in My People. If you think a child’s data has reached us, email privacy@solon.studio and we’ll delete it.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect, who receives it or how long we keep it, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. If a change matters to account holders, we’ll email them before it takes effect.
Contact
AGBK Productions LLC, trading as Solon
240 Harriman Road, Irvington, NY 10533, USA
privacy@solon.studio
See also the terms of service.