What data we do NOT collect

Does AetherCut upload my video files?

No. Video files are read, processed, exported, and saved by your browser on your device. AetherCut has no backend POST endpoint that accepts video content.

We never see them. They are read by your browser, processed in your browser, exported by your browser, and written back to your local Downloads folder. There is no POST endpoint on our backend that accepts video content. Verifiable in DevTools.

Does AetherCut collect my audio content?

No, audio stays in your browser. The only exception is when you opt in to auto captions, which sends a temporary audio segment to Whisper and deletes it within seconds after transcription.

Same as video — audio tracks live in the browser. The one exception is the temporary audio segment sent to Whisper when you opt in to auto-captions. That segment is deleted within seconds of transcription; nothing persists on our side.

Your project files

Project state (clip arrangement, edits, transitions) lives in your browser's local storage. Saving a project to your account is opt-in and only stores the project metadata — still no media content.

Your IP address

Railway terminates TLS and naturally sees IPs at the network layer, but our application deliberately does not log them to the database. The page_views schema has no ip column.

Does AetherCut use device fingerprinting?

No. AetherCut does not use canvas, font, WebGL, or audio fingerprinting. It stores only a coarse user agent bucket, desktop or mobile, and nothing else from your browser.

No canvas fingerprinting. No font enumeration. No WebGL fingerprint. No audio fingerprint. We store only a coarse ua_bucket (desktop / mobile) and nothing else from your browser.

Cross-site tracking

No third-party tracking cookies. No Facebook Pixel. No Google Ads pixel on the editor (present only on the marketing landings if we're running an ad campaign — disclosed in the cookie banner). No session-replay tools.

Behavioural data

We do not record what you click inside the editor. We do not log your timeline edits. We do not track which tools you used in what order. We see that a page was viewed; what happened after the page loaded is your business.

What “not collected” means in practice

A common source of confusion on privacy pages is the difference between a service being able to observe something in transit and a service choosing to store, profile, or analyze it. In AetherCut’s case, the important line is that editor work happens locally in your browser, so normal editing activity does not become account data, analytics events, or backend logs tied to your project contents. If you trim a clip, mute a track, rearrange scenes, or export a file, those actions are not turned into a usage history of your creative work. That matters because many tools avoid saying whether “not uploaded” also means “not logged elsewhere.” Here, the practical point is simpler: your media and edit state remain on your device unless you explicitly use a feature that says otherwise.

If you want to verify that behavior yourself, the easiest check is in your browser’s DevTools network panel during a normal editing session. Import a video, make edits, scrub the timeline, and export. You should not see your media being posted to an AetherCut upload endpoint, because there isn’t one for video content. The same idea applies to project privacy: if you choose not to save a project to your account, your working state stays browser-local; if you do save, that still does not include the underlying media files. The main mistake people make is assuming “account-based” automatically means “cloud media processing.” On AetherCut, those are separate concerns.

Another useful distinction is between operational infrastructure and product-level collection. Any internet service depends on network components to deliver pages securely, but that is not the same as building an internal database of who edited what, from which IP, on which device fingerprint, and in what sequence. This page is about that product-level boundary. It explains not just that AetherCut minimizes collection, but that entire categories of sensitive creative telemetry are intentionally absent.