Draft. Under legal review.
Crestfall Studio privacy policy
The short version
Anthology Interactive, LLC (doing business as Crestfall Studio) runs Crestfall Studio, an adult interactive fiction platform. You write and read stories with AI characters. We collect the small amount of information we need to run an account, take a payment, keep the platform safe and answer the law when it asks. We do not sell your personal information. We do not build advertising profiles from what you write. We ask for your date of birth once to confirm you are an adult, and then we keep only the answer, not the date. Payments are handled by our payment processor; we never see or store your full card number.
This summary is for reading speed. The sections below are the policy.
Who this policy covers
This policy covers the Crestfall Studio website and the service you reach through it. Crestfall Studio is web only; there is no mobile app. Anthology Interactive, LLC is the controller of the information described here.
Crestfall Studio is offered in the United States and, once enabled, the European Union. Access from some other regions is blocked, and this policy does not create rights in a region where the service is not offered.
Age, and who may have an account
Crestfall Studio is for adults 18 and over. There are no content tiers and no under-18 accounts.
At signup we ask for your date of birth in a real date field, before any payment step. It is not a checkbox. We use the date once, to work out whether you are 18 or over. What the account stores afterwards is a single true or false adult flag, which checkout checks before it will take money.
We do not keep the date of birth itself. We do not ask you to upload an identity document, and we do not send you to a third party identity or age verification service. This follows the pattern the state age verification statutes set, under which identifying information collected for an age check may not be retained.
From 2027-07-01, California is expected to require an operator to determine a user's age or apply child protections to everyone. The date of birth gate is the determination we rely on.
What we collect and why
Account information
An email address, a password held only as a hash, a display name, and the preferences you set, including content preferences. We need this to give you an account, let you log back in, and show you the parts of the platform you asked to see.
Age information
The adult flag described above. Nothing else. The flag exists so that a minor cannot open an account or reach checkout.
What you write and create
Your stories, your characters, your prompts, your messages in a conversation with an AI character, images generated from your prompts, the tags you apply, and anything you choose to publish where other users can read it.
We store this so the platform works: so a story is there when you come back, so a conversation continues where it left off, and so published work can be found by other people. Automated safety checks read this content, which is described below.
You are talking with AI. Crestfall Studio characters and stories are fiction, created with artificial intelligence. Nothing you tell a character is read by a human as a matter of course. Content is read by a human only when a safety system, a report, or a legal duty puts it in front of one.
Payment information
Coins are the in-product currency. Coin purchases and any subscription are handled by our payment processor, Stripe. Stripe collects and processes your card details directly. Crestfall Studio does not see, receive or store your full card number, and we do not store card details anywhere in our systems.
From the processor we receive a record of the purchase: what was bought, the amount, the currency, the time, the outcome, and a partial card reference. We keep that record because we have to: it is our sales record, our tax record and our evidence in a dispute or a refund.
Reports, moderation records and safety records
When you report content, or when someone reports yours, we keep the report, a copy of the content it points to, what we decided, and the written statement of reasons we send to the person affected by a moderation action.
A valid request to remove a nonconsensual intimate depiction, including a generated one, is acted on within 48 hours of receipt. We keep the request and the record of how it was handled.
If we have actual knowledge of apparent child sexual abuse material, United States federal law requires us to report it to the NCMEC CyberTipline. A report is also a request to preserve the reported material and the related records for one year, and we preserve them for that period. We do this whether or not you consent, and we may be unable to tell you that it happened.
Self harm detection
Automated detection runs on conversation text to spot suicidal ideation and self harm. When it fires, a crisis referral appears in the conversation pointing you to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States. The detection is automated and runs on our servers; a human does not read the conversation because the referral fired.
What we store is narrow: the event only, meaning the timestamp, the account ID, that detection fired, and that the referral rendered. It never holds conversation content. We do not build a mental health profile of you, we do not sell or share these records, and we do not use them for advertising or for recommending content. California requires the protocol to be published on the website and requires an annual report beginning 2027-07-01. That report is about how the protocol works, not about you by name.
Technical information
Ordinary server records: IP address, browser and device type, the pages you requested, timestamps, and error records. We use them to keep the service up, to investigate faults, and to detect fraud and abuse, including payment fraud. We keep them for 90 days.
Cookies and analytics
Crestfall Studio sets essential cookies: the ones that keep you logged in and keep checkout working, including cookies that expire when you close your browser.
We also use analytics to understand how the service is used: Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and optionally Amplitude, together with service metrics from our own backend. A referral attribution cookie records which referral link brought you to Crestfall Studio, so the person who referred you can be rewarded with coins when you make your first purchase, on a last-touch basis. In the United States we disclose this here and provide a do-not-share opt-out link in the footer. In the European Union a minimal consent banner ships when EU access opens, before any of these run for EU users.
How we use what we collect
We use your information to:
- create and run your account, and to let you sign back in;
- show you your stories and conversations, and publish what you choose to publish;
- take payment, credit coins, send receipts and handle refunds and disputes;
- keep Crestfall Studio safe: enforce the content rules, run the report path, and meet the reporting duties described above;
- run the self harm protocol and show the crisis referral;
- keep the service working, fix faults and prevent fraud and abuse;
- answer you when you contact us; and
- comply with the law, including tax, consumer and platform obligations.
We do not use what you write to target advertising at you. Your stories and chats are never used to train AI models. We improve Crestfall Studio using service metrics, not your content. The third-party model providers behind the characters process your content to run the service, never to train their models, under the terms of their API agreements.
Legal bases, for people in the European Union
Where the General Data Protection Regulation applies, our legal bases are:
- performance of a contract, for your account, your stories and conversations, and your purchases;
- legal obligation, for the reporting, preservation and moderation duties described above, and for tax and accounting records;
- legitimate interests, for security, fraud prevention, service reliability and enforcing our rules, balanced against your interests; and
- consent, where we ask for it, which you can withdraw at any time.
Who we share information with
- Our payment processor, Stripe, which processes your payment and holds your card details under its own privacy policy.
- Service providers that host our systems, deliver our email, and provide the AI models behind the characters. These act as processors on our instructions and may not use your information for their own purposes.
- The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where federal law requires a report.
- Law enforcement and public authorities, where the law requires it, including notifying authorities of information that suggests an offense threatening someone's life or safety.
- A buyer or successor, if the business is ever sold or reorganized, under the same commitments made here.
We do not sell personal information. We do not share personal information for cross context behavioral advertising.
How long we keep information
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Account information | While your account exists, then deleted or anonymized within 90 days of account deletion |
| Adult flag | While your account exists |
| Date of birth | Not retained after the age check |
| Your stories, conversations and generated images | While your account exists, or until you delete them, subject to any legal hold |
| Purchase records | 7 years, the period our tax and accounting duties require |
| Reports, moderation records and statements of reasons | 1 year, so we can answer an appeal and show our working |
| Material and records covered by a CyberTipline report | One year from the report, as the law requires |
| Nonconsensual imagery removal requests | 1 year |
| Self harm referral records | 1 year; the record is the event only, never conversation content |
| Server and security records | 90 days |
Your choices and your rights
You can ask us to:
- give you a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
- correct it if it is wrong;
- delete your account and the information tied to it;
- export your stories and conversations in a portable form;
- object to, or ask us to limit, a particular use; or
- withdraw a consent you gave.
Published public content is carved out of the deletion right. Once you publish content for other people, it stays available under the license in section 10 of the Terms of Service, including inside remixes other people have already made, after you unpublish it or delete your account.
You can also appeal a moderation decision. The written statement of reasons we send with a moderation action tells you how.
Send any of these requests to privacy@crestfallstudio.com. We handle requests by email, which is deliberate: at our size a request portal would add a system without adding a protection. We respond within 30 days of receiving your request.
Some privacy statutes only place duties on a business above revenue and user count thresholds, and Crestfall Studio is below them today. We honor these requests anyway, from anyone, wherever you live, and we say so here so you can hold us to it.
If you are in the European Union you may also complain to your national supervisory authority.
There are limits. We cannot delete something we are required to preserve, such as material and records covered by a CyberTipline report during its one year preservation period, and we cannot delete a record we need to keep for tax or to defend a legal claim.
Children
Crestfall Studio admits no one under 18. The date of birth gate blocks an under-18 signup before an account exists, and there is no retry hint on the block screen.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. Federal law requires verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from a child under 13, and Crestfall Studio does not seek that consent because it does not serve children. If we learn that we hold information from a child under 13, we delete it and close the account.
Security
Passwords are stored as hashes, never in readable form. Access to production data is limited to the people who need it to run the service. Traffic to the site is encrypted in transit.
Where your information is stored
Crestfall Studio is run from the United States and your information is stored and processed there. If you use Crestfall Studio from the European Union, your information is transferred to the United States. For those transfers we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when what we collect or what we do with it changes. The current version number and effective date appear at the top of this page. If a change is significant, we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect.
How to contact us
Write to privacy@crestfallstudio.com for anything in this policy, including a rights request. Send a report about content to report@crestfallstudio.com. Authorities write to legal@crestfallstudio.com, which is also our German youth protection contact. All of these addresses are listed on the contact page linked from the footer of every page.