Privacy Policy

What we collect

From everyone: your name, email address, and whatever you write in a brief, a quote or a message. If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email and profile picture, and nothing else from your account.

From editors additionally: your portfolio links, your rates and turnaround, and, if you connect TikTok or Instagram, your handle and your recent public posts. Connecting is optional and can be undone.

We do not see your card details. Those go straight to our payment processor.

Your photos and video

This is the part that matters most, so it is the most specific.

Files are encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest by our storage provider. They are never public and never listed anywhere. Every single request for a file goes through a check that the person asking is on that job.

Only the editor assigned to your job can open your source material, and only while the job is running. The moment it completes or is cancelled, their access ends. No other editor can reach it at any point, and it cannot be found by guessing a link.

60 days after a job closes, your source material is deleted from our storage automatically by a job that runs daily. This is not a request you have to make. The watermarked preview goes sooner, after 30 days, since by then you have the real thing. The finished edit is kept for 365 days, because you paid for it and may come back for it.

Deletion waits if there is a live reason to keep something: an open dispute, a payment being reversed, or a legal or copyright matter. Those are the only reasons, each one is written down with who recorded it, and the material goes as soon as the matter closes.

Who else sees your files

Uploads are scanned automatically for prohibited content before the other person on a job can see them, which means the file is sent to our moderation provider. They process it and return a verdict.

A file the scanner is unsure about is held for a person at MontageU to look at. That is the only circumstance in which someone here opens your file, and it is recorded when it happens.

Companies we use

Our payment processor handles all card details and holds funds. Our storage provider holds uploaded files. Our moderation provider scans them. Our video service produces the watermarked previews. Our database and hosting provider runs the site.

Each of these sees only what it needs for its part. None of them is given your data for their own purposes, and we do not sell anything about you to anybody.

How long the rest is kept

Source material: 60 days after a job closes, previews after 30, finished edits after 365. Messages and job records: kept while your account exists, because they are the record of what was agreed and what was paid.

Records of a file refused or removed by moderation are kept even when the file itself is deleted. Those are what let us recognise a repeat pattern, and they are the one thing deleting an account does not remove.

What you can ask for

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and its data. Some of it we have to keep: payment records for tax and accounting, and moderation records as above.

You can delete individual files yourself from a job while it is still running.

Cookies

A cookie to keep you signed in, and a short lived one that remembers whether you chose to join as a client or an editor while you are redirected to Google. No advertising or tracking cookies.