Privacy Policy

San Diego AI Studio is operated by A Rhea of Hope, a California corporation. This policy covers sandiegoaistudio.com, our event calendar, newsletters, meetup submission forms, and related San Diego AI Studio pages.

We collect information you choose to provide, including:

• Email addresses, subscription status, and signup source.
• Studio guide choices are kept on the page until you explicitly submit. If you choose to share learning interests, we store the selected topics, programs, preferences and optional note to help plan useful programs. You can share without an email address. Requested guide delivery and selected program updates are separate choices; program updates require confirmation through your email. We keep request, delivery and permission records, including random request identifiers and the consent wording version. Guide choices are excluded from automatic interaction capture and session recording; confirmation and preferences pages are excluded from analytics.
• Meetup submissions, including your email, event link, and description.
• Phone numbers and SMS consent records if you choose to join an SMS program.
• Messages, shared projects, or other material you intentionally submit.
• Anonymous shadow AI census responses on our Lights On page: your closed-choice answers, an optional free-text line you write, a computed archetype label, and a random idempotency token. These are stored without your name, email, or IP address, and the Lights On and event release pages are excluded from our analytics and session recording. If a submission cannot reach us, it waits in that browser's local storage for up to 30 days so the page can retry; clearing site data removes it at any time.
• Event releases. If you fill in the release form at an event, we store your name, email, the event, the choices you ticked, the version of the wording you saw, and your browser's user agent. We keep these as the record of what you agreed to. Email us to change or withdraw a choice and we record the change within 7 days.
• Launch or Leave. If you join the waitlist, we store your first name, email, what you said you would launch first, the tag on the link that brought you if it had one, and when you joined, and we use them to tell you when seats open and so Lucas can reply to you. If you take a seat, we store your name tag, email, the launches you declare and the sentence with each, your payments as Stripe reports them, and when you accepted the rules. Your name tag, your launches and whether you are on the pad are public on the pad and in the studio's Discord.

We also receive limited technical and usage information such as IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, referring page, approximate region, and interaction data. PostHog may provide product analytics and masked session recordings; form inputs are masked. Vercel provides hosting and aggregate web analytics.

At in-person events, we may capture photographs, video, and audio. Event pages and on-site notices provide additional context when recording is planned.

• Deliver newsletters, event information, and requested follow-ups.
• Deliver a guide only when requested, use deliberately shared interests to plan programs, and record separately confirmed permissions for selected program updates. Guide requests do not enroll you in the general newsletter or automatically create a commercial lead.
• Review and publish appropriate meetup listings.
• Operate, secure, troubleshoot, and improve the site and events.
• Prevent abuse and enforce reasonable participation rules.
• Create recaps, recordings, and learning material that tighten the feedback loop between one gathering and the next.

We do not sell personal information for money.

We do use an advertising measurement pixel from X (formerly Twitter) on this site. When we run an ad for an event, the pixel tells X that someone who saw the ad reached our page, so we can tell whether the ad worked and stop paying for ads that do not. Under California law this counts as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, so we are naming it plainly rather than hiding it in a list of vendors. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, the pixel never loads at all. See the next section for how to turn it off, and note that we never send X your name, your email, or anything you typed into a form.

We use service providers to run the site and community, including Vercel, Neon, PostHog, Resend, Cloudflare, TwentyFive, X for advertising measurement, and event or registration platforms. They may process information on our behalf for hosting, storage, analytics, email delivery, CRM, security, advertising measurement, and event operations. We may also disclose information when required by law, to protect safety or rights, or as part of a business reorganization.

Material you intentionally submit for public posting, and event footage or audio identified as public, may be shared publicly and redistributed by others.

The site and its providers may use cookies or similar storage for analytics, security, and basic functionality. Third-party sites you open from our pages follow their own privacy policies.

When a browser sends Global Privacy Control or the legacy Do Not Track signal, this site does not initialize PostHog analytics and does not load the X advertising pixel. Both run through the same check, so one signal turns off both and there is no way for them to drift apart. You can also limit cookies or scripts through your browser. Other providers may still receive the technical information needed to deliver the site.

Global Privacy Control is built into some browsers and available as an extension for others. Turning it on is the single most effective thing you can do here, and it works without asking us for anything.

We retain information for as long as reasonably needed for the purposes above, legal obligations, dispute resolution, and community records. Newsletter data is retained until you unsubscribe or request deletion. A Launch or Leave waitlist entry is kept until you ask us to remove it. Public event recordings and recaps may be retained indefinitely.

We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards, but no internet service can guarantee absolute security.

To opt out of sharing for advertising: turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser and the X pixel will not load on any page here. That is our opt-out mechanism and it takes effect immediately, with no request and no account. You can also email us and we will honor it, but GPC is faster and does not require telling us who you are.

Every newsletter includes an unsubscribe link. SMS participants can reply STOP. You may ask to access, correct, or delete information associated with you by emailing lucas@sandiegoaistudio.com. We may need to verify your request and will respond as required by applicable law.

If you have a concern about event footage or audio, contact us with enough detail to identify it. We will consider reasonable requests, although we cannot control copies already shared by third parties.

The site is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Contact us if you believe a child has provided information.

We may update this policy as our practices change. Material changes will be posted here with a new effective date. Questions or requests can be sent to lucas@sandiegoaistudio.com.