Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Fold Laboratories, LLC is a Colorado limited liability company. We operate a curated marketplace where galleries and artists list original artworks, and where buyers discover them through an AI agent acting on their behalf, and purchase them through that agent or on a checkout page Fold opens for one purchase.

We are the controller of the information described in this policy. Where we handle information on a seller's behalf purely to complete an order, we act as their processor for that limited purpose.

2. What we do not do

We think it is as important to say what we do not collect as what we do.

No tracking. We run no advertising pixels, no session recording, no cross-site tracking, and no analytics service that watches the people who use Fold. We do count our own records — searches, sales, payouts — in totals that name no one, to see how the marketplace is working. We do not know how long you looked at anything.

No advertising. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for targeted or cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not accept advertising on the marketplace.

No card data. Card numbers never reach our systems. Through an agent, payment is completed with a limited-scope token issued by Stripe. On Fold's checkout page, the payment form is Stripe's own code: what you type into it goes from your browser to Stripe, and Fold receives only a reference to it. There is no field in our database capable of storing a card number.

Almost no activity logging. Our systems record only these kinds of event:

• About agents: that an AI agent's search returned a work, or that an agent asked for a work's details or whether it was for sale (section 3.3), and how many times each of those happened to each work on each day; how many searches returned nothing, each day; the tasks an agent gave us through our agent-to-agent endpoint; that access to an artwork image was granted; each day, how many requests AI agents made to each of our agent tools, counted by the platform the agent works for and the AI service or directory it reached us through, how we answered, how long it took and how many works we returned — counts that name no one; and, when an agent sends a buyer to Fold's checkout page or buys through one of our agent endpoints, the platform it works for, the AI service or directory it reached us through — such as ChatGPT, Claude or the MCP Registry — and the name its software gives itself, kept with the sale.
• About sellers: that a seller signed in (section 8), accepted a version of our Seller Agreement, made or withdrew a statement about a work, or recorded sending a sold work or corrected that record, with the carrier, tracking number and date they gave; and that one of our checks held or flagged a work a seller submitted, or that a work was reported to us, and how that was resolved.
• About payments: how many purchase attempts we refused, each day, and why; that a payment could not be automatically reconciled, and how a person then accounted for it; that a payment authorisation an agent had given us was withdrawn; that we refunded a sale, in full or in part, whether we did so ourselves or through our payment processor's tools, whether a refund failed or did not return our fee, and how a refund that failed was then put right; that a card network warned us a payment might be fraudulent; and that our payment processor judged a payment to carry a higher risk of fraud, and that a person then reviewed the sale.
• About returns and claims: that a buyer, or an AI agent acting for them, asked for a return or made a claim through our online request tool: the order it was for, the ground they gave and, where they gave them, their own words; and that we told a person at Fold.
• About alerts for new works: that a buyer, or an AI agent acting for them, asked us to tell them of new works matching a search; whether they confirmed it; when we sent each alert and which works it named; and when it ended.
• About disputes: that a buyer's bank or payment provider disputed a payment, and how that dispute was resolved; that we submitted evidence in answer to a dispute, or could not, and which of our records it drew on; and that, once a dispute was lost, we took the disputed payment back from the seller or bore the loss ourselves, and whether we reversed the tax recorded for it.
• About payouts: that we paid a seller out, paused or resumed a payout, or that a payout did not reach a seller's bank, and when a seller's account was put on, or returned from, the payout schedule we run.
• About our own decisions: that, after review, we removed a listed work or a single print of one, suspended a seller account, or reversed either; and that we deleted records our own tests had made.
• About email: that we sent, or tried to send, an email about a sale or about a seller's account, to whom, when, and whether our email provider accepted it, including when we sent one again, closed it by hand or chose not to send it; and what our email provider later reported of it: that it was delivered or delayed, bounced, was marked as spam, or was not sent because the address is on its list of addresses not to send to.
• About our service: how many requests each of our endpoints answered each day, how it answered them and how long it took, including how many it turned away for coming too quickly; how many times each search engine's or AI company's crawler fetched our pages each day; and each fetch of one of our product feed files: when, which file, how we answered and the user agent the fetching software sent, which names the software — never who sent it.

Separately, when our own software fails — on our servers, or in your browser on one of our pages — we record that it failed, where in our code, which path was being requested and, on the checkout page, at which step — never who was requesting it. We do not keep a general log of what you looked at.

No buyer accounts. Buying does not create an account, a profile, or a marketing relationship. A buyer who asks to be told of new works receives those alerts, and nothing else, until they stop them (section 3.4).

3. What we collect, and from whom

Three kinds of people or systems have information with us, and each is different.

3.1 Sellers and artists

Sellers, and the colleagues a seller invites to its studio, are the only people with accounts, and in most cases the seller is the artist. We collect:

• Legal name and display name
• Contact email, contact phone, and contact display name
• Website address and country
• A Stripe Connect account identifier
• A record of each version of the Seller Agreement you accept: which version, a fingerprint of its text, which signed-in person accepted it, when, and where in the studio
• For each colleague you invite to your studio: the email address we send the invitation to, who sent it, and when it was sent, accepted or withdrawn
• For each work you sell, your record of sending it: the carrier, the tracking number, the date, and, if you give us one, a receipt or label
• For each work you list, if you give them, the town or city and the state it ships from, which are published with the listing

We never store a password. Signing in uses either a one-time link sent to your email address or Google sign-in. If you sign in with Google, Google gives us the name and email address on your Google account, the address of its profile picture, and the identifier Google gives you. Identity verification and banking details for payouts are collected and held by Stripe, not by us.

Your record of sending a work is kept so that we can show it is on its way, and it is the evidence we send if the buyer disputes the payment (section 3.2).

Each listing also carries information about the artist who made the work: name, biography, year of birth, year of death, and nationality, and, where the seller gives them, the town or city and the state the artist is based in and links to the artist's website or profiles, and a photograph of the artist. Usually that is the seller describing themselves. Where a listing describes someone else — an artist a gallery represents, or an artist who is no longer living — the seller is responsible under our Seller Agreement for having the right to provide that information. If you are an artist and want to know what a listing says about you, or want it corrected, write to studioassistant@foldlaboratories.com and we will work with the seller to resolve it.

We publish a reduced copy of that photograph on the artist's page and each of their works' pages, and give it to AI agents and search engines that read those pages. We remove its location and camera details. We do not send it to the shopping services in Section 5, or to any provider that extracts details or builds search indexes.

3.2 Buyers

Buyers buy through an AI agent, or on a checkout page Fold opens for one purchase of one work. There is no catalogue to browse and no account to create.

At checkout, and only at checkout, we collect the minimum needed to complete and lawfully tax a sale:

• Through an agent — optional: email address, name, and phone number. If you give an email address, we send your order confirmation to it, and tell you there when the seller records sending the work and if the order is refunded.
• On Fold's checkout page — required: your name and email address, because no agent is there to tell you the purchase went through, and your order confirmation goes to that address, as does word that the seller has sent the work, or that the order was refunded. If you pay with a wallet the page offers, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay or Link, the wallet gives us your name, email address and delivery address when you approve, in place of your typing them. Before that, it gives us only the city, state and ZIP code of the address you choose, which we use to show the total with sales tax and do not keep. Your phone number is optional.
• Required, either way: a postal address

On Fold's checkout page, Stripe's own code takes your card, wallet or bank details and collects information about your browser and device directly, to screen the payment for fraud; Fold does not receive that information. Link, Stripe's own way to pay, can also pay from your bank account, through Stripe's Instant Bank Payments, or with Klarna, a pay-later service. If you choose Klarna, Stripe passes Klarna the order's total and your name and delivery address, and Klarna asks you for anything else it needs to decide whether to lend to you, under its own privacy policy. If the link that brought you to the work's page said where it came from — for example utm_source=chatgpt.com, or, on a link our agent endpoints gave an AI agent, the AI service or directory it came through and the name of the agent's software, such as surface=claude&agent=claude-ai — we record those words with the sale. If your browser told us which website you came from, we record that website's name, such as chatgpt.com, with the sale too — never the address of the page you came from.

The postal address is required for two reasons: sales tax cannot be calculated without a destination, and it is where the seller sends the work. It goes to the seller for that purpose, in their notice of the sale and on their record of it.

Two more things happen to it, and to your name where you gave one:

• With the payment. We send your name and delivery address to our payment processor, Stripe, with the payment, so that it can screen the payment for fraud. Where you gave no name, we send no address.
• If you dispute the payment. If you dispute the payment with your card issuer, bank or Klarna, we answer the dispute with our evidence: your name, email address and delivery address as you gave them at checkout, our record of your approval, our record that we sent your order confirmation, the returns policy that applied, your order page, and the seller's record of sending the work. That goes to Stripe, and through Stripe to whoever you disputed the payment with.

After the sale. An AI agent acting for you can ask us where your order is, and ask for a return or make a claim through our online request tool. We answer only someone who gives the token from your order page's address, or your order reference with the email address you gave at checkout; we check that address against the one we hold and keep nothing of the asking. A request or a claim is recorded as section 2 says, and a person at Fold reads every one.

A photo to find works like it. An AI agent acting for you can send us a photo — of a work you like, or of your room — to find works on Fold that look like it. We fetch it once, send it to Voyage AI to compare (section 5), and keep it nowhere: not the photo and not its address. The comparison is held in our server's memory for up to ten minutes, so the same photo is not sent twice, and is then forgotten.

We do not use your information for anything else, and we never send your network address or anything about your device. Stripe's code on Fold's checkout page collects its own information about the device you pay from, under Stripe's privacy policy, for the fraud screening described above.

Buyers do not receive marketing from us and are not profiled. The one exception to the first is an alert for new works that a buyer asks for and confirms (section 3.4).

3.3 AI agents

When an AI agent uses the marketplace, we record its identifier, its trust tier, the surface it is operating from, the platform it works for — as it names itself, or as its signed requests or its operator's published network addresses show — the AI service or directory it reached us through, as the address it called shows, the text of what it searched for and, where it names the platform it works for, the address of that platform's public profile.

That last item deserves its own section — see Section 6.

3.4 Alerts for new works

A buyer, or an AI agent acting for them, can ask us to tell them when a work is listed that matches a search. We keep the search's words and filters, whether works flagged as mature content may be included, and the email address to write to — or the web address of the agent's own system, which receives the same alerts, signed by us. With an email address we keep a one-way digest of its mailbox, which limits how many confirmation emails one mailbox receives in a day. An email alert starts only when its address confirms it, from the one email we send to ask, which names the search in our words and never repeats the words the request gave; unconfirmed, the request is deleted within 72 hours. We send at most one alert a day, each naming the new works and how to stop the alerts in one click, and never a work that has since been sold or withdrawn. An alert ends when the buyer stops it, or after 180 days; then the address, the words, the filters and the text of its messages are erased, and we keep only that it existed, when it was confirmed and ended, and when each alert was sent and which works it named. Alerts are never used to profile anyone, and the words are never shown to sellers.

4. How we use each kind of information

This section explains what we actually do with the information described above, and what we do not do with it.

Seller and artist information is used to operate your account, to publish and present your listings, to verify you so that you can be paid, to pay you your share of each sale, to communicate with you about sales and the service, to answer a buyer's dispute about a sale you made, and to meet our tax and record-keeping obligations. Artwork images and the text you write are also sent to Anthropic and Voyage AI so that listings can be given structured attributes and made findable by agents, and, where we list works with a shopping service named in Section 5, to that service, so that the works can be shown there.

Buyer information is used for one transaction and nothing more: to calculate the correct sales tax, to take the payment and screen it for fraud, to arrange delivery, to send the order confirmation and tell the buyer when the seller records sending the work or the order is refunded, to show the order and take a return request or claim for whoever proves they placed it, and to answer a dispute about the payment; and, where a buyer asks for alerts for new works, to send them (section 3.4). We do not otherwise use it to market to you, to build a profile, or to inform what we show anyone else.

Agent information is used to authenticate the agent, apply rate limits and trust tiers, keep the marketplace safe from abuse, understand in aggregate what kinds of work are being sought and which AI platforms bring buyers to Fold — subject to the erasure periods in Sections 6 and 7.

We do not use any of this information for advertising, and we do not sell it.

5. Who receives information

Twelve outside companies receive information from Fold. This is the complete list.

Channels. The channels we send listing content to, in the words of Section 7.2(c) of the Seller Agreement, are the shopping services in the table: Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. AI agents and search engines read the same public listing, and its public images, from Fold's website and agent interfaces; we send them nothing else. We add a channel to the table before we send it anything.

Neither Anthropic nor Voyage AI trains on what we send it. They are the service providers Section 7.2(d) of the Seller Agreement refers to, and we use no other.

• Anthropic. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, content sent through its API is not used to train its models, and inputs and outputs are deleted from its systems within 30 days.
• Voyage AI. We have opted our account out of data storage and model training. Nothing we send it — artwork text, the public copies of works' images, or a buyer's photo — is retained.

Artwork images are sent to Anthropic within the request itself, because the originals are held in private storage that is not publicly reachable. A work's public images are a reduced copy of its primary image and, where its seller has accepted version 6 of the Seller Agreement, clean copies of its primary, detail, framed and in-situ images, never at full resolution. They are stored by Supabase and served from foldlaboratories.com, which Vercel runs, and Fold may show them on the work's page and give them to AI agents, shopping services and search engines, so anyone may see them (section 10).

Better Stack is told that something broke, not what anyone was doing. It is the only service here that receives nothing about you. When our software hits an error it cannot handle, we send the error's type, the place in our own code it came from, and the SHAPE of the endpoint that was being asked for — /orders/:reference, never /orders/ followed by your actual reference. That distinction is deliberate: a buyer's order link is itself the key to that order, so sending a real one would be handing out a key. When one of our pages fails in your browser, the page sends our API the same few facts — on the checkout page, with the step that failed — and our API passes them on with nothing about your browser. We also do not send, and our software has no way to send, the address you were visiting in full, anything you typed, the contents of the request, your sign-in details, your network address, or the text of the error itself, because an error's text can quote the data it was working on. Better Stack also checks from the outside that our service is answering, by requesting pages that contain no personal information. Better Stack stores this in the United States.

Resend sends our transactional email, and the alerts for new works a buyer asks for — never other marketing. We have turned off its open and click tracking, so our messages carry no tracking pixel and no rewritten links. Resend keeps a copy of each message it sends for 30 days. If an address bounces, or its owner marks our mail as spam, Resend keeps that address on a list of addresses not to send to, until we remove it. Resend also tells us when a message we sent is delivered, delayed, bounces, is marked as spam or is not sent, and we record that against our own record of the message. We keep nothing else of what it tells us: not the address again, and not the message.

Beyond these twelve, we disclose information only where the law requires it, to enforce our agreements, to protect people from harm, or in connection with a merger or sale of the business — in which case this policy continues to apply or you will be told otherwise.

6. Buyers, agents, and search text

7. How long we keep things

Where the law requires us to keep something longer, we do, and we delete or anonymise it once that reason ends.

8. Sign-in and session information

Signing in requires a session credential so that we can keep you signed in between pages. It is used for that and nothing else. With each session, our sign-in provider, Supabase, records the network address and the browser it was started from; we do not use either. We do not use cookies or similar technologies for analytics, advertising, or tracking.

9. Your rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us to:

• Tell you what information we hold about you and how we use it
• Correct anything inaccurate
• Delete it, subject to records we must keep by law
• Give you a copy in a portable format
• Opt out of any sale, targeted advertising, or profiling — we do none of these, but the right stands
• Appeal if we say no

We do not treat anyone differently for exercising a right.

How to ask. Email studioassistant@foldlaboratories.com. You do not need an account. We reply within 45 days, and if we need longer we will tell you why before that period ends.

Verifying you. We confirm who you are before acting, usually through the email address connected to the information. An authorised agent may ask on your behalf with your written permission.

If we decline. You may appeal by replying with "Privacy Appeal" in the subject line. We answer appeals within 45 days and explain our reasoning. If we still decline, we will tell you how to contact your state Attorney General.

Universal opt-out signals. We do not sell personal information or share it for targeted advertising, so every visitor already has what a Global Privacy Control signal asks for, whether or not they send one.

10. Security

We protect information with encryption in transit and at rest, access controls limited to what each person or system needs, and authentication on the endpoints that agents use. Original artwork images are held in private storage that is not publicly reachable. The exception is narrow and deliberate: a work's public images — a reduced copy of its primary image and, where its seller has accepted version 6 of the Seller Agreement, clean copies of its display images, never at full resolution — are public, so that the work can be shown on its page and by agents, shopping services and search engines. Card data never enters our systems, and passwords do not exist to be stolen.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

11. Children

The marketplace is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and we delete it if we learn we have.

12. Where information is held

We are based in the United States and process information here and with the service providers listed in Section 5. If you contact us or buy from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where data protection law may differ from your own.

13. Changes

We may update this policy. If a change is material, we will post notice at least 30 days before it takes effect and update the date above. Earlier versions are available on request.

14. Contact

studioassistant@foldlaboratories.com Fold Laboratories, LLC · Golden, Colorado, United States