How your words are handled

Your answers are stored in a private database so you can leave and come back. Voice answers are transcribed by OpenAI and the audio is never kept. First drafts of your brand strategy are written by Claude from your own answers, and Andreas reviews every one before it reaches you. Nothing is sold, nothing is shared for advertising, and you can delete a discovery yourself at any time.

The controller under Art. 4(7) GDPR for everything described here:

Name

Andreas Horvath

Postal address

Hausmanning 1, 94099 Ruhstorf, Germany

Email

studio[at]raiseyourlight.com

Service

studio.raiseyourlight.com

Raise Your Light is a one-person studio. One person reads your answers, and that person is Andreas.

Your account email, your name if you give it, your questionnaire answers including edits and follow-ups, and the brand-strategy drafts generated from them. If you use The Mirror, the text you paste and your email are stored so Andreas can follow up, plus a one-way hash of your IP address used only to stop the free tool being abused.

If you tick the newsletter box on The Mirror, that choice is stored along with the time you made it, because consent has to be demonstrable under Art. 7(1). Leaving it unticked changes nothing about the result you get.

When you answer by voice, the recording is sent to OpenAI for transcription and comes back as text. The audio itself is not stored, not by this app, and is not used for model training. Only the text lands in your answers, and you can edit it before it counts.

Two places, openly: transcription of voice answers, and the first drafts of your brand strategy, which are generated with Claude (Anthropic) from your own answers. Everything you receive is a mix of AI drafting and human work. Andreas reviews, corrects and shapes every draft before anything reaches you. No AI output goes to you unreviewed, and the drafts are built to quote your words rather than replace them.

There is no automated decision-making in the sense of Art. 22. Nothing about you is decided by a machine; the drafts are raw material for a person.

The questionnaire asks open questions about your work and your story. Some people answer with things that count as special category data under Art. 9: health, beliefs, or similar. You are never required to. Where you choose to include them, the basis is your explicit consent under Art. 9(2)(a), which you give by ticking the separate consent box before your discovery starts. That box is never pre-ticked, the time you ticked it is recorded, and declining it does not stop you working with the studio — the work is built from your professional material instead. You can withdraw the consent at any time by email, and you can remove the details themselves by editing before submission or by deleting the discovery afterwards.

Delivering the discovery and the drafts is performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b). The Mirror and any newsletter rest on your consent, Art. 6(1)(a), which you can withdraw at any time. Keeping the service running and unabused, including the hashed IP behind the rate limit, is legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f). Nothing here is used for advertising or profiling.

One kind, and only one: the sign-in cookie that keeps you logged in while you work. Without it the app cannot tell who you are, which makes it strictly necessary and exempt from consent. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking. The banner still offers you the choice, and both optional categories are off unless you turn them on. The cookie policy sets that out in full.

Your answers stay while your project is active and afterwards as the working record of your brand foundation, since that is what later work is built on. Mirror entries are kept while the lead is live. Server logs are kept only as long as needed to keep the service secure.

You can delete any discovery yourself from your dashboard. That removes the answers and every draft made from them, permanently, straight away.