Privacy Policy

Abantu LLC ("Abantu Audio", "we", "us") operates the Abantu Audio mobile application and the account and checkout website at account.abantuaudio.com. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what you can do about it.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not show advertising, and we do not share your listening activity with advertisers.

What we collect

Account information. Your email address, and a password managed by our authentication provider — we never see or store your password in readable form. Optionally a display name, first and last name, avatar image, phone number, locale and time zone, if you choose to provide them.

Listening activity. Which titles you open, your playback position, how much of a title you have completed, and session records containing the device type, platform and app version you used, along with start and end positions and timestamps. We use this to sync your place across devices, show what you have in progress, and report aggregate listening to publishers so authors and narrators are paid.

Your library. Titles you have purchased with credits, titles you have saved, and titles you have asked to be notified about.

Purchases and subscription. Your credit balance and a permanent, append-only record of every credit granted or spent. For subscriptions we store an identifier issued by Stripe, your plan, status, billing period dates and country.

We never receive or store your card number. All payment details are entered directly with Stripe, our payment processor. We hold only Stripe's identifiers for your customer and subscription records.

Technical information. Device type, platform, and app version, collected as part of session records.

Community feedback. If you post in the feedback channels of our Discord community, we capture your message into our feedback system so that bugs and suggestions are not lost in a busy channel. Those channels are listed and labelled — a pinned notice and the channel topic both say that messages there are captured, and no other channel is read. What we store is the text of your message as you wrote it, any screenshots you attached, your Discord username and Discord user ID, and a link back to the original message. Your Discord identity is not connected to your Abantu account; we hold no way to link them and do not attempt to.

Usage analytics and diagnostics

If you are an adult user, we collect product usage data to understand how the app is used and to make it better: which screens you view, searches you run (how many characters and how many results, never the text you typed), titles you open, playback events such as start, pause, seek and completion, download and checkout steps, and basic device and app details (platform, app version, locale, coarse country). These events are tied to a pseudonymous identifier (your account's internal user ID), not to your name or email address. We may also record session replays of how the app is used so we can find confusing screens. Replays mask text input and are switched off on sign-in, account, checkout and sign-in handoff screens.

We also collect crash and performance data (error reports, stack traces, device model, operating system, app version, timings) so we can find and fix problems. We configure this to exclude your email address, access tokens and similar secrets.

We never send your email address, name, phone number, payment details, search text or other free text you type to our analytics.

Kids mode. Analytics and session replay are never collected from kids mode or kids sessions. From those sessions we receive only crash reports, scrubbed of personal information, so the app can be kept working.

Why we collect it

To provide the service — authenticate you, deliver audio you are entitled to, remember your place, and maintain your library. To process payments and maintain an accurate financial record. To pay publishers, authors and narrators, which requires reporting aggregate listening and sales for their titles. To fix problems, diagnose crashes, and understand how the app is used so we can improve it. And to meet legal and accounting obligations.

To sort community feedback: messages captured from our Discord feedback channels are sent to Anthropic's Claude API, which reads each one and returns a category — bug, feature request, general feedback or question — along with a short summary, so that a person can triage a week of reports in minutes rather than scrolling a channel. A human reviews and corrects those categories.

We do not use your data to build advertising profiles, and we do not use it to train machine learning models — not our own, and not anyone else's. Sending a message to a model to be read and categorised is different from using it to train a model: Anthropic processes the text to return an answer and does not train on it.

Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers who process data on our behalf:

Discord is not on that list, because Discord is not processing anything on our behalf — it is the platform you chose to post on, and its own privacy policy governs what it does with your messages and account. We read from the channels listed above and copy what we find into our own system.

Publishers receive aggregate reporting about their own titles — listening totals, sales counts and royalties owed. They do not receive your name, email address or any information identifying you individually.

We may also disclose information where required by law, or to protect our rights or the safety of others.

Where your data is held

Our infrastructure is operated in the United States. If you use the service from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed there.

How long we keep it

We keep your account information and library for as long as your account is active.

When you delete your account, we deactivate it immediately, cancel any active subscription, and permanently erase your personal data after 30 days. Signing in during that 30-day window restores your account, your library and any unspent credits. Your subscription is not restored — it was cancelled when you asked to delete — so you would need to subscribe again.

Community feedback is kept on a shorter clock. We remove your Discord username, Discord user ID, the text of your message and any screenshots after 12 months, unless the report is still attached to an open piece of work. What survives is the anonymised summary and the count of how many people reported the same thing — because the fact that nine people hit one bug is the reason the system exists, and deleting that would destroy it.

One exception, and we would rather state it plainly than bury it: we retain the financial transaction record — what was purchased and when — with your identity removed, so that it can no longer be linked back to you. We do this because we are required to keep accurate accounting records and because publisher royalties are calculated from that history. The retained record contains no name, email address or account identifier.

Your choices and rights

You can view and update your profile, and delete your account, from inside the app under Account.

For community feedback, type /forget-me to our Discord bot and we will remove your Discord username, user ID, message text and screenshots from our feedback system, keeping only the anonymised summary described above. You do not need an Abantu account to do this. /feedback-privacy prints this explanation in Discord on demand.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to request a copy of your data, correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to particular processing. Contact us at info@abantuaudio.com and we will respond within the time your local law requires.

California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under the CCPA/CPRA, and we do not offer financial incentives in exchange for personal information.

If you are in the EEA or UK: we process your data to perform our contract with you, to meet legal obligations, and for our legitimate interest in operating and improving the service. You may lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

Children

Abantu Audio is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact info@abantuaudio.com and we will delete it. Some titles in our catalogue are intended for adult audiences. Our kids mode does not send usage analytics or session replay; it sends only scrubbed crash reports that do not identify the child.

Security

We use encrypted connections, restrict database access with row-level security so that you can only reach your own records, and keep payment details entirely within Stripe's systems. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Changes

We may update this policy. If we make a material change, we will notify you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and revise the date at the top.

Contact

Abantu LLC
17350 State Highway 249 Ste 220
Houston, Texas 77064-1132
info@abantuaudio.com