Privacy Notice

1. Who we are

Acorn is operated by Best Price LC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("Acorn", "we", "us"). This notice explains how we handle personal information when you visit acorncompute.com, use the Acorn API or acorn command-line tool as a customer, or run the Acorn Mac app or command-line worker as a worker.

For our own accounts, website, billing, worker payouts, and security, we decide how and why personal information is used, so we are the controller. When we process a customer's recordings and transcripts, we do so on that customer's instructions as its processor or service provider; the customer's own privacy notice governs that content. If your voice or information appears in a customer's recording, please contact that customer first. We will help them respond.

Contact: privacy@acorncompute.com · Best Price LC, 30 N Gould St, Ste R, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States.

2. What we collect

Customers

Account and contact details: name, work email, organization, and the details you give us in signup, contact, and support messages.
Credentials: API keys, which we store only as hashes. You sign in to the acorn command-line tool with an API key we issue. Web sign-in by emailed link will be listed here when it is available.
Job content: the audio you submit, the transcripts we return, job settings, and the webhook destinations you configure, along with job status, duration, and usage records.
Billing records: usage, charges, prepaid balances, budget caps, and payment correspondence. If you pay by card, a payment processor handles the card details; we do not store card numbers.

Workers

Account details: a required contact email, your worker identifier, a generated display name, and the versions of this notice and the Worker Agreement you accepted, with the time of acceptance.
Payout details: the PayPal or Venmo account you give us, your earnings, holds, payout requests, and payout records.
Device information: details about your Mac and how it's set up, such as model, chip, memory, storage, macOS and app versions, and connection type, and a device identifier. We use them to match work to your Mac, optimize your earnings, and run the network.
Machine health and performance, sent while the Software runs: processor load, memory and swap use, thermal state, temperatures, fan speed, power draw, battery charge, capacity and cycle count, whether the Mac is on power, uptime, job timings, and network speed measured against our servers. We also receive a yes-or-no signal for whether someone used the keyboard or mouse in the last five minutes, so work can yield to you.
Computer Name: the name you gave your Mac in macOS settings, which may include your name. After you accept this notice, the Mac app sends it with work requests so our operators can recognize your Mac. The command-line worker sends it, or your hostname, when you register. We replace it when you rename your Mac. It is not used for payouts or sign-in and is not sent to analytics providers.
Diagnostics: launch information (install identifier, versions, macOS, processor type, and language setting) and, if the app crashes, up to ten of the newest Acorn crash reports, with your macOS username removed from file paths.
Command-line worker extras: the command-line worker also reports the number of kernel panics in the last seven days and the name of your Mac's default network interface.
Mac lending: if you opt in to lending your Mac for customer virtual machines, lease timing and qualification results. We do not collect the contents of a customer's network traffic.

Everyone

Connection data: IP address, browser or app user agent, requested pages and API paths, and an approximate location (such as country, region or city) derived from your IP address.
Website analytics and attribution (Section 6).
Messages you send us.

What stays on your Mac

To decide when to pause, the Mac app checks locally whether the camera or microphone is in use, whether a meeting app is running, which app is in front, and exactly how long you have been idle. Those details never leave your Mac. The Software does not record your screen or keystrokes, does not read your personal files or browsing history, and does not request camera, microphone, or photo-library access.

3. How we use it

To provide the service: accept and split jobs, send work to workers, merge and deliver results, and run customer virtual machines.
To pay workers: calculate earnings, apply holds, and send payouts.
To bill customers and enforce budget caps.
To keep the network reliable and safe: match jobs to capable Macs, avoid overheating or slowing a Mac in use, validate results, detect fraud and abuse, and investigate incidents.
To support you and fix crashes.
To understand product use and how people find Acorn, through analytics.
To meet legal obligations and to establish or defend legal claims.

We do not sell personal information or use customer job content to train models. We may use advertising tools on our website. If we add them, the Privacy choices link in the site footer becomes "Your Privacy Choices" and lets you opt out of advertising there. Where the law treats that as sharing, we also honor Global Privacy Control as that opt-out. In the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, and Quebec, we use them only with your consent.

4. Telemetry and analytics in the Mac app

The Mac app sends no diagnostics or product analytics until you accept the Worker Agreement and this notice during onboarding. After that, launch information, crash reports, and product analytics are on by default. Product analytics record app events such as launch, starting and stopping work, pausing, demo use, and your progress through onboarding (steps viewed and completed, time on each step, the step where you stopped, and whether you granted each permission), together with app version, macOS version, processor type and tier, and similar device details added by the analytics library, identified by your worker identifier. Onboarding timings from before you accept are kept in memory on your Mac and sent once, only after you accept. They never include job content. Our analytics provider receives your IP address and may estimate your approximate location from it. You can turn diagnostics and analytics off in the app's Privacy settings. Turning them off does not stop the machine health, performance, and job information the network needs to run, validate, and pay for work.

5. Who receives it

Service providers that host our systems, run our edge network, store backups, deliver email, provide analytics, and send payouts. Our subprocessors page lists these by category.
Workers. A worker's Mac receives the audio for its job: sometimes a segment, and for some jobs the complete recording. Workers are independent operators bound by the Worker Agreement not to listen to, keep, or share customer content. Those are contractual protections; a person who controls a Mac may be technically able to access files on it.
Destinations customers choose, such as webhook endpoints.
Authorities and advisers, when the law requires it or to protect rights and safety.
A buyer or successor of our business, subject to this notice.

6. Website cookies and analytics

In the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, and Quebec, the website sets analytics cookies only after you accept them in our banner. Elsewhere, analytics are on by default, and you can turn them off with the Privacy choices link in the site footer. We store your choice in your browser for up to 13 months.

When analytics are on, we record the site and page that referred you (without its query string), campaign tags, pages viewed, clicks, scroll depth and pointer position on each page, download and signup events, and device and screen details, linked by a first-party cookie ID kept for up to 12 months. We do not record what you type, and we do not record sessions. Website analytics pass through our own domain, so our analytics provider does not receive your IP address from the website; our edge adds your country instead.

Our edge network also counts every visit in aggregate: referring site, campaign tags, landing page, country, and device type. These counts carry no cookie, IP address, or other identifier.

Download links and our signup form carry the source that brought you to the site (the referring site and campaign tags), so we can count which sources lead to installs and signups. When analytics are on, download links also carry your analytics ID, so the download is added to your website visits. After you install the Mac app and enroll, we may link your earlier website visits to your worker record. We don't link them if you turned off website or app analytics, or if you didn't give consent where it is required. The Mac app and our signup form may ask how you heard about Acorn and where; answering is optional.

Our website does not respond to Do Not Track signals, because there is no common standard for them. Global Privacy Control opts you out of advertising sharing as described in Section 3; it does not turn off analytics, which you control with the Privacy choices link. The website also uses cookies needed for security and sign-in.

7. How long we keep it

Information	How long
Normalized job audio on our servers	Deleted automatically about 7 days after the job finishes. Audio for a job that ends partly complete is kept so the job can be recovered, then removed by an operator.
Transcripts, job records, and webhook deliveries	Kept until deleted at the customer's request. We do not yet delete them automatically after a set period.
Audio on a worker's Mac	Deleted by the Mac app when the job ends. Leftovers from a crash are removed on a later launch once they are more than six hours old.
Backups	Volume snapshots expire after 14 days, and our point-in-time database replica keeps 7 days of history. Other backup copies expire on their own schedules.
Server logs	Kept by our hosting provider for a limited period.
Customer web sessions	30 days.
Worker health samples	90 days.
Diagnostic bundles you upload	30 days.
Network address history	12 months after last seen.
Account, payout, billing, audit, and security records	For as long as the account exists and afterward as needed for accounting, tax, disputes, and fraud prevention.
Website and app analytics events	1 year at our analytics provider.
Crash reports, launch records, messages, and signup or contact forms	Until deleted. We do not yet delete these automatically; ask us and we will.

8. Deletion and your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of your personal information, to object to or restrict certain uses, and to withdraw consent. To make a request, email privacy@acorncompute.com. We handle deletion requests manually: an operator verifies the request and deletes or scrubs the data, including transcripts and audio for a customer's job. This does not yet cover jobs that ended partly complete. Copies in backups expire on the schedule above. We cannot recall data already delivered to a destination a customer chose.

We will verify your identity in proportion to the request and respond within the time the law requires, for example one month under the GDPR, extendable where the law allows. If we decline a request, we will explain why and how to appeal. We will not treat you differently for exercising your rights. Customers should send requests about content in their jobs to the customer that submitted it.

9. Automated decisions

Routing, trust tiers, payout holds, result validation, and fraud flags use automated signals and can affect what a worker earns and when. A worker can ask for a person to review any of these decisions at support@acorncompute.com.

10. Security

We use HTTPS for connections to our services, store API keys and worker credentials as hashes, protect operator access with passkeys and one-time recovery codes, sign webhooks, keep worker credentials in the macOS Keychain, and log operator actions. Workers process customer content on their own Macs under contractual restrictions; splitting audio across workers reduces what one worker sees but does not make it anonymous. No system is perfectly secure.

11. International users

We are based in the United States, and our servers run in a single U.S. region. Our edge network processes traffic close to you, and workers' Macs can be anywhere in the world. We do not offer data-residency guarantees. When you use Acorn from outside the United States, your information is processed in the United States and in the countries where our providers and workers operate.

EU and UK users

When the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to our processing as controller, we rely on these legal bases:

Contract: to provide a worker's participation and payouts, and a customer's service where the customer is an individual.
Legitimate interests: to run, secure, and improve the service, administer business customer relationships, validate work, prevent fraud, count website visits in aggregate at our edge, attribute downloads and signups to their source, and run website analytics where consent is not required. You can object to this processing.
Consent: website analytics cookies, and linking those visits to your worker record. You can withdraw consent at any time with the Privacy choices link in the site footer.
Legal obligation: accounting, tax, and responses to lawful requests.

Where we transfer personal information from the EU, UK, or Switzerland to a country without an adequacy decision, we use the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK equivalent where the law requires them. Customers can request our Data Processing Addendum, which includes those clauses, at legal@acorncompute.com.

You may complain to the data protection authority where you live or work, or to the UK Information Commissioner's Office. We would appreciate the chance to address your concern first at privacy@acorncompute.com.

We have not appointed a representative in the EU or the UK. We will appoint one if the law requires it.

U.S. state privacy rights

If a U.S. state privacy law applies to you, you may have the rights described in Section 8, and you may use an authorized agent. We do not sell personal information. You can opt out of any sharing for targeted advertising as described in Section 3. We do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. The categories we collect, their sources, uses, and recipients are described in Sections 2, 3, and 5, and how long we keep them is in Section 7.

12. Children

Acorn is for people 18 and older, and we ask you to confirm you are 18 or older when you sign up, get an API key, or enroll a Mac. We do not knowingly collect information from children through accounts or enrollment. Customer recordings may include anyone's voice; customers are responsible for having the right to submit them.

13. Changes

We will post changes here with a new version date. When a change materially affects workers, the Mac app and command-line worker will ask workers to accept the new version before receiving more work. We will notify customers of material changes by email.

14. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@acorncompute.com. Security issues: security@acorncompute.com. Legal notices: legal@acorncompute.com. Mail: Best Price LC, 30 N Gould St, Ste R, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States.

Acorn Privacy Notice