Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

This policy is issued by Atlas Methods, a website and automation studio operating from Southern California (“Atlas Methods,” “we,” “us,” “our”). We are the party responsible for the personal information described here.

Contact: info@atlasmethods.com · Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm Pacific.

2. What this policy covers

This policy applies to information we collect through atlasmethods.com (the “Site”), including the consultation form and the Atlas assistant chat widget, and to information you send us by email in connection with an inquiry or a project.

It also serves as our notice at collection. It is linked in the footer of every page and directly beneath the consultation form, so it is available to you at or before the point where you give us anything.

It does not change the terms of any signed proposal, statement of work, or care-plan agreement between you and Atlas Methods. Where a signed agreement addresses confidentiality of your business information, that agreement controls. Section 8 explains how we treat information we handle on behalf of a client as part of a website or automation we build.

3. Information we collect

3.1 Information you give us

When you submit the consultation form, we collect your name, your business email address, and what you tell us you need help with. Optionally, you may also give us your company name, your current website URL, and a rough company size. When you email us, we collect whatever you choose to send: business details, existing site access notes, content, and files.

3.2 Information collected automatically

Our hosting and security provider records standard server and edge log data for every request: IP address, browser type and user agent, referring page, the pages and files requested, and the date and time. We use this to deliver the Site, diagnose errors, block abuse, and enforce the rate limits that protect our contact form and chat endpoint.

3.3 The Atlas assistant (AI chat)

The chat widget on this Site is an AI assistant, not a person. When you send it a message, the text of your message and the recent conversation are transmitted to our AI model provider, Ollama, Inc. (Ollama Cloud), which runs the open-weight model that generates the reply. Your conversation and a randomly generated session identifier are stored in your browser’s sessionStorage, which your browser clears when you close the tab; we do not maintain a chat transcript database. Your IP address is used to rate limit the endpoint to 20 messages per hour. Please do not enter sensitive personal information, passwords, credentials, or confidential client data into the chat.

3.4 Cookies and similar technologies

This Site does not use advertising cookies, cross-context behavioral tracking, or a third-party analytics package as of this revision. Our bot-protection widget (Cloudflare Turnstile) and our security provider may set strictly necessary cookies or storage entries required to verify that a form submission is not automated, and the chat widget uses sessionStorage as described above.

3.5 Information we ask you not to send

We do not need and do not knowingly collect sensitive personal information: government ID numbers, financial account numbers, health information, precise geolocation, or biometric data. Please keep it out of the consultation form and the chat. Invoices and payments are handled separately, through a secure payment link hosted by our payment processor, Stripe; we do not collect or store payment card numbers through this Site.

We also do not accept protected health information, and we will not act as a HIPAA business associate unless we sign a separate business associate agreement. We do not collect consumer health data or biometric identifiers.

4. Categories collected in the last 12 months

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended (the “CCPA”), the categories of personal information we have collected in the preceding twelve months are:

We do not collect the categories of sensitive personal information defined by the CCPA, biometric information, geolocation beyond coarse IP-derived region, education records, or inferences used for profiling.

5. How we use information

• To respond to your inquiry and schedule a consultation.
• To prepare proposals, scopes, and estimates for website, care-plan, and automation work.
• To design, build, launch, maintain, and support the work you engage us for.
• To invoice, collect payment, and keep required business and tax records.
• To operate and secure the Site, including rate limiting and bot filtering of the consultation form and chat endpoint.
• To generate replies in the Atlas assistant when you choose to use it.
• To send transactional messages about an inquiry or engagement you initiated. We do not run a marketing email program from this Site.
• To comply with law and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

6. Who we disclose information to

We disclose personal information only for the business purposes listed above, to:

• Service providers under contract: our hosting, content-delivery, and bot-protection provider (Cloudflare, Inc., which serves this Site and provides the Turnstile verification widget on our form), our transactional email provider (Resend, which receives the contents of your form submission in order to deliver it to us), our payment processor for recurring billing and invoicing (Stripe), our AI model provider for the Atlas assistant (Ollama, Inc.), and the web font service that serves typefaces to your browser (Google Fonts, which receives your IP address as part of that request). Each is bound to use the information only to perform services for us.
• Subcontractors engaged for your project, limited to what they need to perform the work and under confidentiality obligations.
• Professional advisors: accountants, insurers, and attorneys, under duties of confidentiality.
• Legal and safety: when required by law, subpoena, or court order, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Atlas Methods, our clients, or the public.
• Business transfer: in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, subject to this policy.

7. AI and automated processing

Because we sell AI automation, we hold ourselves to a plain account of how we use it on our own site.

• The chat is a bot, and it says so. The Atlas assistant is clearly identified as AI, it is instructed never to claim to be human, and it exists to answer questions about our services. It is not a companion product and it is not designed to simulate a personal relationship. This follows California’s bot-disclosure law (Bus. & Prof. Code §17940 et seq.), which requires disclosure when an automated account communicates with people in California.
• No significant automated decisions. We do not use automated decision-making technology or profiling to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you. A person reads every inquiry and every proposal decision is made by a person.
• What the model sees. Only the text you type into the chat plus the running conversation is sent to the model provider, along with the instructions that tell the assistant what Atlas Methods sells. The consultation form is not sent to an AI provider; it is verified by Turnstile and emailed to us.
• Training. We do not use your inquiries or chat messages to train or fine-tune AI models, we do not use them to build or benchmark another product, and we do not sell or license them to anyone for those purposes. The same applies to information we handle for clients under Section 8: client data is never used to train a model or improve our own products. Our model provider processes your messages solely to generate the reply, under its own terms; we authorize no other use, and we cannot control a provider’s independent practices. If you would rather send nothing to a model provider, email us instead of using the chat.
• Model changes. The assistant runs on whichever open-weight model our provider makes available, and we may change models to keep it working. A change of model does not change anything in this section.
• Accuracy. AI-generated answers can be wrong or out of date. Nothing the assistant says is a quote, an offer, or professional advice. Confirm anything that matters with a person at info@atlasmethods.com.

8. Information we handle for clients

When we build or maintain a website or an automation for a client, we may process personal information that belongs to that client’s customers: contact-form submissions, inbox contents routed by an email triage workflow, chat transcripts on a client’s site, and similar operational data.

For that information, the client is the responsible party and we act only as their service provider. We use it solely to deliver, operate, and support what the client engaged us to build; we do not use it for our own purposes, and we do not sell or share it. Requests to access or delete that information should go to the client whose website or workflow collected it, and we will support the client in fulfilling those requests. Where a client requires a data processing agreement or service-provider addendum, we will sign one. For the client’s own website content and code, Section 6 of our Terms of Service sets out our commitment to transfer it on request.

9. No sale or sharing of personal information

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined by the CCPA. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months. We do not sell or share the personal information of consumers we know to be under 16 years of age.

10. How long we keep it

We keep inquiries that do not become engagements for 24 months and then delete them. Records tied to a completed engagement, including proposals, invoices, and delivery documentation, are retained as long as needed for support and for the periods our tax and contract records require, generally four years, which matches California’s four-year limitations period for written contracts (Code Civ. Proc. §337). Server and security logs are retained for the short period set by our provider’s defaults. Chat conversations live in your browser session and are cleared when you close the tab. We delete or de-identify information when it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected.

11. Security

The Site is served over HTTPS with HSTS and a content security policy. Form submissions are transmitted over encrypted connections, verified by Cloudflare Turnstile, rate limited to 5 submissions per IP address per hour, and delivered to a limited number of internal recipients. The chat endpoint is rate limited to 20 messages per IP address per hour. API responses are never cached. Access to project records and client credentials is limited to people who need it. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach compromises your personal information, we will notify you, and the California Attorney General where required, as Cal. Civ. Code §1798.82 requires.

12. California privacy rights

If you are a California resident, the CCPA gives you the rights below. We honor these requests as a matter of policy, whether or not Atlas Methods meets the statutory thresholds that make a business subject to the CCPA in a given year.

• Right to know: the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you, the sources, the purposes, and the categories of recipients.
• Right to delete: deletion of personal information we collected from you, subject to exceptions such as completing a transaction, security, and legal compliance.
• Right to correct: correction of inaccurate personal information.
• Right to portability: a copy of the personal information you gave us, in a portable and, to the extent technically feasible, readily usable format.
• Right to opt out of sale or sharing: we do not sell or share personal information, so no opt-out link is required or provided.
• Right to limit use of sensitive personal information: we do not collect sensitive personal information.
• Right to non-discrimination: we will not deny service, charge different prices, or provide a different level of quality because you exercised a privacy right.

12.1 How to submit a request

Email info@atlasmethods.com with the subject line “Privacy Request.” Tell us which right you are exercising.

12.2 Verification

To protect your information, we will verify your identity before acting. For most requests this means matching the email address in our records and confirming details of the inquiry or engagement. We will not use information provided for verification for any other purpose.

12.3 Authorized agents

An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with written permission signed by you, or a valid power of attorney. We may also contact you directly to confirm the authorization.

12.4 Timing

We confirm receipt within 10 business days and respond within 45 calendar days. If we need more time, we will tell you and may take up to 45 additional days.

12.5 Shine the Light

California Civil Code §1798.83 lets California residents ask about personal information disclosed to third parties for those parties’ own direct marketing. We do not disclose personal information for that purpose.

12.6 This notice in another format

If you use assistive technology and have trouble reading this policy, email info@atlasmethods.com and we will send it in another format, including plain text or large print, at no charge. Our Accessibility Statement covers how this Site is built to be read with a screen reader or a keyboard alone.

13. Other state privacy rights

Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws (including Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Oregon, Montana, Minnesota, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, Iowa, Washington, Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island) may have rights to access, correct, delete, and obtain a portable copy of their personal information, and to appeal a denied request. We apply the process in Section 12 to those requests regardless of whether we meet a given state’s applicability thresholds. To appeal, reply to our response with “Appeal” in the subject line; we will respond in writing within 45 days with our decision and the reasons for it, and tell you how to reach your state attorney general if you disagree.

Several of those laws also give you the right to opt out of targeted advertising, the sale of personal information, and profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. We do none of those things, so there is nothing to opt out of and no universal opt-out signal for us to act on. If that ever changes, we will update this policy first.

14. Children’s privacy

This Site is directed to business owners and operators. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided information, email info@atlasmethods.com and we will delete it.

15. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

There is no common standard for responding to browser “Do Not Track” signals, and this Site does not respond to them. Because we do not sell or share personal information and run no cross-context behavioral advertising, a Global Privacy Control signal does not change how we handle your information. There is nothing to opt out of. No other party collects personal information about your online activities over time and across different websites through this Site.

16. Visitors outside the United States

Atlas Methods serves clients in the United States and stores information in the United States. If you visit the Site from outside the U.S., you understand that your information will be processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those in your country. We do not market to individuals in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom.

17. Third-party links

The Site links to third-party websites, including the founder’s portfolio at alvinlee.cc. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those sites; read their policies before providing information.

18. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our practices or the law change. The effective date at the top shows the current version. Material changes will be posted on this page before they take effect, and we will note the change in the “Last updated” line. If a change materially affects information you already gave us, we will email the address we have on file.

19. Contact us

Atlas Methods · Southern California · Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm PT · info@atlasmethods.com

See also our Terms of Service and Accessibility Statement.