Privacy at ArtSites

When you write to an artist

An artist's contact form, and the enquiry panel on a single work, ask for your name, your email address and your message. We ask for all three because the artist cannot reply to you without an address, and a message with no name is a hard thing to answer warmly.

What happens next depends on how that artist reads their messages. Both ways are ordinary, and the form looks the same either way.

Most artists get your message as email

We pass it straight to them and keep no copy of what you wrote. Two small records of the send stay with us for 90 days and then delete themselves:

• A record that a message went out. It holds who it went to, the subject line, and whether the mail was accepted. It does not hold your words.
• A short note of your name and email address. It exists for one reason: artists often press Reply, and their reply comes back to us rather than to you. That note is how we pass it on to you instead of losing it.

Some artists read their messages here

If the artist uses an inbox on our system, your message, your name and your email address are stored with us so they can read the thread and reply in it. We keep it while their website exists. The artist can delete the thread, and so can you, just by asking us.

If you asked about a particular work, we also note which work it was, so the artist knows what you meant.

Two of us touch that message, and we are each accountable for a different part of it. The artist chose to put up a form and invite you to write, so the artist is accountable for why your message is collected and what happens to it once they have read it: whether they reply, whether they follow up, whether they call you about buying the work. We operate the form itself, so we are accountable for how it is handled before that: how it travels, where it is kept, how long, and who else can see it. On a group's website, the group's admins stand in for "the artist" above. On a basic artist profile hosted directly at ArtSites, we are both parties, because there is no separate artist site standing behind the page.

We believe both of us are accountable, each for our own part, and that is the honest position rather than a settled one: it has not yet had legal review. If you are ever unsure who to ask about a message you sent, ask us. We will point you to whoever is responsible, or answer it ourselves if that is us.

If you would like to know which of the two an artist uses before you write, ask us and we will tell you.

When you use chat

Two chats look alike and go to different places.

Chat on an artist's website

This goes to that artist. It is stored the same way as an inbox message above, and everything in that section applies to it.

Chat on our own site and in our help centre

This comes to us, and a person reads it and answers. Nothing you write in it is sent to anyone else.

If you open a chat with us and never write anything, we delete it a day later. Otherwise we delete it 180 days after your last message, unless you have asked to be put through to a person and we are still working on it.

When you write to platform support

This section is for you if you are an artist and you used the "Get help" button inside your own site, not a contact form on someone else's page. That message comes straight to us. It is not a message to another artist, so nothing above about an artist's inbox applies to it.

One of our people reads it and answers. That is the same arrangement as chat on our own site, described above, because it runs through the very same system.

We keep the whole thread so you can come back to it, to read what we told you, to add to it later, or to check what was said. Nothing about it is on a timer. The 180-day period described above is for a chat from someone we may never hear from again; it does not apply here, and no automatic clean-up sweep touches your support thread at all.

That stays true even after you close your account. We keep a record of the support we gave you on purpose: if a question ever comes up about what we told you or when, we want to be able to show the real conversation rather than rely on memory. It is your history with us as much as it is ours, which is why deleting it is your call rather than something that happens to you on a schedule.

You can delete it yourself, at any time, from the conversation history list in the support panel. Once you do, it is gone. We keep no copy.

The Feedback button

While we are still building, every page carries a Feedback button. If you use it, it sends us your name, your email address, what you wrote, the page you were on, the page you came from, and your browser and screen size. The technical parts are there so we can reproduce the problem on the same sort of screen you saw it on.

It reaches one of us as email, and the record of that send deletes itself after 90 days. We do not record your IP address.

Cookies

Two, and neither one is for advertising or for following you around.

tz

Your timezone, so dates and times read in your own local time rather than ours. Lasts 1 year.

artsites_visitor

Set only if you start a conversation. It is what lets you come back to your own thread without an account and without a password. Lasts 180 days.

That is the whole list. No third-party cookie, nothing shared with anyone, nothing measured.

We have not put a consent banner in front of you. Clicking "accept" on two cookies that exist only to show you the right time and your own messages would be a chore we invented for ourselves, not a choice we gave you.

You can clear them from your browser whenever you like. Times will show in our timezone instead of yours, and you will need to ask us for a fresh link to any conversation you had.

Where your information goes

This is the complete list. If something is not on it, it does not happen.

• The artist you wrote to. On a group's website, that group's admins as well.
• Amazon Web Services, in the United States, which sends our email.
• Our own servers and database, which are in the United States.
• Google, on nearly every page, because we load our fonts from Google's font service. That request tells Google your IP address and which browser you are using. It is a stylesheet and nothing more: it cannot see the page, the form, or anything you type. We are looking at hosting the fonts ourselves so that even this stops.

We do not send your work or your words to an AI company. Not the images you upload, not what you write to us, not what a visitor writes to you. None of it is sent anywhere to be analysed, summarised or answered by a machine, and none of it is used to train one.

We do use AI to help write our own help articles, the way we use any other tool to write them. That touches nothing of yours. If we ever change what is described in the paragraph above, we will say so here before we do it, and this page will describe exactly what is sent and where.

What we never do

• No advertising, no analytics, no session recording, no tag managers. There is no third-party script on any public page.
• Nothing reads what you are typing before you press send. No keystroke capture, no half-written message saved anywhere, nothing kept in your browser.
• No open tracking or click tracking on the email carrying your message. A note between you and an artist is not a marketing campaign, and we do not measure it.
• No IP address of yours in our database. We hold one briefly in memory so that nobody can submit a form a thousand times, and then it is gone.
• No CAPTCHA. Proving to a machine that you are a person is a tax on you for our convenience.

How long we keep things

A message emailed straight to an artist

We keep no copy. The two records of the send delete themselves after 90 days.

A message in an artist's inbox here

While their website exists, or until you or the artist delete the thread.

A chat with us that you never wrote in

1 day.

A chat with us, after your last message

180 days. This is the visitor chat on our own site and help centre, described above. It does not cover an artist's platform support thread, which is next.

An artist's platform support thread

Kept indefinitely. No sweep expires it, and it outlives your account if you close it. See When you write to platform support for why, and how to delete it yourself.

Feedback sent from the Feedback button

90 days for the record of the send. It reaches a person as email.

Your name and email address on their own

Never longer than the messages they belong to. When the last one goes, they go with it.

Who can read what you wrote

• The artist you wrote to. On a group's website, that group's admins.
• Our most senior operator role, when something has to be fixed or when you have asked us to do something. Every time one of us opens an artist's message thread we leave a record of it, so "only when needed" is something we can show rather than something we say.

Our general support team cannot open an artist's inbox at all. That is deliberate: the people who answer questions about billing have no reason to read your letter to an artist.

Asking us what we hold, or asking us to delete it

Write to support@artsites.me and a person will answer. There is no form and no queue. These requests are rare, and one person handling one properly beats a machine handling it badly.

We will usually ask you to write from the same address you used when you contacted the artist. That is so we do not hand your messages to somebody else, or delete them on a stranger's say-so.

If you ask us to delete a conversation, we delete the messages and your contact details with them, and we keep no copy.

Contact

ArtSites is based in British Columbia, Canada.

Anything on this page, or anything you would like us to explain: support@artsites.me.

Our terms of use are a separate page: Terms of Use at ArtSites.

When something on this page changes, we change the page and update the date below. If a change matters to you, we say so at the top rather than burying it.

Last updated August 7, 2026.