Where your data lives — and what "no AI" means

Everyone has a right to privacy. For a composer or songwriter that is not an abstract principle. Your catalog is your business: what you wrote, who it is registered with, what it earned, which placements you have. A list like that says more about your working life than most contracts do.

So the honest question is not whether a tool promises to be careful. It is where your data physically sits, and who can reach it.

What we can see of your catalog

Nothing.

That is not a policy we chose to be nice. It follows from how cueliszt is built: there is no cueliszt server holding your catalog, your statements or your earnings. There is nothing there for us to look at, nothing to leak, and nothing to hand over.

Never on our servers. Never in a training set. Never with third parties.

What this website processes is a separate and much smaller story — an email address if you join the waitlist, a message if you write to us. That is at the end of this post, in full.

Where your data actually lives

Your data lives on your devices and in your private iCloud — never on our servers.

That is the whole architecture. cueliszt reads and writes on your Mac. Sync goes through your own iCloud account — your iCloud, not ours — which means we have no access to it. We keep no account for you, no dashboard of your works, no copy of your statements.

Your final audio files are not moved or altered either. cueliszt references them where they are, so your catalog knows where the real file lives without taking custody of it.

The app itself is quiet on the network. Apart from your own iCloud sync, the one thing it fetches is the European Central Bank’s public reference exchange rates, so amounts in different currencies can be compared. That request contains nothing about you.

If you want to know how iCloud protects what it stores, read it from Apple rather than from us:

• Apple’s privacy overview — the principles, with short films explaining them
• Privacy features in detail — feature by feature, including on-device processing
• iCloud data security overview — which categories are encrypted, and what Advanced Data Protection adds
• Apple Platform Security — the full technical documentation

Advanced Data Protection is worth reading about in particular. It raises the number of iCloud categories that are end-to-end encrypted — not all of them, and Apple’s own table says exactly which. It is also a setting you control, not something we grant you.

What “no AI” means — and what actually reads a statement

No AI reading over your shoulder.

In the app: none at all. That deserves precision rather than a slogan.

A statement comes in as the CSV or text file your PRO exports. cueliszt reads it with ordinary, deterministic code on your Mac and checks its own result against the statement’s own totals. Matching lines to works, adding up sources, comparing quarters — that is arithmetic, running on your machine. No model reads your statement, and none is trained on it.

“No AI” means: no training on your data, no reselling, no third-party AI.

Why we are careful about this

AI is taking sync and library work away from composers. cueliszt does the opposite: it helps you claim the money you’ve already earned — and never feeds on your work.

That is the reason for the line we drew. Not a position on technology in general, but a decision about whose material trains what.

What this website does

Being straight about the app means being straight about the site.

If you join the waitlist, your email address goes to CleverReach in Germany. Along with it go your IP address, the page you came from and your browser identification — that trio is the record of your consent, which the law requires us to be able to produce. If you write to us or report a problem, your message lands in a mailbox in Germany and is read by a person.

cueliszt.com can also load Google Tag Manager and, through it, Google Analytics — but only after you actively agree. Before that, no tracking loads at all: no tag, no cookie. The banner asks about marketing as well; nothing in that category is switched on today, and if that changes it will need your consent in the same way. You can withdraw at any time through the cookie settings in the footer; withdrawal takes effect immediately and deletes the cookies.

All of it — recipients, purposes, legal bases, retention — is written out in the privacy notice.

The app is not in the App Store yet, so treat this as a description of how it is built rather than a review of something you can install today. The architecture is the part that will not change: the most a tool can do is stay out of the way — and be able to show that it does.