Privacy Notice

This notice covers the award only — entering, being shown in the gallery, voting, and Academy membership. It applies to everyone, everywhere, including the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. For AICU's other products and services, see the AICU privacy policy; where the two differ for the award, this notice governs.

1. What we collect, and why

Data	Why (legal basis)	Kept for
Account identifier from AICU Sign-in (a pseudonymous subject id) and your email	To identify entrants and voters and to prevent duplicate voting (performance of the contract; legitimate interest in a fair vote)	While your account exists; award records retained for the edition + 12 months
Age band and country — derived values only: whether you are over 18, and a two-letter country code	To apply age and regional eligibility rules (legal obligation; legitimate interest). We do not receive or store your date of birth or address. AICU Sign-in derives these values and passes only the result	With the membership or entry record
Your entry: title, description, public work URL, credits, and any files you upload	To review, publish and judge the work (performance of the contract; your consent for publication)	Published as described in §2; source files removed 12 months after membership lapses
Votes you cast	To count the public vote and detect manipulation (performance of the contract; legitimate interest)	Aggregated after the ceremony; individual votes deleted within 12 months
Payment records (Stripe customer and subscription ids, amount, status)	To take the USD 10 annual Academy fee and meet accounting and tax duties (contract; legal obligation)	7 years where tax law requires it
Partner enquiries (name, organization, email, country, message)	To answer you and manage the partnership (contract; legitimate interest)	3 years from last contact
Server logs (IP address, user agent, timestamps)	Security, abuse and fraud prevention (legitimate interest)	Short-term, per Cloudflare's retention

Card details never reach us. Payments are processed by Stripe, which acts as an independent controller for the payment itself.

2. What becomes public — and what does not

• Public: once an entry passes screening, the work title, the creator or team name you supply, the public work URL, the credits you list, and the field it was entered in appear in the gallery, in nomination and results announcements, and in the certificate at cert.aicu.ai.
• Not public: your email address, your payment records, your age band and country, and how you voted.
• You choose the name that is shown. A pen name is fine.
• Certificates are meant to last. A certificate is a record a third party can check, so it stays published after the edition ends. If you need one withdrawn, write to award@aicu.ai: we will remove it unless we must keep it to defend the integrity of a published result, and we will tell you which applies.
• If your Academy membership lapses, paid-only material is unpublished, while the preview, the credits and the certificate remain (see the Code of Conduct and the Academy Rules).

3. Young people

The award is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you are 13–17, you may take part only with the permission of a parent or guardian, and AICU Sign-in will ask for confirmation before an account can be used for a paid entry. Voting is designed to need as little as possible: a sign-in and one vote per field. Where a school or event organizes group voting, the organizer is responsible for obtaining any consent their own rules require. To ask about a young person's data, write to award@aicu.ai.

4. Cookies

The award site sets no advertising cookies and does not sell personal data. We store your language choice and sign-in session locally so the site works. Where consent is required by law — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — we ask for it before setting anything that is not strictly necessary, and the site is fully usable if you decline. We check only the country your request arrives from in order to decide whether to ask; that check is not stored.

5. Who else sees the data

• Cloudflare — hosting, storage and delivery
• Stripe — payments
• Resend — transactional email
• Google Workspace — the award office mailbox
• Judges see the entries they are assigned; partners see aggregate figures, not personal data.
• We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we do not use your entries to train AI models.

6. International transfers

AICU Inc. is in the United States and our processors operate globally, so your data will be transferred outside your country. For transfers from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (with the UK Addendum where relevant) together with the technical measures described here.

7. Your rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or transfer it. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Write to award@aicu.ai — we answer within 30 days. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland you may also complain to your local supervisory authority.

Two limits worth stating plainly: we cannot un-publish a result that others have already relied on without saying so, and we must keep payment records for as long as tax law requires.

8. Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Non-public files live in private storage that is not reachable by URL, and access is limited to the award office. No system is perfect; if a breach affects you we will tell you and the relevant authority as the law requires.

9. Changes

If we change this notice materially we will say so on this page and, where the change affects you, by email before it takes effect.

International AI Creator Award 2026 · Organizer: AICU Inc. (Delaware) · Operated by AICU Japan K.K.
Code of Conduct · Academy Rules · aicu.ai/award/2026 · Effective 2026-08-29