The most-asked question in my creator DMs is some variant of “are you training AI on my pics?” When I was an ActiveCampaign reseller a decade ago, the same fear ran through every brand I onboarded about their CRM data — every vendor’s privacy doc sounded the same, and almost none survived a careful reading. So I rewrote ours this month to match the code we actually ship and to retire the kind of hand-wavy slogans that a careful reader (or a careful lawyer) would correctly call out. The binding answer to “do you train on my uploads” lives in the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, both of which you accepted when you registered. This essay is the plain-English walkthrough; the policy documents are the authoritative version.
Where the binding rules actually live
The short version: when you registered for Apiway, you accepted the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use in a single act, and that single acceptance covers every use of your content described in those documents — current and updated — for as long as you keep the account active. There is no second consent buried in a settings page, no opt-in default that you have to find, and no separate agreement per feature.
Everything below describes what those two documents currently authorize. If anything in this post reads as a separate promise that sounds narrower or broader than the policy text, the policy text wins. I’m calling that out at the top because it’s the only way an explainer like this can stay readable for years without turning into its own quasi-contract.
The relevant sections are Privacy Policy §5A–§5F and Terms of Use §3A. Cite those, not this post.
What we currently do with brand-private uploads
Brand uploads — your own product photos uploaded to run our AI photoshoot, ghost-mannequin, or image-creation pipeline — sit in your private workspace, run through whichever upstream generation provider’s no-training option is available at the time, and return as your output. Per Privacy Policy §5A.2 and §5D, private content is excluded from the public catalog surfaces, from cross-platform distribution under §5C.3, and from the AI/ML model-training scope of §5C.4. The binding scope of the carve-out is the policy text, not the identity of any specific provider at any specific moment.
Brand mode currently has no public profile surface on Apiway — brand uploads aren’t indexed at any /<your-store> URL. That’s a product-design statement about today, not a contractual promise about every future feature; if that ever changes, the legal scope will move with it through the §5 framework, and the change will be disclosed in the policy update channel rather than in this post.
One narrow technical exception worth naming: every upload (brand or creator) runs through our automated content-safety check before any generation goes out the door. That is a per-request safety operation described in Privacy Policy §5C.1; it is not training data and is not retained for any other purpose.
What we currently do with publicly published creator content
Creator publishing is a different deal — deliberately, and you accepted the difference when you registered. When a creator publishes a photo set to the Apiway creator marketplace — whether through the bulk upload modal, by tapping “Auto upload” in the @apiway_official DM, or by connecting an Instagram account so new IG posts flow in on their own — the content becomes publicly published creator content under Privacy Policy §5A.1.
Per §5C of the Privacy Policy, publicly published creator content may be analyzed by our computer-vision models to generate the SEO titles, captions, structured data and tags that turn a flat upload into a searchable listing page; may be distributed on ApiWay-operated accounts on third-party platforms for the purpose of attracting traffic back to the creator’s public profile; and may be used to develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate and benchmark Apiway-operated AI/ML models that power moderation, ranking, recommendation and aesthetic scoring on the platform.
The third-party platform list is not a roadmap. The policy authorizes a category — ApiWay-operated channels on third-party platforms — and which platforms are actually wired up at any given time is an operational choice. Today, the active distribution channel is Apiway’s Pinterest. Whether and when any additional platform is activated is governed by the same §5C.3 authorization you already accepted; you don’t have to re-consent each time a new channel is wired up, and we don’t have to pre-announce one either.
The exchange, written cleanly: a creator grants a publication license on the content they choose to make public; Apiway provides distribution and SEO infrastructure that a single creator can’t produce alone, plus a commission flow every time a brand uses the set and an affiliate flow when the creator brings new accounts in. The commission and affiliate mechanics are documented in detail on the creator affiliate payouts page, which is where any specific number lives — numbers in a blog post tend to age out faster than the page that ships next to the code.
Why we retired the “we never train” slogan this month
Because the old wording stopped being literally accurate and we’d rather rewrite it than rely on a slogan that survives only as long as nobody reads it carefully. The historical analogue I keep coming back to is the way late-1990s ISP terms of service treated “your connection is private” — the wording felt permanent until deep-packet inspection became standard, at which point every honest ISP rewrote, and the dishonest ones got sued. Marketing claims age fast when the underlying business changes.
Specifically: an earlier version of this very URL said “Apiway does not operate a training pipeline that consumes user uploads.” That was accurate when the only thing we were running was a thin wrapper around an upstream generation model. It stopped being accurate the moment we started running our own ranking, moderation and aesthetic-score models on publicly published creator content. Better to rewrite than to ride a slogan into a misalignment with the code.
If you registered when the older, narrower slogan was the public framing of the product, the grandfather clause in Terms of Use §3A.7 keeps your previously-uploaded content under the older, narrower terms; the expanded processing operations apply only to content you publish, send or import after you’ve been presented with, and affirmatively accepted, the current consent at a fresh upload, publish, connect, or DM event.
How withdrawal works, in plain English
Three layers. Unpublishing a listing or hiding a single frame in the Apiway app pulls it from your public storefront with effect from the moment the Service records the action. Disconnecting Instagram or toggling auto-sync off stops further IG posts from flowing into your marketplace. Deleting your account triggers the full deletion pipeline described in Privacy Policy §7 and §9.
Distribution on ApiWay-operated channels on third-party platforms is also withdrawable: send the request to [email protected] or through the in-product control, and the §5E mechanism kicks in.
Two limits I want to name explicitly because they live in the policy already and because pretending they don’t exist would be the exact kind of slogan I’m trying to retire. Privacy Policy §5E.3 acknowledges that Apiway cannot reach copies, reshares, screenshots, embeds, archives or search-engine caches made by anyone outside its control; and it acknowledges that training increments already incorporated into an existing model before a withdrawal request cannot be cleanly reversed, because modern machine learning does not have a primitive for unlearning a specific example. Both limits are honest and both are in the binding policy text rather than a marketing one.
Statutory rights under GDPR Article 17 and the California CPRA apply independently of all of the above, on the standard request-and-verify flow, and Privacy Policy §9 describes how to invoke them.
The reason I rewrote this post instead of quietly editing the old one is the same reason I told the legal team to put the binding answers in §5A–§5F of the Privacy Policy rather than in a marketing slogan: the relationship between an AI platform and the people who upload to it is fragile, and only honest documentation survives a year. If you’re a brand, your product photos sit under the §5A.2 and §5D carve-out. If you’re a creator, public publication is the deal you accepted on registration, and the binding scope is §5C. Either way, the document you agreed to once is the one that controls — this post is the explainer, not the contract.
— Anton
P.S. The old URL still works because months of organic equity point at it. The wording inside is just different now, and aligned with the document you actually agreed to.