Legal
What we collect, what we do not, what the application sends and when, and what you can ask us to do about any of it. Written from the code rather than from a template, so every claim here is one you can hold us to.
The short version
This summary is here to be useful, not to replace what follows. Where the two could be read differently, the detailed sections below are the ones that count.
This site loads no analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising or social network scripts and no third-party fonts. The training videos are served from our own site rather than embedded from a video host. One third-party script loads, and it is the sign-in system described in section 10.
LMX does not report what you patch, what you program, how long you use it or which features you touch. There is no usage reporting to turn off, because there is none to turn off.
Showfiles, fixture profiles, cues, audio and logs are written to your own disk and never leave it, unless you deliberately attach a showfile to an issue report.
The device identity LMX uses for licensing is eight random bytes generated on your machine. It is not derived from your hardware, your serial numbers, your network or anything else about you.
We do not sell, rent or share personal information for advertising, and we do not run profiling or automated decision-making that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you.
We apply one standard worldwide. Whichever country you are in, you can ask for a copy of your information, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it and close your account.
Contents
LMX is a software lighting console for theatre, distributed from this site at lmxlighting.com. LMX Lighting is operated by an individual trading under that name, and that individual is the data controller for the information described in this policy: the person who decides what is collected and why.
You can reach us at [email protected], which is the only mailbox we operate and the one to use for every question in this policy, including a request to exercise any of the rights in section 15. If you need a postal address in order to make a formal request or a complaint, ask at that address and we will provide one in writing.
This policy covers three things:
It does not cover anything you reach from LMX that is run by somebody else. The one that matters in practice is GDTF Share, which is covered separately in section 7 so you know exactly where the boundary falls.
Grouped by the thing that causes us to hold it. If you have only downloaded the application and never created an account, only the last of these applies to you.
Creating an account is handled by Clerk, our authentication provider. We ask for your email address and a means of signing in, and we store your name alongside it. Clerk also keeps the security records any sign-in system needs: when you signed in, from what kind of device, and from what IP address, so that it can detect a compromised account. We can see those records but we do not copy them into our own database.
An account is required to use LMX beyond the demo. It is not required to read the site, the documentation or the training videos.
Joining the beta programme adds a small profile: your first and last name, the country you selected, the lighting role you selected, whether you opted in to beta announcements, and the date you signed up.
Country and role are chosen from fixed lists rather than typed, so neither is free text and neither is more precise than the country. We use them to understand the shape of the beta group: which parts of the world are testing, and whether the people reporting a problem are designers, programmers, technicians or students. This profile is also the record that entitles your account to download the build and to hold a beta licence.
LMX is licensed to a machine rather than to a session, so we keep a record of the machines you have activated. For each one that is:
Alongside those we keep your licence record: the licence type, when it was activated, when it expires if it ever does, how long the application may run offline before rechecking, how many machines may hold it at once, and the date of your last machine swap so the cooldown between swaps can be applied.
We keep two counters per account: how many times the installer has been handed to you, and how many times the licence service has been called in your name, each with the date of the first and the most recent. They tell us whether an account has ever got as far as downloading and running the application, which is most of what running a beta programme consists of.
These are counters, not an event log. We do not keep a row per request, so there is no record of the individual times you opened LMX, only the first, the last and how many there have been in total. That was a deliberate design decision and not an accident of implementation.
When you use the report command in LMX, we receive what you typed: a summary and a description, plus the application version and build and a short platform string describing the operating system. Your name and email are attached to the report from our own records rather than sent by the application, and the report is linked to the account and device it came from.
You may optionally attach either or both of the following. Neither is attached unless you choose it:
Please look at what you are attaching. A showfile can carry cue names, venue names, production names and anything else you have typed into it, and a command log can carry file paths that include your username. If a show is confidential, describe the problem instead of attaching it, or send a reduced show that reproduces the fault.
We also keep the handling history of each report: status changes, staff notes, and any rename, including the summary you originally filed so that it is never lost.
For beta announcements we keep a record of which messages have been sent to which accounts, with the address the message was intended for, the address it was actually delivered to, the subject line as sent and the time. That record is what stops the same message reaching you twice.
We also keep a do-not-contact list. If you tell us never to email you again, we record that against your account along with who actioned it and when, and every path that sends mail checks that list first. We keep the record even if the flag is later cleared, because being able to show that an instruction was honoured is the whole purpose of it.
Beta announcements are opt in and you can turn them off from your account page or by replying to any message. Service messages are separate. If we need to tell you something about your account, your licence or the security of the service, we will send it whether or not you take announcements, because opting out of marketing is not opting out of being told your licence has changed.
If you email us, we keep the message, your address and our reply for as long as we need to deal with what you raised and to have a record of having dealt with it.
Our own application code does not log IP addresses and does not write a request log. The providers listed in section 11 necessarily see connection metadata in order to serve a request at all, including your IP address, the approximate location it implies and your browser's user agent string, and they retain it briefly for security and abuse prevention under their own policies. We do not combine that data with your account or use it to build any picture of you.
One of those providers is worth naming here rather than leaving to section 11. The account menu in the site header is provided by Clerk, our authentication provider, so a script loads from clerk.lmxlighting.com on every page of this site, including this one, whether or not you are signed in. That subdomain is part of this site but is operated by Clerk on our behalf, so Clerk sees a request from your browser on each page view. Its purpose is to work out whether you have a session and to show the right thing in the header. It is not analytics, and we receive no report from it.
This is worth being exact about, because a lighting console sits on a show network and you are entitled to know what it talks to. The installed application makes exactly four kinds of request to us, and three of them only happen at startup.
There is no fifth request. LMX does not check in on a timer, does not report usage, does not upload crash logs and does not send anything about the rig you have patched, the cues you have written, the audio you have loaded or the hardware you are outputting to. If the machine has no internet connection, LMX runs on its stored licence and makes no requests whatsoever.
LMX writes a good deal to your own disk, in a folder named .lmx in your
home directory. None of it is uploaded anywhere. It includes:
You can delete any of this at any time. Deleting the licence files simply means LMX asks you to activate the machine again.
Several LMX features use your network without involving us at all. The lighting output protocols, Art-Net and sACN, are sent from your machine to your rig. USB-DMX goes down a cable. Neither passes through us and neither carries anything about you.
The phone remote deserves a plainer warning. When it is on, LMX serves a control page from your own computer on port 8765, and a phone on the same network reaches it directly. Nothing goes through our servers and we never see it. But that page has no password, and it listens on every network interface your machine has, so anyone who can reach your computer on that network can see the state of your show and send the commands the remote allows. That is a reasonable trade on a private show network and a poor one on shared or public wifi. It can be turned off in Configuration, and it is worth turning off if you are not on a network you trust.
LMX can browse and download fixture profiles from GDTF Share, which is a service run by the GDTF organisation and not by us. If you use it, you sign in with your own GDTF Share account and your requests go to them directly. Your username and password are stored on your own machine, in your operating system's keyring where one is available. We never see those credentials, never see what you search for and never see what you download. What GDTF Share does with that information is governed by their privacy policy, not this one.
To state the absences as clearly as the presences:
Data protection law in the UK and the EEA asks us to name a lawful basis for each use. We are setting out the whole table for every reader, wherever you are, because it is the clearest statement we can make of why each piece of information exists.
| Purpose | Information | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Creating and running your account, and signing you in | Email address, name, authentication records | Performance of a contract (the terms you accept when you create an account) |
| Issuing a licence and enforcing the one-machine limit | Device identifier, device label, licence record, activation timestamps | Performance of a contract, and our legitimate interest in preventing unlicensed use |
| Running the beta programme and deciding who may download the build | Beta profile (name, country, lighting role, signup date) | Performance of a contract, and our legitimate interest in running a controlled beta |
| Investigating and fixing the issues you report | Report text, application version, platform, anything you attach | Our legitimate interest in diagnosing faults, and your consent for the optional attachments |
| Sending you beta announcements | Email address, name, send history | Consent, which you give with a tick box and can withdraw at any time |
| Sending you messages about your account or licence | Email address, name | Performance of a contract. These are service messages and are not marketing |
| Honouring a request never to be contacted | Account identifier, and who set the flag and when | Legal obligation, and our legitimate interest in being able to prove a request was honoured |
| Keeping the service available and resistant to abuse | Rate limit counters, infrastructure logs held by our hosting provider | Our legitimate interest in the security and availability of the service |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is overridden by your rights and concluded that it is not, on the basis that the data involved is minimal, expected in context, and not used for anything beyond the stated purpose. You can object to any of it, and you can ask us for our reasoning.
This site sets no analytics, advertising or preference cookies of its own, and stores nothing in your browser's local storage. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
The only cookies set are those our authentication provider needs in order to keep you signed in and to protect the sign-in process against abuse. Because the account menu appears in the header of every page, that provider's script runs on every page, and it may set a cookie recording whether you have an active session before you have signed in to anything. These cookies are strictly necessary for a service you have asked for, they are set on this site's own domain rather than a third party's, and they are not used to track you across other websites. Blocking them means you cannot sign in; everything you can read without an account keeps working.
The LMX application uses no cookies. Where it remembers something, it writes it to your own disk as described in section 5.
We use a small number of service providers, each under a contract that permits them to act only on our instructions. We do not sell your information to anyone, and we do not share it with anyone for their own purposes.
| Provider | What they do | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Hosting, content delivery and the database behind this site | Everything this site stores, plus the connection metadata any web host necessarily sees, such as your IP address |
| Clerk | Account creation, sign-in and session management. Its script loads on every page, so that the header knows whether to show a sign-in link or your account menu | Your email address, name, credentials and sign-in security records, plus a request from your browser on each page you view |
| GitHub | Storage of the Windows installer file | The download request your browser makes when you follow the expiring link we hand it |
| Purelymail | Delivery of outgoing email | The recipient address and the message content, for messages we send you |
Beyond that list, we would disclose information only where:
Our providers operate globally, so your information may be stored or processed in countries other than your own, including the United States. Where information originating in the UK or the EEA is transferred outside it, that transfer is covered by an adequacy decision or by Standard Contractual Clauses together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, along with the technical measures described in section 14.
You can ask us at [email protected] for details of the safeguards that apply to a particular transfer.
Where we are required to keep something longer in order to meet a legal obligation or to defend a claim, we keep only that and only for as long as necessary.
No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority and, where the risk is high, we will tell you directly and promptly.
Different countries grant different rights, and checking which ones apply to you is our problem rather than yours. We extend all of the following to every user, whatever your location and whatever your local law requires of us.
How to use them. Email [email protected] and say what you want. We will respond within 30 days, and sooner where we can. There is no charge. We may need to confirm you are the account holder before acting, which normally means replying from the address the account uses. If we cannot do what you asked, we will tell you why and what your options are.
You may use an authorised agent where your local law provides for one. We will ask for proof of their authority.
We are the controller as described in section 1. The lawful bases we rely on are in section 9 and the safeguards for transfers are in section 12. You have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, which in the United Kingdom is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, and in the EEA is the authority for the country you live or work in.
We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer, because the scale and nature of our processing does not require one. Questions that would go to a DPO should go to [email protected].
In the twelve months before the date at the top of this page we collected the categories of personal information described in section 3: identifiers, including name, email address and device identifier; commercial information, in the form of licence and download records; internet activity, limited to what section 3.8 describes; geolocation, limited to the country you selected; and the contents of any issue report or message you sent us. The sources, purposes and recipients are those described in sections 3, 9 and 11.
We have not sold or shared personal information, as those terms are defined by the CCPA, in the preceding twelve months, and we do not do so now. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose that would give rise to a right to limit it. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. Your rights to know, delete, correct, and to be free of discrimination for exercising them, are covered in section 15 and are available to you through the same address.
If your country's law grants you a right that is not named above, you have it, and emailing [email protected] is how you use it. We would rather honour a request that turns out not to have been required than argue about jurisdiction.
LMX is a professional tool intended for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, tell us at [email protected] and we will delete it.
LMX is used in schools and colleges. Where an institution runs it for students, the institution is responsible for the accounts it creates and for any consents its own rules require.
LMX is in beta. Beta builds carry faults, and a fault can lose work. That is a reliability matter rather than a privacy one, but it has one privacy consequence worth stating: we may ask you for an issue report, including an attached showfile, in order to reproduce something. You are never obliged to send one, and the section 3.5 guidance about what a showfile can carry applies every time.
We will update this page when what we do changes. The date at the top always reflects the current text. We keep every earlier version, and you can ask us at [email protected] for the wording that applied on a particular date.
If a change materially affects how we use information we already hold about you, we will tell you before it takes effect: by email to the address on your account, and in the application's in-app news. We will not quietly begin using information you gave us for one purpose for a materially different one.
Every question, request and complaint covered by this policy goes to one address: [email protected]. It is the only mailbox we operate and a person reads it.
If something here is unclear, or you think a claim on this page is not true of the software, we want to know. The point of writing this policy from the code was to make it checkable, and a policy that has drifted from what the application does is worth correcting immediately.
Ask, and a person will answer. Requests to see, correct or delete what we hold go to the same place.