Privacy

The catalog asks people to upload photographs of their own work. That only works if it is clear what becomes public and what does not, so this document tries to be specific rather than reassuring.

The default

Contributions are public. A swatch you submit, a measurement you record, a correction you make: those are the catalog. That is the trade, and it should be obvious at the moment you make it rather than discovered afterwards.

What we collect

• An email address, to sign you in and to send you things you asked for. It is never shown publicly and never sold or shared for marketing.
• Your contributions and the record of who made them. Contributor names are not currently displayed on public pages.
• A display name and a public attribution name, both optional and both chosen by you and changeable.
• Preferences — language, units, colour theme.
• Ordinary server logs, kept briefly for operating the site and diagnosing failures.

We do not ask for your legal name, your address, or your date of birth. The age rule is a clause of the terms you accept when you register, not a separate question with a birth date attached — deliberately, so that we do not end up holding one.

Photographs carry more than you think

A photograph from a phone can embed the camera, the settings, the time, and often GPS coordinates of where it was taken — which, for a photograph of fabric taken at your kitchen table, is your home address.

Location data is removed before your photograph is stored, not merely before it is shown. An upload lands first in a quarantine area that the site never serves from. Before it is promoted to a stored master, GPS tags, XMP and IPTC location fields, and derived composite coordinates are stripped, and the file is then re-examined to confirm they are actually gone. If any survive, the upload fails rather than being stored — the check refuses to pass a file it could not clean. The quarantined original is deleted once the cleaned copy is safely stored.

So the coordinates are not sitting in a bucket somewhere marked private. They are not retained at all.

Camera settings that make a colour reading trustworthy — make, model, exposure, white balance — are read out into ordinary catalog fields and kept, because that is what lets someone judge whether a measurement is any good.

What none of this can do is look at your photograph for you. Metadata is handled; a mailing label, a screen, a window view, or another person in the frame is not.

Who can see restricted photographs

Photographs of fur on a finished suit are never published openly.

Moderators can see restricted content, including content you have not shared, because reviewing a report sometimes requires it.

Every such access is recorded and auditable: the log keeps which moderator was shown which item, and when, so the claim "moderators do not browse this material" can be checked instead of trusted. The reason a moderator was looking is recorded on the review, not on the picture: opening a report to answer it is itself recorded, and an access made while answering it is shown against that report. An access with no review open to explain it is shown as a bare access rather than left blank — the unexplained view is the one worth seeing. Moderator access is held by two people.

How long things are kept

• Contributions persist while the catalog does — that is what a catalog is.
• Logs are short-lived.
• Removal records — what was taken down, when, why — are kept after the file itself is deleted. They do not contain or reconstruct the removed content.
• Uploads you abandoned, uploads that failed processing, and quarantined files have defined retention windows and are swept automatically once they expire. This runs on its own schedule and touches only quarantine, never stored masters.
• Legal hold is not something this site does. There is no mechanism for one, and none has ever been used. If that changes, it changes here first, and as a separately audited exception.

Taking your data with you

You can download your data yourself, at any time, for free, from your account settings. It is a single machine-readable file (JSON) that downloads straight away. It contains your account data — your email, the names you are known by, your preferences, and any organisations you belong to — and a manifest of every photograph you have uploaded, each named with a stable link to where its bytes are served, so that nothing you contributed is missing from the record.

Your uploads are part of this because the copy we hold may be the only one left — if your own has been lost, a portability promise that returned everything except your photographs would not be portability at all.

The export is free and stays free. It is a commitment about your data rather than a feature we sell, and it will not move behind a subscription later.

Deleting your account

You can close your account yourself, at any time, from your account settings — without asking anyone and without waiting on any open report.

The screen tells you what will happen before you confirm. If you have never contributed to the catalog, your account and its data are deleted outright. If you have, your private and account data are removed and your public contributions are kept under your pseudonym only: the revision history is genuinely unchangeable, so a contributor's account is retired to a pseudonymous tombstone rather than erased, and your name comes off the work while the work stays.

The honest limit, repeated from the contribution terms because it is the thing people most often assume otherwise: openly licensed photographs may already have been copied elsewhere with your attribution name attached. What this site displays can be changed. Copies other people already hold cannot be recalled.

Cookies

A session cookie to keep you signed in, and an optional "remember me" cookie if you ask for one. That is all. No advertising trackers, no third-party analytics.

Before you sign in, language and colour theme follow what your browser reports rather than anything we store.

Children

The minimum age is stated once, in the terms of use, and it depends on where you are rather than being a single number. This notice does not restate it, because an age rule written down twice is an age rule that will eventually disagree with itself.

What belongs here is what happens to the data: if we learn an account belongs to someone younger than the rule allows, it is closed and its data removed.

Governing law

This notice is governed by the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the applicable federal law of the United States.

Changes

This notice carries a version written as major.minor, starting with 0 while it is still a draft. A material change bumps the major and comes with a summary of what changed; a reword bumps the minor. Changes that affect what happens to data you already contributed are notified rather than posted quietly. Because this is a notice of what we do rather than terms you agree to, a change here never asks you to accept anything again.

Contact

Privacy questions, export requests, and deletion requests go to reports@aussie-theo.dog, and get a written answer.