Privacy Policy

Buried Beneath LTD is the controller of personal data described in this notice for the Buried Beneath Vault service. Registered office: 61 Bridge Street, Kington, HR5 3DJ, United Kingdom.

Privacy enquiries and data-rights requests can be submitted through the Contact Us form using the Privacy/Data Request topic.

• Account and identity data: name, account identifier, email address and authentication information managed by our cloud authentication provider.
• Billing data: customer/subscription identifiers, payment status, price/product references, billing events and credit transactions. Buried Beneath Vault does not need to store full payment-card details.
• Find data: Front/Back photographs, object descriptions, identification results, confidence information, sources, valuations, favourites and report metadata.
• Land data: postcode, what3words or other location input, coordinates resolved from that input (through what3words for a three-word address, or postcodes.io for a postcode), an optional device position, research radius, Land Intelligence reports, evidence, features, zones, target scores and cached LiDAR metadata, and any detecting-area outline you submit for analysis together with its saved result.
• Earthwork Intelligence data: elevation/terrain data retrieved for your search area, terrain derivatives calculated from it (hillshade, slope, Local Relief Model, curvature, openness, sky-view), detected feature geometry, classifications, confidence values and archaeological interest scoring and ranking.
• Mapping and geocoding requests: the map tile and data requests needed to draw your maps and gather evidence, made to Ordnance Survey (through our server), Esri, the Environment Agency, Historic England and postcodes.io.
• Support data: name, reply email, topic, subject, message and optional report/reference supplied through Contact Us.
• Technical and security data: logs, timestamps, device/browser information where available, authentication/security events, API usage, processing times, errors and audit records.

We use account, billing, uploaded find and land-location information primarily because it is necessary to provide the service you request and perform our contract with you.

We use security, fraud-prevention, service-integrity, diagnostic and limited operational records where necessary for our legitimate interests in operating a secure and reliable service, balanced against your rights.

We process information where necessary to comply with legal obligations, including accounting, tax, consumer-protection and lawful requests.

Where consent is the appropriate lawful basis — for example for optional non-essential cookies or marketing — we will ask for it separately and you may withdraw it.

We use OpenAI’s API as our AI provider. Find photographs and the accompanying instructions and descriptions may be sent to OpenAI to perform the identification and research workflow, and Land Intelligence sends the location-related research content needed for AI-assisted research and explanation.

OpenAI processes that content as our service provider under their API terms and data processing addendum. How long OpenAI holds it depends on the service and data controls configured on our API account: our current workflow uses OpenAI’s stored-response mechanism, so request and response content can be held on OpenAI’s systems and retrieved by us while a job runs and for the retention period applying to our account. OpenAI’s standard API abuse-monitoring and data-retention controls may also apply. We do not claim a Zero Data Retention arrangement, and we do not state that OpenAI retains nothing.

OpenAI processes API content in the United States and other locations; transfers are made under the safeguards in their data processing addendum. We do not permit AI providers to use your content to train their general models under our API terms.

AI output is not treated as infallible. The service presents confidence, evidence and limitations and combines AI with deterministic processing where appropriate.

We do not use Buried Beneath Vault, or any customer content processed through it, to make decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you solely by automated means.

Buried Beneath Vault is built and hosted on Lovable (Lovable Cloud), which provides the managed PostgreSQL database for records, managed authentication for sign-in, managed private file storage and the server functions that run our processing. The database, authentication and storage services are provided on Supabase infrastructure within Lovable Cloud, hosted in the EU.

Cloudflare provides edge delivery and bot/abuse protection for the published site and processes technical request data for that purpose.

Private storage buckets include find-images and lidar-data. Files are intended to be accessed only through server-side controls or short-lived signed URLs rather than public bucket access.

During identification, the original Front/Back images may be temporarily retained so the AI can inspect the best available image rather than a compressed derivative.

After successful analysis and safe creation of retained derivatives, the original image variants are designed to be deleted and their corresponding database rows soft-deleted. For each side, an archival WebP (approximately 2400 px long edge) and thumbnail WebP (approximately 520 px long edge) are retained while Vault retention applies.

If processing fails, operational handling may temporarily retain data needed to diagnose or safely retry the request, subject to retention controls.

Exact land inputs and resolved coordinates are treated as private account data. Public/customer-facing presentation should use masked references where exact coordinates are not required.

A postcode you enter is sent to postcodes.io to obtain an approximate centre. A three-word address you enter is sent to what3words to convert it into coordinates; where the exact centre of a report is needed again later, that conversion is requested again rather than taken from storage. Coordinates derived from a three-word address are held only for a short working period and then cleared, while the saved report itself is unaffected.

Land locations are used to obtain or compare relevant mapping, terrain/LiDAR, historic-map, heritage and research evidence, to run Earthwork Intelligence terrain analysis and feature scoring, and to calculate target areas and navigation information.

We share only the data reasonably necessary with the providers that help us operate Buried Beneath Vault:

• Lovable / Lovable Cloud (on Supabase infrastructure) — hosting, database, authentication, private storage and server functions.
• Cloudflare — edge delivery, security and bot protection for the site.
• Stripe — subscription, checkout, billing portal and payment-event processing.
• OpenAI — AI processing for Find Identification and Land Intelligence, as described in section 4.
• what3words — converting a three-word address you enter into coordinates. Only the three-word address is sent; no account or report details are sent.
• postcodes.io — converting a postcode into an approximate centre and looking up the nearest town/county label. Only the postcode or coordinate is sent.
• Ordnance Survey — base mapping tiles, requested by our server so your browser does not contact OS directly. Only tile coordinates are sent.
• Esri (ArcGIS Location Platform) — satellite/aerial imagery tiles in released Land Intelligence reports, requested by your browser. Only tile coordinates and normal technical request data are sent; no customer identifiers are deliberately sent.
• Environment Agency — public LiDAR terrain data requests for the analysis area.
• Historic England — public heritage dataset queries (National Heritage List for England scheduled monuments and Aerial Investigation Mapping) for the analysis area.
• Resend — sending transactional emails such as membership and billing confirmations.
• Professional advisers, regulators, courts or law-enforcement bodies where disclosure is legally required or reasonably necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal rights.

Requests to mapping, terrain and heritage providers carry the location and tile information needed to return the data, not your name, email or account identifier.

We do not sell personal data to advertisers.

Some technology providers may process data outside the UK. Where UK data-protection law requires safeguards for an international transfer, we will rely on an applicable adequacy regulation or appropriate contractual/other safeguards provided for by law.

Provider arrangements can change. The live Privacy Policy should be reviewed when processors or hosting arrangements change.

We keep personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, including contractual, security, accounting and legal requirements.

• Original Find image variants: designed for deletion after successful analysis and creation of retained WebP derivatives.
• Vault archival/thumbnail images and Find reports: while the account/membership retention rules apply; after paid membership ends, the current design provides 30 days of read-only Vault retention before scheduled deletion.
• Land reports and evidence: retained for the account while needed to provide saved reports and subject to account deletion/retention rules.
• Billing, tax and transaction records: retained for the period reasonably required by applicable accounting, tax and legal obligations.
• Cooling-off and refund records (your request, the deadline shown, usage check, refund amount, payment and refund references, and related consent and audit evidence): retained for the same period as billing, tax and transaction records.
• Pending refund and deletion: if you request a cooling-off refund together with account deletion, your account is kept only as long as needed to complete the refund, after which the existing deletion process applies.
• Support, security and audit records: retained for a proportionate period based on the nature of the request, dispute, security need or legal requirement.

We use account authentication, owner-scoped database rules, private storage, signed URLs, server-side secret handling, payment-webhook verification and audit controls designed to reduce unauthorised access.

No online system can be guaranteed completely secure. If we become aware of a personal-data breach, we will assess and respond to it in accordance with applicable law.

Depending on the circumstances and lawful basis, you may have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability, and a right to withdraw consent where processing relies on consent.

Your right to object: where we rely on legitimate interests, you may object to that processing. We will consider the objection in accordance with applicable data-protection law.

Submit a request through Contact Us using Privacy/Data Request. We may need to verify identity before acting on a request.

You may complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office if you believe your personal data has been handled unlawfully. You can find current complaint information on the ICO website. We would appreciate the opportunity to address your concern first, but you are not required to contact us before contacting the ICO.

Buried Beneath Vault is not designed as a service directed at children. If we learn that personal data has been provided by a child in circumstances where it should not have been processed, we will take appropriate steps.

We will update this Privacy Policy when our processing, providers, retention arrangements or legal requirements materially change. The effective date will be shown at the top.