Plain-language summary: TerrAlert collects what it needs to run the service, never sells personal data, and lets you export your data or delete your account at any time from the Account page. Deleting your account takes effect immediately.
TerrAlert, Inc. ("TerrAlert", "we", "us", or "our") operates the TerrAlert satellite change detection service at https://terralert.io and through its API. TerrAlert is the controller for the personal data described in this policy.
TerrAlert, Inc., United States.
Privacy contact: [email protected]
When a business customer adds other people's data to its account, such as the team members it invites and the webhook addresses it adds, TerrAlert processes their data on the customer's behalf. For that data the customer is the controller and TerrAlert is its processor, under our Data Processing Agreement (see section 5).
When you create an account, we collect:
You may also give us, when you sign up or later under Account (all optional):
If you sign up with Google, we receive your name and email address from your Google account, and store the name as your full name. You can change it at any time under Account.
We do not collect or store your password. Sign-in is handled by our authentication provider, Supabase (email and password, or Google). Your password is created, checked and held by Supabase and never reaches TerrAlert's servers. We receive only a short-lived, signed session token confirming who you are.
AOI coordinates you draw or upload are your data. We process them to deliver the change-detection service and do not claim ownership of them or sell them. To find change, our servers download Sentinel-2 imagery of your areas from the Copernicus Data Space and store processed copies so that you can compare before-and-after images. For an area smaller than 10,000 m² or narrower than 100 m, the imagery we download and analyse covers a box at least 100 m across around it, so it can include neighbouring land. Satellite imagery of land at 10 metres per pixel is generally not personal data. The maps in the app also load basemap tiles directly from third-party services, as described in section 5.
Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. At checkout Stripe collects your card details, your organisation name, your billing address and, if you choose to give one, a tax ID such as a VAT number. Card details are entered on Stripe's page and never reach TerrAlert. We keep only the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers and the subscription details we need to run your plan (plan, status and renewal date).
If you open a support ticket or email us, we keep the messages and your contact details to help you and to keep a record of what was agreed. If you use the contact form or ask for an Enterprise quote, we collect your name, email address, company, your message and, for a quote, the configuration and notes you enter, and we use them to answer your enquiry. Copies of support tickets and of contact-form and sales enquiries also reach TerrAlert's support and sales mailboxes, so that we see them and can answer. Section 7 says how long each is kept.
Each purpose below has one legal basis. Section 4 explains the bases.
| Purpose | Data used | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Provide and operate the TerrAlert service, including alerts and the weekly summary email | Account, AOI, alert settings, team members, detections | Contract |
| Take payment and manage your subscription | Billing details, Stripe identifiers | Contract |
| Send account, billing and security messages, and notice of changes to our Terms or this policy | Email address, name | Contract |
| Provide customer support | Support tickets and messages | Contract |
| Answer contact-form and sales enquiries | Enquiry details | Legitimate interests |
| Keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and fix errors | Technical data, error reports, security log | Legitimate interests |
| Keep the service out of countries under comprehensive US sanctions | Country you give, country derived from your IP address | Legitimate interests |
| Understand who uses TerrAlert and for what | Optional profile fields, page-view counts | Legitimate interests |
| Keep proof of what you agreed to and when | Consent record | Legitimate interests |
| Keep tax and accounting records; answer data-rights requests and keep a record of them; notify authorities of a personal data breach where required | Billing records, request log, relevant account data | Legal obligation |
| Send product-update emails | Email address | Consent |
We do not sell, rent, or broker your personal data to any third party for their marketing purposes.
For individuals in the European Economic Area (EEA) or the United Kingdom, we rely on the following lawful bases under Article 6 GDPR and the UK GDPR:
TerrAlert is not designed to process special categories of personal data, such as data about health, religion or political opinions. The Acceptable Use Policy in our Terms of Service forbids using the service to monitor individuals or private residences, and customers must not use it for that purpose.
We use the service providers below to run TerrAlert. Each is used under its data processing terms and processes personal data only on our instructions. The Subprocessors page is the full, current list, with each provider's name, location and transfer safeguard.
| Provider | Purpose | Data involved |
|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean, LLC | Server hosting in the United States for the application, database, processed imagery and the database backups kept on the server | Everything TerrAlert stores |
| Backblaze, Inc. | Off-site storage of database backups (Backblaze B2, United States, US East region). Each backup is encrypted on our server before it is uploaded, and Backblaze does not hold the key | Encrypted copies of everything TerrAlert stores |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | DNS, TLS and protection against denial-of-service attacks | IP address and request data as it passes through |
| Supabase, Inc. | Sign-in, password reset and two-factor authentication. Our database is not hosted at Supabase. | Email address, hashed password, sign-up details, sign-in IP address and session tokens |
| Stripe, Inc. | Payments, invoices and the billing portal | Billing details and payment history |
| Our email delivery provider (named on the Subprocessors page) | Delivery of the emails TerrAlert sends | Recipient email address and message content |
| Functional Software, Inc. (Sentry) | Error reports from our servers and the web app, and performance timing for a 10% sample of server requests | Error details and stack trace, page or endpoint, browser type, and the IP address a browser report comes from |
To draw maps, search for places and let you sign in with Google, your browser fetches content straight from the services below. They receive your IP address and ordinary browser details, as any website you load content from does, and decide for themselves how to use them under their own privacy policies. TerrAlert does not send them your account data.
Our web pages load their fonts from terralert.io itself, not from Google Fonts.
Our servers query public data services (the Copernicus Data Space, NASA and Global Forest Watch, among others) for imagery and land-change signals. These requests carry map coordinates only, never your name, email address or other account data.
For business customers whose personal data TerrAlert processes on their behalf (the team members they invite and the webhook addresses they add), our Data Processing Agreement forms part of the Terms of Service and governs that processing.
We may also disclose data if required by law or court order, or where necessary to protect the rights, safety or property of TerrAlert, our users or the public.
TerrAlert, Inc. is based in the United States, and the service's data is stored on servers in the United States. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, your personal data is therefore transferred to and processed in the United States.
Where we pass personal data to service providers outside those regions, we rely on:
The Subprocessors page names the safeguard for each provider. For business customers, section 9 of the Data Processing Agreement sets out the transfer terms for customer personal data.
| Data | Kept |
|---|---|
| Account and profile | Until the account is deleted. Deletion is immediate (see below). |
| Areas, scenes, detections, alerts | Per plan history window, and deleted with the account. |
| Contact-form and sales enquiries, including the copies in our sales and support mailboxes | 2 years after receipt |
| Support tickets and messages, including the copies in our support mailbox and messages you email to [email protected] | 3 years after the ticket's last activity |
| Error reports | 90 days |
| Product analytics events | 13 months |
| Security log (staff actions, data exports and account deletions, with IP address) | 2 years |
| Data-rights request log | 3 years (proof the request was handled) |
| Billing provisioning failures | 1 year after creation, and only the fields needed to fix provisioning |
| Database backups | A copy every 6 hours, and one before each database update, kept on the server up to 15 days; encrypted off-site copies at Backblaze removed about 35 days after upload by the storage bucket's retention rule |
| Invoices and payment records | Held by Stripe for as long as tax law requires |
Plan history windows. Detections and scenes older than your plan's history window are deleted automatically each day: 30 days on Free, 1 year on Starter and Growth, 3 years on Pro, and on Enterprise the period set in your Enterprise configuration. When a paid subscription ends, your full history is kept for 60 days so that you can switch provider or retrieve it; the "Download my data" JSON export on the Account page includes all of it, including your areas with their alert settings and your detections with their geometry. After those 60 days the Free plan's 30-day window applies.
Deleting an area. An area you delete stops being monitored and is hidden from the app. Its boundary and name are kept until you delete your account, and its scenes and detections follow your plan's history window.
Deleting your account. You can delete your account at any time in the "Your data" section of the Account page. Deletion is immediate. In one step it deletes your areas and everything under them (scenes, detections and alerts), your webhooks, your support tickets and messages, your team memberships, contact messages sent from your email address, and billing provisioning records; it deletes your customer record at Stripe, which ends any subscription, and your Supabase sign-in account; and it anonymises your account record. If the step at Stripe or Supabase fails, the confirmation you receive says so, and we finish that step by hand. The processed satellite imagery files for your areas, which contain no personal data, are removed from our servers within a day. We keep only what is listed here, on purpose:
Copies in database backups are deleted as the backups expire, on the schedule in the table.
We describe our security controls here at the same level of detail as our Security page. Where a control is partial or not in place, we say so.
If a breach happens. If a personal data breach occurs, we notify the competent supervisory authorities within 72 hours of becoming aware of it where the law requires, and we tell affected customers without undue delay. Where the breach affects personal data we process for a business customer under the Data Processing Agreement, we notify that customer without undue delay so that it can meet its own obligations.
TerrAlert's own pages set no cookies. The web app keeps a few items in your browser's local storage and session storage. Each one is either strictly necessary for the service to work or remembers a choice you made. None of them identifies you for analytics or advertising, and we use no advertising or third-party tracking tools, so we do not show a cookie banner.
| Key | Storage | Purpose | How long | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
sb-<project>-auth-token | Local storage | Your Supabase sign-in session. During Google sign-in a temporary -code-verifier entry is added and then removed. | Until you sign out | Strictly necessary |
terralert:last_activity | Local storage | Time of your last activity, so the app can sign you out after 24 hours without activity | Until you sign out | Strictly necessary (security) |
terralert:auth_flow | Session storage | Which sign-in flow is in progress | Removed when sign-in completes | Strictly necessary |
terralert_admin_token | Session storage | Staff sign-in for the support console (TerrAlert staff only) | Until the tab is closed or the staff member signs out | Strictly necessary |
terralert:theme | Local storage | Your light or dark theme choice | Until you clear it | Preference |
terralert:aoi_draw_view | Local storage | Where you last left the map when drawing an area | Until you clear it | Preference |
terralert:profile_prompt_dismissed:<user id> | Local storage | That you chose "Not now" on the profile prompt | Until you clear it | Preference |
Earlier versions of the app stored a random visitor ID (terralert:anon_id) for counting visits. The current app deletes it from your browser the next time it counts a page view, and the IDs stored with earlier page views have been removed from our records.
Other sites have their own rules: Stripe's checkout and billing pages, which Stripe hosts, use Stripe's own cookies, and our network provider Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie to tell people apart from automated traffic.
You can clear these items in your browser's settings at any time. Clearing the sign-in session signs you out.
If you are located in the EEA or the UK, you have the following rights under the GDPR and the UK GDPR:
| Right | Description | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Access (Art. 15) | Receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you. The export in the "Your data" section of the Account page gives you most of it at once. | Yes |
| Rectification (Art. 16) | Correct inaccurate or incomplete data. You can edit your profile under Account. | Yes |
| Erasure (Art. 17) | Have your personal data deleted. You can delete your account in the "Your data" section of the Account page (see section 7). | Yes |
| Portability (Art. 20) | Export your data in machine-readable form: one JSON file from the "Your data" section of the Account page, with your profile, areas (boundaries in GeoJSON, with their alert settings), detections (with their geometry in GeoJSON), alerts, webhooks, billing details, support tickets, team memberships, contact messages and data-rights requests; and detections as CSV or GeoJSON | Yes |
| Restriction (Art. 18) | Restrict processing while a dispute is resolved | Yes |
| Object (Art. 21) | Object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to direct marketing at any time | Yes |
| Withdraw consent (Art. 7) | Withdraw consent for product-update emails at any time under Account | Yes |
| Automated decisions (Art. 22) | Not be subject to solely automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects | Yes: we make no such decisions |
To exercise any right that you cannot exercise yourself in the app, email [email protected] with a subject line such as "Data request: access". We will answer within one month, or tell you within that month if a complex request needs up to two further months.
If you believe we have not handled your data lawfully, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In the EEA, that is the data protection authority where you live or work. In the UK, it is the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
If you are a California resident, you may ask us to:
TerrAlert does not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We use sensitive personal information (such as account sign-in details) only to provide the service. We will not discriminate against you for making a request.
To make a request, email [email protected] with the subject "California request". We will verify your identity and respond within 45 days.
TerrAlert is a service for businesses, organisations and professionals. You must be 18 or older to create an account, and consumers may not use the service. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact [email protected] and we will delete it.
When we change this policy, we publish the new version on this page with a new "Last updated" date and version. If a change is material:
If you do not agree to a new version, you can export your data and delete your account from the Account page.
For any privacy question or data request: