Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

Information you give us

• Account details: your name, email address, phone number and password, plus your company name if you sign up as a supplier. Authentication is handled by our sign-in provider, and your password is not available to STL personnel in readable form.
• Membership details: your plan, membership status, trial or promo code use, renewal and period dates, and the customer and subscription identifiers Stripe gives us. Card payments are handled by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card number.
• Corporate plans: a Corporate plan puts five or more people on one subscription at a lower price per person. If you buy one for your company, we collect the company name, a billing email address for it, and the number of seats. If your company gives you a seat, your email address reaches us from whoever invited you rather than from you.
• Student verification: the .edu email address you submit to qualify for the free student membership, and the one-time code we email to that address to confirm you receive mail there. We do not ask for, and cannot accept, uploaded documents.
• Messages: what you send us by email, including your name and email address if you include them. The feedback form on our Contact page records two things — the text you type and the time you sent it. It has no name or email field and collects nothing else, so a submission does not identify who sent it.

Information collected when you use STL

• Location (website): if you allow it, the NETWORK supplier map uses your device location to show suppliers near you and to pick your region. You can use NETWORK without it by searching an address or region instead. See section 3 for exactly where those coordinates go. The mobile app does not currently ask for or use device location.
• Usage data (website): pages visited, the link that brought you to the site, browser and device type, and approximate region. We use Vercel Web Analytics for this. It does not use cookies and does not identify individual visitors, and the events we record carry fixed values only — nothing you typed is sent. The mobile app does not send analytics.
• Technical logs: our hosting provider records IP address and request time to keep the service running and secure. We separately record the IP address and browser user-agent of requests that ask for or redeem an access code, and use IP addresses to rate-limit abuse of the sign-up and promo code endpoints.
• Tool inputs: the values you type into TOOL BOX calculators are worked out in your browser or on your device to produce your result. They are not sent to STL's servers and are not saved to your account.

Cookies and local storage

Website. We use your browser's local and session storage to keep you signed in and to remember basic settings — your NETWORK region and distance filter, and the notes you type into the calculator note pad. The Mapbox map library stores its own identifier for the maps it serves you. We do not use advertising cookies, tracking pixels, or any other advertising or cross-site tracking technology.

Mobile app. The app uses your device's local storage for the same purposes: your sign-in session and basic settings. This is storage on your device rather than browser cookies, and removing the app removes it.

2. How we use it

• To run STL: sign you in, show the tools and the supplier directory, and unlock member features.
• To manage your membership, trial, student access, or a corporate plan and the seats on it.
• To answer your questions and support requests.
• To understand which tools get used so we can improve them.
• To protect the service against misuse — including rate limiting and abuse review — and to meet legal obligations.

Service emails

We send emails that are necessary to operate your account: account confirmation, password reset, student verification codes, membership and trial notices, and security notices. These are not marketing, and they cannot be turned off while the account is open.

Product updates

We do not send marketing email today. If we begin sending occasional product updates, every one of those emails will carry an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing will not affect your account or the service emails above.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising or cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not show third-party ads.

3. Who handles data for us

We use a small number of service providers to operate STL. They process information on our behalf, for the purposes below, and each maintains its own privacy practices for the information it handles.

• Supabase: database and sign-in. Account, membership and student verification records are stored here.
• Vercel: website hosting and website analytics.
• Stripe: payment processing for individual memberships and corporate plans bought on the website.
• Mapbox: maps, address search and place lookup in NETWORK. Mapbox receives map and search requests, your IP address, and usage information from its map library.
• Google: Google Workspace sends the email we send you and receives the mail you send us. Feedback submitted through our Contact page goes to a Google Form and is collected in a spreadsheet on the same Workspace account.

Location, specifically

When you use "near me" on the website, your browser hands your coordinates to the page and the page sends them to Mapbox to turn them into a place. Those coordinates are not sent to STL's servers, are not written to our database, and are not associated with your account. What is kept on your own device is the coarse answer — the region or state — so the map opens in the right place next time. Turning location off in your browser stops all of it. Mapbox handles what it receives under its own privacy practices.

Corporate plans, specifically

A Corporate plan is one subscription covering five or more people, bought and paid for by a company. If you hold a seat on one:

• Administrators at that company manage your seat. They can invite you, and they can end your access at any time.
• Everyone on the plan can see its roster — the email address, role and status of each person on it, and when they joined. It is your company's own list, and it is how people on a plan see who holds a seat.
• Your invitation email names the person who invited you and the company the plan belongs to.
• A seat gives nobody at the company access to your STL account, and it does not show them your tool inputs, your searches, or anything else you do on STL. What it shares is the seat.

If you administer a plan, you see that same roster along with the plan's billing email, seat count, renewal date and billing status. When you invite an address that already holds a seat on a different company's plan, we tell you so that you do not spend a seat on it. We do not tell you which company.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale or transfer of all or part of the business. If that happens, this policy continues to apply to your information until you are told otherwise.

4. How long we keep it

We keep account information for as long as your account is open. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete your personal information within 30 days of verifying the request, except records we must keep for tax, accounting or legal reasons, such as payment records. Feedback sent through the Contact page is a message and a timestamp with nothing attached that identifies you, and we keep it as a record of what people have asked us for. When someone's seat on a Corporate plan ends, the seat is freed straight away and we keep a record that they held one and when it ended, so the company has an accurate account of who had access. Backups are overwritten on their own schedule, so a copy may persist there briefly after deletion.

5. Your choices

• See or correct your information: open your Profile page, or email us at privacy@stltechus.com.
• Delete your account: email us from the address on the account. Self-service deletion inside the app and on the website is not available yet. The current process is at stltechus.com/delete-account.
• Location: turn location access on or off at any time in your browser or device settings.
• Leave a Corporate plan: ask an administrator at your company to remove your seat. Your STL account belongs to you and stays open when a seat ends — deleting the account itself is separate, and is covered above.
• Emails: service emails about your account cannot be turned off while the account is open. Any product update we send will carry an unsubscribe link.
• A copy of your information: email us and we will send you the information we hold about your account in a portable format.

Depending on where you live, state privacy law may give you rights to know, correct, delete or obtain a copy of your personal information, and to opt out of certain processing. Not every right applies to every user. Whichever state you live in, we will honor requests to see, correct, delete or export your information as a matter of policy, and we will not treat you differently for making one. We may take reasonable steps to verify who you are before acting on a request, and we will respond within the timeframe required by applicable law.

6. Security

All traffic to STL is encrypted in transit. We use administrative, technical and organizational safeguards appropriate to the size of the service, and access to the database is limited to the people who need it to run it. No system is completely secure and we cannot guarantee that every incident can be prevented. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you as the law requires.

7. Children

STL is built for working engineers and university students. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

8. Where we operate

STL is operated in the United States and intended for users in the United States. Your information is stored and processed in the United States, except that the providers listed in section 3 operate globally and may process some information — such as serving a map tile or delivering an email — outside the United States.

9. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we post the new version here with a new effective date. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will give notice in the app and on the website before it takes effect, and will email account holders where we reasonably can.

10. Contact

Questions or requests: privacy@stltechus.com

STL Technologies Inc.