Privacy policy

ByShovel LLC operates byshovel.com and a family of public-records research tools including Mining Incidents, Safety Incidents and The Vault Report. This policy covers all of them. It is short because we collect little.

1. What we deliberately do not collect

Worth saying first, because it is unusual.

• We do not store your IP address. Our analytics record a browser family and a random visitor identifier, not an address. Where we need to rate-limit a public feature, we store a salted one-way hash and never the address itself.
• We never see your card details. Payments run through Stripe, which collects card data directly. It does not pass through our servers and we cannot see it.
• We do not sell personal information to anyone, for any purpose.
• We run no advertising trackers and no third-party advertising cookies.

2. What we do collect

If you just read the sites: the page visited, a browser family, a random visitor identifier, the referring site, and any campaign tags in the link you followed. That is it.

If you contact us or subscribe: your email address, and your name and message if you sent one. Alert subscribers also give us the mines, operators or search terms they want watched.

If you use the chat assistant on Mining Incidents: the messages you type, a session identifier, your browser's user-agent string, the page you started from, and the salted hash described above. If you give an email address or name an operator in chat, we store those so we can follow up.

If you buy something: Stripe gives us your email address, name and country for the receipt and our records. Not your card number.

3. Why we hold it

To deliver what you asked for, which is mostly alerts, replies and reports; to know which pages are worth keeping; and to run the business, including billing, tax records and preventing abuse of public features. We do not use your data to build a profile of you or to target advertising.

4. Who processes it

We use a small number of service providers, each doing one job on our instructions:

• Stripe · payments and receipts
• Mailgun · sending alert and notification email
• Supabase and Fly.io · database and application hosting
• Cloudflare · content delivery and abuse protection
• OpenRouter and the model provider it routes to · generating chat assistant replies

Worth being explicit about the last one: what you type into the chat assistant is sent to an external language-model provider in order to produce a reply. Do not type anything into it you would not want processed that way.

Beyond these, we disclose personal information only where the law requires it.

5. Public records are a different thing

Most of what our sites publish is not personal data about visitors at all. It is the public enforcement and safety record of companies, published by federal agencies and republished by us.

One exception matters. Small businesses sometimes register a home address with a regulator, so a business record can carry someone's house. We withhold residential street addresses and show city and state only. If you believe a personal address of yours appears on one of our sites, write to us and we will remove it. You do not need to explain why.

6. How long we keep it

Analytics are kept in aggregate. Subscriptions and enquiries are kept while the relationship is live and for a reasonable period after. Records tied to a purchase are kept as long as tax and accounting rules require. Ask us to delete something and we will, except where we are required to retain it.

7. Your choices

Every alert and marketing email carries an unsubscribe link that works immediately. You can also ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by writing to hello@byshovel.com. We will not make you prove you are entitled to ask, and we will not charge you for it.

8. Cookies

We use a small number of first-party cookies and similar browser storage to keep you signed in where that applies, to remember that you dismissed a banner, and to hold the random visitor identifier used for analytics. There are no advertising cookies to opt out of.

9. Children

Our sites are business research tools and are not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

10. Changes and contact

We may update this policy; the date at the top shows when it last changed. Questions, requests and deletions go to hello@byshovel.com or 765-278-7186. Our terms of sale are at byshovel.com/terms.