Access to your personal data and your rights
You can ask whether Urbexology processes personal data about you and receive a copy of that data, together with information about its purposes, categories, recipients, retention, sources, relevant automated decisions, and international transfer safeguards. Request access to your personal data.
Email urbexology.com@gmail.com. No paid membership, active account, special form or explanation is required. Your first copy is free. We respond without undue delay and within one month; if a permitted extension is necessary, we explain it within that month.
You may also request correction, deletion or restriction, or object to processing, where these rights apply. You can complain to CNIL or another competent supervisory authority and seek a judicial remedy. Read about your rights and complaints.
When you authorise Discord linking, Urbexology requests basic identity access to verify your account and permission to add you to the Urbexology Discord server. The join request does not set or change your nickname, avatar, banner or other profile settings. The app does not edit your Discord profile. If you are a member, our server bot may assign Urbexology server roles associated with your membership or achievements. You can also join the server using its invitation.
You can review or revoke Urbexology’s existing permissions in Discord under User Settings > Authorized Apps. Unlinking on Urbexology and revoking an authorization in Discord are separate actions.
Removing the Discord association deletes the Discord user ID and username from your Urbexology account and stops displaying the username on your profile. It does not remove you from the Urbexology Discord server or make your Discord account leave that server. You can leave the server through Discord itself.
Making a profile private removes its public profile page, including its biography, social links, badges, and shared wish list. The profile information and current avatar remain stored so that the owner can use them. Existing accepted friends can still see the member's username and avatar in their friends list. Pending relationships may still show the username, but they do not receive the private avatar, and new friend requests cannot target the private profile.
Avatars are stored in private object storage. Urbexology uses short-lived authorized links to display them. When a public profile becomes private, Urbexology tries to replace the avatar's object key. A link that was issued before that change can remain usable until its short expiry time, and a copy or screenshot that another person already made cannot be recalled.
A wish list item is a reference to a spot on the Urbexology map and is linked to your account. It is location-interest data because it shows a place that you selected. It does not show where your device is located.
Technical data linked to your account
We store more than an email address. Depending on the features you use, our application records may include:
- Your account email, registration and verification dates, registration IP address, sign-in security information, and a password hash if you set a password.
- Your contributions and reports, including their text, photos, selected map coordinates, submission time, IP address and browser information sent with the request. When you are signed in, these records can be linked to your account email.
- Security events used to investigate suspected automated extraction of map data, including your account email, IP address, browser information, time, request counts, a summary of requested map areas and the reason the activity was flagged.
- Your selected notification area and other account preferences, as well as profile, friendship, wish list, membership and activity records described in this policy.
We use these records to operate your account, handle contributions and reports, provide the features you choose, and protect the service from abuse. Requested map areas describe activity on the map; they are not measurements of your device’s GPS position. Technical records can be personal data even if your email address is replaced by an internal reference.
Payment Information
Stripe processes purchases made on our website. Apple processes Membership purchases made in the iOS app. We do not receive or store your payment card details. We store purchase history, including transaction identifiers, subscription expiry dates and refund status, linked to your Urbexology account to provide and restore Membership access. Apple and Stripe handle payment information under their own privacy policies.
Location Information
Urbexology does not request your device's precise GPS location or continuously track your location. We may use an approximate location derived from your IP address to choose the first area shown on the map.
Your wish list is private by default. If you make it public, every current and future saved place that is eligible for public display may appear on your public profile. The public profile map loads their exact locations together. Anyone, including search engines, can see those places and infer that you are interested in them. A public wish list item is resolved against the spot's current map record. If that record changes, is restricted, or is removed, the wish list display may change or disappear. The wish list does not keep a separate historical copy of the spot's map data.
Making your profile private, or turning off public wish list sharing, keeps your saved wish list items available to you but immediately hides the public wish list and blocks public access to its coordinates. If you later make the wish list public again, all current and future eligible items are covered by that list-wide choice.
Data Security
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information. We use TLS encryption to protect data sent between users and our servers.
Disclosure of personal information
We do not sell personal information. Service providers receive the information needed to operate the features you use, such as hosting, email delivery, payments and Discord integration. Information you choose to publish, including an eligible public wish list, can also be seen by other people.
We disclose personal data to competent authorities only when required by applicable law, including a legally binding request or order. Before disclosure, we check the authority, legal requirement and scope, and limit the information to what is necessary to meet that requirement. A breach of our site rules does not by itself trigger disclosure of your personal data.
Depending on the legal requirement and the records we actually hold, a disclosure could include account identifiers, relevant IP addresses and timestamps, contributions or related security records. It does not mean that all records about you will be shared. You can request information about your data and its recipients, subject to applicable legal restrictions.
Why we may process your personal data
The legal basis depends on the purpose. Accepting the Terms of Use does not give blanket consent for every use of your data.
- Providing the service you request — performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR): creating and authenticating your account, saving your map preferences and content, providing requested social features, and processing purchases and membership access. This basis covers only processing necessary to provide those services or take steps you request before entering the contract.
- Protecting the service — legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR): preventing abuse and unauthorised automated extraction, investigating security incidents, moderating contributions, and resolving service disputes. Our interests are keeping the service reliable and protecting users and their contributions. We must assess necessity and balance those interests against your rights. You can object by contacting us.
- Meeting legal requirements — legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR): responding to privacy-rights requests, retaining records required by applicable accounting or other law, and making disclosures that the law requires.
- Specific optional uses — consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR): where we ask you to opt in separately, such as publishing your wish list or linked Discord username. You can withdraw that permission in your profile settings. Withdrawal stops future publication by Urbexology but does not affect the lawfulness of earlier processing or remove copies already made by other people.
Any optional analytics or marketing that requires consent must have a separate choice. Agreement to these terms or possession of an account is not that consent. If we propose a new purpose, we will explain it and its legal basis before using your data for that purpose.
How long we keep personal data
Different records have different lifetimes. The expiry of a sign-in link, membership or temporary restriction does not mean that the account or its related records have been deleted. The following describes our current retention arrangements; a missing automatic expiry is not permission to keep data indefinitely without a valid purpose.
- Account, profile and preferences
- These remain while your account exists. Inactivity or the end of a paid membership does not automatically delete your account. Account deletion is handled manually after a request.
- Authentication and registration records
- Passwords are stored as hashes when you set a password. Verification links have limited validity. An hourly cleanup removes expired password-signup proofs and Discord authorization states from the active database. A separate registration history record can remain even if you never finish signing up. Registration records do not currently have an automatic expiry. You may request deletion without completing registration.
- Wish lists, private markers, notes and map preferences
- Saved data remains until you remove it or it is removed as part of account deletion. Making it private changes its visibility rather than deleting it. A wish list reference is kept until you remove that item or account deletion is completed.
- Contributions, photos, comments and discussions
- There is no single automatic expiry for shared contributions. During a deletion request, we review their account links and any need to retain shared content in an anonymised form while protecting other people’s rights. A contribution’s public visibility is not itself a reason to retain its author’s personal identifiers indefinitely.
- Friendships, notifications, activity and achievements
- Account-linked records remain according to the relevant feature and are reviewed during account deletion. Removing a connection or dismissing a notification does not necessarily erase every related event or security record. No single time limit applies to all these categories.
- Membership and transaction records
- Expiry of membership does not delete purchase history. We retain records needed to provide or restore access, resolve a payment dispute, or meet an applicable legal obligation. Where French accounting law applies, invoices and accounting evidence must be retained for 10 years from the end of the relevant financial year. This does not justify keeping unrelated account data for 10 years.
- Security, moderation and suspected scraping records
- Temporary restrictions can expire while related events remain. Stored scraping alerts are trimmed when their storage limit is reached, rather than after a fixed number of days; this does not establish a maximum age. Other security and moderation records require review against the incident being investigated and any specific legal preservation requirement.
- Hosting and technical logs
- There is no verified single deletion period covering every hosting provider and application log. We do not promise that all IP addresses or technical events are deleted after 30 days. Ask us for the retention period or criteria that apply to your identifiable logs.
- Support correspondence and privacy requests
- These require review after the request is resolved, taking account of any continuing dispute, legal obligation or need to demonstrate how a rights request was handled. A fixed automatic deletion period has not yet been established for every type of correspondence.
- Backups and copies held by providers
- Deleting an active record does not necessarily remove existing backups immediately. Retention depends on the actual backup lifecycle and the provider’s applicable arrangements; we have not established a single verified maximum covering every backup. We will explain the relevant period and any continued retention when responding to your request.
- Optional audience analytics
- If optional analytics is enabled, its notice and consent information must identify the relevant provider and retention period. This is separate from our own account and security records. We do not claim that an analytics cookie’s expiry deletes those application records.
Admin is responsible for assessing whether continued retention is justified and arranging deletion or anonymisation when it is no longer necessary. If particular personal data must remain after a deletion request, we will explain the reason and applicable period or criteria. Truly anonymous statistics may remain because they no longer identify you.
Email urbexology.com@gmail.com to ask about your records. Request a copy of your personal data or follow the account deletion process. These requests do not require a paid membership.
Changes to Privacy Policy
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify users of material changes by posting the new policy on our website.
Application records and audience analytics
The account, contribution and security records described above are collected by Urbexology’s application independently of audience analytics. In particular, our own records can link an IP address or an action to an account email.
We do not combine Google Analytics data with Urbexology account information. This does not make our own application records anonymous, and disabling analytics cookies does not prevent the account or security processing described in this policy.