Privacy Policy

Information you give us:

• Account details — name, email address, and a password, which is stored only as a salted hash and never in a readable form.
• Optional profile details — username, display name, biography, pronouns, website, company, professional role, years collecting, favourite brands, areas of expertise, social links, avatar image, phone number, country, and date of birth.
• Two-factor authentication settings and recovery codes, held in encrypted form.
• Verification applications and the supporting information you submit with them.
• Watch information — brand, model, reference number, serial number, production year, and the history you record.
• Uploads — photographs, capture sessions, warranty cards, receipts, service documentation, correspondence, and provenance documents.
• Messages you send through the Platform and their attachments.
• Enquiries you send through the contact form.
• Preferences — language, timezone, notification settings, and privacy settings.

Information generated by your use of the Platform:

• Session information needed to keep you signed in.
• Records of security-relevant and record-changing actions — authentication decisions, certificate issuance and revocation, ownership changes, provenance edits, evidence access, estate actions — written to append-only audit trails.
• A one-way hash of the IP address associated with an audited action. We store the hash, not the address itself.
• Transient request information used for rate limiting, to protect the Platform from abuse.
• Technical error reports where something goes wrong.

• To create and operate your account and keep you signed in.
• To carry out authentication examinations and produce reports and certificates.
• To maintain the Registry, provenance records, ownership records, and audit trails.
• To operate transfers, disputes, messaging, and notifications.
• To provide customer support and respond to enquiries.
• To keep the Platform secure — detecting fraud, abuse, impersonation, and unauthorized access.
• To preserve the integrity of our records, so that a conclusion can be explained and audited later.
• To diagnose faults and improve the Platform.
• To meet legal obligations that apply to us.

We do not use your personal information for automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects on you. Authentication conclusions are made by human examiners.

Only three things are public, and only as described:

Registry entries

Certificate and watch details, with the serial number masked. No owner name, contact detail, account identifier, document, or price. See the Registry Terms.

Your public profile

Only if you choose to have one. Profile visibility defaults to private, and you control which elements appear.

Editorial content

Knowledge Center research and catalog material, which is about watches rather than about people.

Your Privacy Center settings give further control over activity visibility, discoverability in search, and who may contact you.

We share personal information only in these situations:

• With our own staff, limited to those who need it for their work — for example, the examiners handling your submission.
• With the other party to an action you initiate, such as an ownership transfer, and then only what that action requires.
• With service providers that operate parts of the Platform under contract, listed below.
• Where you ask us to share something, or make it public yourself.
• Where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect the Platform, our users, or a third party from serious harm.
• With an acquirer, if the business is reorganized or transferred — with your rights under this policy preserved.

Our service providers include hosting and database infrastructure, object storage for uploaded files, transactional email delivery, and — where enabled — an error-monitoring service and a managed store used for rate limiting. They process information on our instructions and for no independent purpose of their own.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

• Passwords are stored only as salted hashes.
• Serial numbers are encrypted at rest, and shown publicly only in masked form.
• Two-factor secrets and recovery codes are stored encrypted.
• Uploaded files are served through access-controlled routes, not public URLs.
• Sensitive actions such as ownership transfers can require additional verification.
• Access to customer records is limited by role, and privileged actions are written to append-only audit trails.
• Rate limiting protects sign-in and other sensitive endpoints from automated abuse.

No system is perfectly secure. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately and change your password.

We keep account and profile information while your account is open. When you delete your account it is deactivated immediately and scheduled for deletion after a grace period, during which you can restore it.

Deleted content may persist for a period in encrypted backups before being overwritten in the ordinary course.

From your account you can:

• View and correct your account and profile information.
• Control profile visibility, activity visibility, discoverability, and who may contact you, in the Privacy Center.
• Manage notification and communication preferences.
• Export a copy of your data.
• Delete your account, subject to the grace period and the retained records described above.

You can also ask us to correct information we hold about you, ask what we hold, object to a particular use, or ask us to restrict or delete information — and we will respond. Where we cannot act on a request, we will tell you why.

The Platform is reachable internationally and is available in many languages. Information may be processed in a country other than your own, including by the service providers described above.

Where cross-border transfer safeguards are required, we will put them in place and describe them here once the operating jurisdictions are fixed.

Translations of this policy are provided for convenience. The English version is the one we maintain, and it governs if a translation differs.

The Platform is not intended for children, and accounts require you to be at least 18. If we learn that we hold information about a child, we will delete it.

We will update this policy as the Platform changes. The version identifier and dates at the top of this page tell you which version you are reading, and we will give notice of material changes through the Platform or by email.