Privacy notice
Sensor data never leaves your device
Camera frames, microphone audio, motion, compass heading and location are read by your browser, used by the instrument you are holding, and discarded. None of it is uploaded. None of it is sent to an advertiser or an analytics service. There is no server-side component to any instrument on this site, so there is nowhere for it to go even if we wanted it.
That is a fact about the architecture rather than a policy we are keeping to. Every instrument runs as JavaScript in your own browser, there is no upload endpoint, and there is no database. You can check this yourself: open the network panel in your browser’s developer tools and work an instrument. Nothing goes out.
Recordings you make with the EVP recorder, and plates you expose with the SLS camera, are held in your own browser. If you clear your browsing data they are permanently gone, and we cannot recover them, because we never had a copy.
What is stored on your device
Everything the Survey remembers about you is held in your browser’s local storage, and none of it is a cookie: the operator designation assigned on your first visit, that you have seen the first-visit notice, whether you have muted the instruments, and anything you have chosen to log — sessions, marked excursions, exposed plates, marked utterances, site labels and investigation progress. Cookies on this site are set only by the third parties named below.
All of it stays in your browser, is readable only by this site on this device, and is never transmitted. It does not follow you to another phone and it is not a profile of you held anywhere. You can erase every part of it by clearing site data for this domain in your browser settings, or from the controls on your own service record.
Permissions the site asks for
Nothing is requested until you press a switch that says what it is about to ask for. Motion and orientation are needed by the detector, the spirit board and the investigation; the microphone by the spirit box, the EVP recorder and some investigation checks; the camera by the SLS camera and the thermal camera. Refusing any of them leaves the rest of the site working, and every instrument has a stated behaviour for the case where its sensor is unavailable.
You can withdraw a permission at any time in your browser settings, and the instruments will report the sensor as unavailable rather than breaking.
Analytics
The site uses Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights to count page views and measure how quickly pages load on real devices. Both are cookieless: no cookie is set and no identifier is stored in your browser.
What they collect is the page you viewed, the referring site, and coarse technical information — country, browser, operating system, device type — along with page-loading timings. It is aggregated, and it never includes anything from a camera, a microphone or a motion sensor, because as above the site never has that data in the first place.
Session recording
The site also uses Microsoft Clarity, which records how the page is used: where you tap, how far you scroll, which controls you press, and a playback of the page built from what was on screen. It is how we find out that a switch is in the wrong place or that a permission prompt is stopping people, which a count of page views cannot tell us.
Unlike the two above, Clarity sets cookies in your browser — first-party ones, named _clck and _clsk — so that the taps in one visit can be joined together. Microsoft processes the recording as a data processor and sets out what it retains in its privacy statement.
Two things are deliberately hidden from the recording, because they are yours and this notice says they stay on your device: the whole of your service record, and the field where you name a site. Both are masked in the page itself, so what a playback shows in their place is blocked-out shapes rather than your text. Nothing from a camera, a microphone or a motion sensor can appear in a recording either, for the same reason as above — that data is never in the page and never leaves your device.
If you would rather not be recorded, your browser’s Do Not Track or global privacy control setting is honoured by Clarity, and blocking third-party scripts or using a tracker-blocking extension will stop it. The instruments work either way; nothing on this site is gated on analytics.
Advertising
This site currently carries no advertising. No ad network script is loaded and no ad network is contacted. Advertising is planned, and this section will be updated to name the network and link its own privacy notice before the first advert appears. Advertisers will receive no sensor data, no recordings and no readings, because this site has never held any of it.
How this site is paid for sets out the funding arrangements in full, including equipment links in the field notes.
Accounts
There are none. There is no sign-up, no email address is collected, and no database of users exists. The operator designation on your record is generated by your own browser and has never been sent to us.
Hosting
The site is served by Vercel, which processes standard request information such as IP address and user agent in order to deliver the pages, as any web host does. Vercel’s own privacy notice is at vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy.
Children
This site is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone. It does not collect personal information from anyone at all.
Your rights, and the odd shape of them here
Data protection law gives you rights to see, correct and delete personal data held about you. We hold none, so there is nothing to produce and nothing to delete on our side. Everything this site knows about you is in your own browser, and clearing site data removes all of it immediately and permanently.
If you want to ask about any of this, write to hello@ghostdetectorlab.com.