Privacy
Last updated 22 September 2026
What this version of mapbench stores and why. The organisation running it is responsible for how it is operated.
What your account holds
- Your email address, which is also how you sign in. It stays with the account for its lifetime — it cannot be swapped for a different one from inside the app — and we confirm it by sending you a link.
- A display name, if you set one.
- Who you work with: the organisation you belong to, what you are allowed to do in it, and which workspaces you can open.
Your password is never stored in a form anyone can read, including us. Changing it is done through a link we email you rather than inside the app, so someone who got hold of your open session still cannot lock you out of your account.
The data you bring
Files you upload, and everything built from them, are kept in private storage that is set aside for your organisation. Every request to look at them is checked against your access first. Nothing you bring in is used to train anything, and it is not shown to another organisation unless you publish it or share it yourself.
A share link works for anyone who has it, with no account and no further check, until you withdraw it. Search engines are asked not to list shared maps, which is a request rather than a guarantee — so treat the link itself as the secret.
What gets logged
- Ordinary web logs — which pages were asked for, whether they worked, how long they took, and the network address they came from. Kept to run the service and keep it secure.
- A record of changes — who created or changed something, when, what changed, and whether it came from a person or from an assistant working on their behalf. People who manage your organisation can read this; it is what makes an assistant's work accountable.
- Counters used to block abuse, kept against a network address or an email address. They delete themselves.
Cookies
One to keep you signed in, and one that protects forms from being submitted by another site on your behalf. That is all. There is no analytics, no tracking pixel and nothing loaded from another company anywhere in this product. That is not only a policy: the browser is instructed to refuse code that did not come from mapbench itself.
We email you to confirm your address, to reset a password, and to invite you. There is no marketing mail.
Third parties
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with other companies for their own purposes. There are no advertisers, data brokers or analytics providers anywhere in this product.
Running the service needs a small number of infrastructure providers who handle data only on the operator's behalf and only to keep it working — the host the software runs on, and the private object storage your files sit in (Cloudflare R2 in the hosted version). They are not permitted to use your data for anything else.
When you pull data in from an outside service, or hand out a share link, that is your action: the fetch goes to whatever address you name, and a share link reaches whoever you give it to. Those destinations are your choice, not ours.
How long things are kept
- Your account and the data you bring stay until you delete them or the account is closed — there is no automatic expiry, and nothing is held back after deletion.
- Ordinary web logs are kept only as long as they are useful for running and securing the service, then rotated out.
- The record of changes is kept for as long as the thing it describes exists, so an assistant's work stays accountable.
- Counters used to block abuse expire on their own, usually within minutes to hours.
- Database backups are held for a rolling two weeks and then deleted, so a mistake can be undone without keeping old data indefinitely.
The organisation running this deployment can set these periods differently.
Deleting things
You can delete anything you have brought in, and deleting it removes the stored copies too. To close an account entirely, or to ask what is held about you, contact whoever runs this deployment — the same people who invited you.