vau

1. Who we are

vau is a media vault operated by [OPERATOR — legal entity at incorporation; until then, the founder as sole operator], the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: privacy@vau.ltd.

2. What we collect

• Account data: your email address and, if you sign in with Google, your name and Google account identifier.
• Your content: the photos and videos you store, their metadata (file names, dates, camera metadata you chose to keep), and the organisation you create (galleries, favourites, notes).
• Delivery records: when someone delivers to your vault, their name and email as they entered them, the usage terms they accepted, and when.
• Access and security records: server logs with IP addresses, sign-in and access events, download logs (which file, when, from which IP), and rate-limit events. These are the provenance ledger the product shows you, and our abuse-prevention record.
• What we do not collect: no advertising trackers, no analytics cookies, no fingerprinting. The only browser storage we use is a session cookie to keep you signed in and local preferences (such as your theme choice).

3. Why, and on what legal basis

• To provide the Service (contract): storing and serving your media, generating thumbnails and previews, delivering emails such as sign-in codes and share notifications.
• Security and abuse prevention (legitimate interest): logs, rate limits, download-pattern monitoring, and matching content against databases of known abusive material.
• Legal obligations: reporting apparent child sexual abuse material, responding to valid legal process, preserving evidence under legal hold.
• With your consent, where we ask for it separately.

4. Where your data lives, and who processes it

Your media and database records are stored in the European Union. We use these processors: Cloudflare (hosting, content delivery, and object storage with EU jurisdiction), Neon (database, EU region), and Resend (transactional email). Each processes data only on our instructions under data-processing agreements. Where any processing involves a transfer outside the EU/EEA, it is protected by safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

5. Who can see your content

Nobody, unless you give them access: your vault is private by default, share links are unguessable and revocable, and we do not offer any public discovery or search of stored content. Our staff access stored content only when required to operate the Service, investigate a credible abuse report, or comply with law. We disclose data to authorities only under valid legal process, and proactively only where the law requires (such as apparent child sexual abuse material).

6. How long we keep things

Your content: for as long as your account exists, plus a short recovery window after deletion. Security and access logs: up to 13 months. Delivery and licence-acceptance records: for the life of the related content, because they are the provenance record the product exists to keep. Content and records subject to an abuse investigation or legal hold: at least one year, or as long as the law requires, even if deleted by you. If we stop offering the Service, we keep your content until the end of the notice period in our Terms (section 10) so you can export it, then delete it, except where the law requires us to keep it.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR you can access, correct, export, and erase your personal data, object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent where processing is based on it. Export is built into the product (export everything, any time). To exercise any right, write to privacy@vau.ltd. You can also lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

8. Security

Content is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is role-based and logged, uploads never pass through shared infrastructure unencrypted, and the operational security posture (including our decision to favour provable operational security over end-to-end encryption, which would prevent thumbnails, previews, and abuse response) is documented and available on request.

9. Changes

We version this policy by date and will notify you of material changes in the product. The current version is always at vau.ltd/legal/privacy.