Privacy Policy — SmartMrk

1. Who we are

SmartMrk (“we”) is the controller of the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us about anything here at info@smartmrk.com. We sell smart NFC and QR tags internationally, and this policy applies wherever you are.

2. What we collect, and why

Each purpose below is listed with the legal ground we rely on for it.

Your account — name, email, and password. To give you an account at all: performance of a contract.
What you put on a Mrk — whatever you choose to enter, which differs by tag type. To show it to whoever scans it, which is the entire product: performance of a contract. Health information is treated separately, in section 3.
Scan events — time, approximate location, device type, and how the tag was opened. To tell you your Mrk was scanned and to show you your own history: performance of a contract. Approximate location comes from the network address; precise location is only ever recorded if the person scanning explicitly allows their browser to share it.
Messages between you and someone who scanned your Mrk. To carry the conversation, and to keep a record of how a recovery was handled: performance of a contract, and our legitimate interest in being able to evidence what happened. See section 5.
Orders — name, email, delivery address, and what you bought. To fulfil the order and keep accounting records: performance of a contract, and legal obligation.
Security and audit logs. To detect abuse and investigate problems: our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe.
Analytics — see section 7. Off if you opt out.

3. Health information

A Medical Mrk can hold allergies, medications, conditions, blood type, and your doctor’s details. That is health data, and most privacy laws give it extra protection. We want to be direct about how it is handled.

You provide it, and you decide what shows. We rely on your explicit consent to hold it and to display it to whoever scans your Mrk — which is the point of a medical tag, and also why you can put any section behind a PIN.
You can withdraw that consent at any time by deleting the information, or the Mrk, from your dashboard. Doing so does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.
We do not sell it, and we do not use it for advertising. It is not used to build a profile of you.
Anyone who scans an unprotected Mrk can read it. That is the design. Treat a Mrk as public unless you have set a PIN on the section, and do not enter anything you would not want a stranger who found you to see.
Translation and read-aloud send the text to Google. If a scanner uses those features, the profile text — including health information — is sent to Google’s Translation and Text-to-Speech services to be processed. We keep this on because a language barrier at an emergency is exactly when it matters, but you should know it happens.

4. Who we share it with

Your Mrk profile is shown to whoever scans it — you control exactly what that includes. Beyond that, we do not sell personal data. We use these providers to run the service, and they process data on our instructions:

Supabase — database, authentication and file storage.
Vercel — hosting.
Google Cloud — Translation and Text-to-Speech, when a message is translated or a profile is read aloud.
Google Analytics — usage measurement, unless you opt out. Never sent any profile or Mrk data; see section 7.
Resend — sending email.
PayPal — payments. We never see or store your card details.
ipapi.co and ipwho.is — turning a network address into an approximate location for a scan.
OpenStreetMap Nominatim — turning coordinates into a place name.

These providers operate internationally, so your data is processed outside the country you are in. We also disclose data where the law requires it — for example a valid legal request from law enforcement.

5. How long we keep it

Your account and your Mrk profiles — until you delete them, or close your account.
Messages — 36 months, then deleted. With one deliberate exception: a conversation attached to a lost-and-found case is kept while that case is open, and for a year after it settles. A finder’s thread is often the only record of how something was handled — including a theft, a demand for money, or harassment — and may be needed later by you, by the other person, or by the police.
Scan history — on the free plan, the most recent 30 days are shown and older records are cleared after 180 days. On a paid plan your history is retained.
Lost-and-found cases — the case record is kept, but the finder’s contact details and any payout details are redacted 90 days after the case settles. A case with an unresolved dispute is never redacted while the dispute is open.
Orders — kept as accounting records, including after you close your account.
Security and audit logs — kept, and detached from you when you close your account.

6. Security

Traffic to and from the site is encrypted in transit. PINs are hashed with scrypt rather than stored as text, and are checked with a constant-time comparison so they cannot be guessed by timing the response. Access to your data is restricted at the database level to you and to the people you have shared a Mrk with. In a lost-and-found case, a delivery address you provide is stored apart from the rest of the case, is never shown to the finder, and is removed when you close your account. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell you promptly if a breach affects your data.

7. Cookies and analytics

We use essential cookies for authentication and session management. We use Google Analytics to see which pages are useful. No profile or Mrk data is ever sent to it: pages whose address contains an identifier — a tag code, a recovery or conversation link — are recorded as the page type rather than the address itself, so a scan of your Mrk is never traceable to you through analytics. You can turn analytics off below, or through your browser settings.

8. Your rights

You can access and update your account and Mrk data at any time from your dashboard. Under Settings → Your data you can download a copy of everything we hold about you as a file, and close your account.

Closing your account deletes your profile, your Mrk profiles, your reminders and your saved details, and releases each Mrk so the physical tag can be set up again. Some records are kept and no longer linked to you: messages with finders, scan history, orders, and security logs. A conversation about a lost pet or item is often the only record of how it was handled — and may be needed later by you, by the other person, or by the police — so it is anonymised rather than destroyed. Orders are kept because they are accounting records.

If a Mrk of yours is part of a live recovery case, that case has to be closed first — someone else is relying on it. If anything blocks you, or you would rather we did it for you, contact us at info@smartmrk.com. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

9. Children

You must be at least 16 to hold a SmartMrk account. A Mrk for someone younger — a Student Mrk, a child’s medical tag — is set up and managed by a parent, guardian or school on the account of an adult, who decides what appears on it. If you believe a child under 16 has created an account, tell us at info@smartmrk.com and we will remove it.

10. A note on HIPAA

SmartMrk is not a HIPAA-covered entity, and a Medical Mrk is not a medical record. HIPAA applies to healthcare providers, health plans and their business associates; we are none of those. Information you put on a Medical Mrk is information you have chosen to publish for a responder to read. We protect it as described above and treat it as health data under general privacy law — but do not rely on it as a medical record, and do not assume HIPAA protections apply to it.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will say so on this page and update the date at the top.

12. Contact

For anything in this policy, or to exercise any of the rights in section 8, contact us at info@smartmrk.com.