Privacypolicy.

Who we are

IIDA Labs builds and operates SAAF (Sensing and Accounting of Aquatic Floatables), a service that measures the waste reaching the sea: it turns drone imagery of shores, creeks, riverbanks and water surfaces into the count, category, footprint and estimated weight of the waste present, and maps where it gathers over tides and seasons. IIDA Labs is the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: saaf@iidalabs.org.

This policy covers two different things: what happens when you visit this website, and what happens to the imagery you send us for processing. They are described separately below.

Visiting this website

This site is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and carries no advertising or tracking scripts. We do not build profiles of visitors.

Fonts, images and scripts are all served from this site's own host. One third party is involved in serving the pages:

• Hosting. The site is served by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel receives your IP address and browser request details to deliver the page and may keep short-lived server logs for security and reliability.

Why there is no cookie banner. Consent banners exist to ask permission for cookies and similar storage that are not strictly necessary. This site uses none, so there is nothing to ask. A small notice tells you this once; closing it stores a single flag in your browser's local storage so the notice does not reappear. That flag identifies nothing and is never sent to us.

When you contact us

If you use the form on the contact page, the details you enter (name, email address, organisation, drone and camera, altitude and your message) are delivered to our inbox by Web3Forms, a form-relay service. Web3Forms transmits the submission to us and does not use it for its own purposes. If you email us directly, we receive what you send.

We use these details only to reply to you and to run the survey or demo you asked about. We do not add you to a mailing list and we do not sell or rent contact details.

Survey imagery we process for you

When you engage us to process a survey, you send us aerial imagery and the flight details needed to scale it (camera model, focal length, altitude). We process that imagery to detect and classify litter and to produce annotated frames, per-class counts, footprint areas and estimated masses.

• Your imagery stays yours. You keep all rights in the imagery you send. We use it to produce your results and for the purposes below, and for nothing else.
• Location data. Imagery and flight logs contain the coordinates of the stretch you surveyed. We treat survey locations as confidential to you and do not publish them without your written agreement.
• Improving the service. Where a detection is wrong and is corrected, the corrected frame may be used to improve the detection model. Frames used this way are stripped of identifying metadata and are not shared outside IIDA Labs. If you do not want your imagery used to improve the service, tell us when you engage us and we will honour that.

People who appear in imagery

A drone flying a litter survey at 10 to 40 metres may capture people on a beach, creek bank or riverbank. SAAF is designed to detect litter, not people, and we do not identify, track or count individuals. Where a frame we return to you or use for improvement shows a person, faces and other identifying detail are small at survey altitude and are not the subject of any processing we perform. If you would prefer that frames containing people be excluded from anything beyond your own results, ask and we will exclude them.

You are responsible for flying lawfully in your jurisdiction, including any notice or consent rules that apply to aerial photography of public places where you operate.

How long we keep things

• Contact form submissions and emails are kept for as long as the conversation is active and for up to 24 months afterwards, so that a follow-up survey can refer back to it.
• Survey imagery and results are kept for the life of your engagement so that later surveys of the same stretch can be compared directly, which is the point of the method. On request we delete your imagery and results within 30 days, except frames already incorporated into model improvement, which cannot be individually removed from a trained model but are removed from our stored data.
• Server logs at our host are retained according to Vercel's own retention periods, typically days.

Who we share data with

We share personal data only with the service providers named above (Vercel, Web3Forms), each acting on our behalf to run this site and deliver messages. We do not sell personal data. We may disclose data where the law requires it.

Survey results are yours. We publish aggregate or anonymised figures, or name a site, only with your written agreement.

Your rights

Depending on where you are, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to object to or restrict its processing, and to receive a copy in a portable form. To exercise any of these, email saaf@iidalabs.org. We reply within 30 days. If you are unhappy with our response you may complain to the data protection authority in your jurisdiction.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS with a strict content security policy. Survey imagery is transferred over encrypted channels and stored on access-controlled systems available only to the people working on your survey. No system is perfectly secure; if we become aware of a breach affecting your data we will tell you without undue delay.

Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the service or the law changes. The effective date at the top tells you when it last changed. Material changes that affect an active engagement are notified to you directly.