Privacy Policy & Disclaimer

1. Purpose

Medius Earth (“Medius Earth”, “we”, “us”) operates a unified platform for environmental project management, monitoring, reporting, and verification. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect personal data and project data when users, clients, partners, and field teams request access to and use the portal.

The purpose of this policy is to describe our commitments to responsible data handling, secure platform operations, transparency, accountability, and compliance with applicable data-protection and project-record obligations.

2. Scope

This policy applies to the Medius Earth portal, its tools, APIs, uploaded files, project workflows, integrations, and user accounts. It applies to portal users, clients, project sponsors, partners, field teams, contractors, vendors, and third parties who access or process portal data on our behalf.

For this policy, “user data” means account, contact, role, activity, consent, and authentication information connected to a portal user. “client project data” means project, site, field, geospatial, operational, document, financial, carbon, biodiversity, and reporting data added to the portal by or for a client, sponsor, partner, or field team.

3. Privacy Principles

We apply the following principles when handling personal data and client project data:

• Purpose limitation: data is used for portal access, project operations, analytics, reporting, compliance, support, and security.
• Data minimization: users should provide only data that is needed for the relevant workflow, and we avoid requesting unnecessary sensitive information.
• Accuracy: users and project owners can request corrections to inaccurate records, subject to authority and audit requirements.
• Restricted access: data access is controlled by role, project, site, and tool permissions.
• Confidentiality and integrity: sensitive records are protected through authentication, access controls, masking, encryption where implemented, signed file access, and audit trails.
• Accountability: important writes, exports, downloads, tool runs, and analysis runs are logged for oversight.

4. User Information We Collect

When you request access or use the portal, we may collect:

• Your full name and email address
• Your organization
• Your phone number, if provided
• Your assigned role, project access, site access, and tool permissions
• Login, consent, activity, language preference, and audit metadata
• Account credentials, stored only in securely hashed form when password login is used

Where Google OAuth, Google Tasks, WhatsApp, email, transcription, translation, storage, or other integrations are enabled, we process only the data needed to provide those portal functions.

5. Client Project Data We Process

Clients and authorised users may add or generate project data in the portal. Depending on the tools used, this can include:

• Project names, descriptions, plans, tasks, budgets, milestones, and project documents
• Site details, location, village or administrative information, KML boundaries, zones, and maps
• Field survey records, tree measurements, survival monitoring, GPS points, images, audio, notes, and daily logs
• Farmer, FPO, panchayat, vendor, landowner, and other onboarding or KYC records
• Financial-model, carbon-model, geospatial-analysis, MRV, impact, report, and tool-output records
• Uploaded files such as KMLs, photos, invoices, consent documents, ownership documents, and reports

Client project data remains associated with the relevant project, site, organization, or workflow. We use it to operate the portal, support field operations, generate analyses and reports, maintain project records, and provide the services requested by the client or authorised user.

6. How We Use Information

• To review and approve your access request
• To authenticate you and provide access to platform features
• To assign roles, projects, sites, tasks, and tools to the correct users
• To process, store, analyse, export, and report project and site data
• To support field collection, offline sync, WhatsApp ingestion, transcription, translation, and document digitization where enabled
• To communicate with you about your account, project work, approvals, or service operations
• To operate, maintain, secure, and improve the platform
• To comply with applicable legal and regulatory obligations

7. Platform Protections Already in Place

The portal includes technical and operational protections designed to limit access, preserve accountability, and reduce exposure of sensitive records. Current protections include:

• JWT-based authentication, refresh tokens, and token-version revocation on logout or password change
• Password hashing with bcrypt; plaintext passwords are not stored
• Role-based access control across field users, site managers, project managers, admins, and superadmins
• Project-level and site-level assignment checks before users can view or change scoped project data
• Tool permissions that can grant, restrict, or remove access to specific portal tools
• Admin-only access to user management, audit logs, and broad platform administration
• Signed or freshly resolved download URLs for stored files instead of exposing permanent public file links
• Central audit events for successful write actions, file/download/export routes, tool runs, and analysis runs
• Per-record edit logs where implemented, including change history for operational records
• Encrypted storage of Aadhaar and bank-account fields in onboarding registries
• Masked Aadhaar and bank values for non-admin users; full values are limited to admin-level access
• DPDP consent fields and data-principal erasure support for farmer, FPO, panchayat, and vendor registries
• Import backup snapshots before supported Excel imports, with retention controls for automated snapshots
• Soft-delete or inactive-state patterns for many project, document, analysis, todo, and operational records
• Idempotent client event IDs for offline survival-monitoring sync to reduce duplicate field records

These controls support confidentiality and integrity, but no internet-connected system can be guaranteed to be risk free. Users are responsible for keeping their login credentials secure and for assigning access only to people who are authorised to work on the relevant project or site.

8. Retention, Deletion & Erasure

We retain data for as long as needed to provide portal services, maintain project records, meet audit and contractual obligations, support MRV and reporting workflows, resolve disputes, and comply with applicable law.

• Signup requests include consent version and timestamp records; expired and declined requests may be deleted according to platform rules.
• Project, site, MRV, financial, document, and analysis records may be retained while the project or client relationship remains active and where records are needed for audit, reporting, certification, or legal purposes.
• Supported onboarding registries include DPDP consent and erasure fields; eligible personal-data fields can be nulled or tombstoned through the erasure workflow.
• Supported Excel imports create backup snapshots before import; automated backup retention controls keep only a limited number of recent automatic snapshots per scope.
• Some records use soft-delete or inactive status so that operational history, auditability, and project consistency are preserved.

9. Data Protection & Your Rights

We handle personal data in accordance with applicable data-protection law, including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Subject to applicable law and contractual obligations, you may request access to, correction of, export of, restriction of, or deletion of your personal data by contacting us.

Your consent to this policy is recorded with a version and timestamp at the time you submit your access request. You may withdraw consent by requesting deletion of your account or erasure of eligible personal-data records.

Client project data may include operational, contractual, regulatory, MRV, financial, and environmental records that the client, project owner, or authorised organization may need to retain. Requests to delete or export project data may therefore require verification of authority and may be subject to project, legal, audit, or contractual retention requirements.

10. Data Sharing, Vendors & Integrations

We do not sell your personal data. We may share data with service providers who help us operate the platform, with authorised members of your organization or project team, with project partners where required for the requested workflow, or where required by law. Such providers are bound by confidentiality and data-protection obligations.

Some portal workflows rely on third-party services or integrations, such as cloud storage, mapping, satellite analysis, email delivery, transcription, translation, Google services, WhatsApp ingestion, or carbon/MRV integrations. Data is shared with those services only as needed for the feature or integration being used.

Third parties who process portal data on our behalf are expected to handle it under confidentiality, data-protection, and security obligations appropriate to the service they provide.

11. Security Incident Response

If we identify a data breach or cybersecurity incident affecting portal data, we will take steps to contain and investigate the incident, assess affected data and users, mitigate the issue, and improve controls where needed. Where personal data is affected, we will notify affected parties or regulatory authorities when required by applicable law.

Users should promptly report suspected unauthorized access, incorrect project assignment, leaked credentials, or accidental upload of sensitive data to tech@mediusearth.com.

12. User and Client Responsibilities

Clients and authorised users are responsible for ensuring that data uploaded to the portal is lawful, accurate, and submitted with any required consent or authority. This includes landowner, farmer, worker, vendor, panchayat, financial, document, GPS, image, audio, and other field data.

Users should not upload sensitive personal data unless it is required for the project workflow and should limit project access to people who need it. If a user believes data has been uploaded incorrectly, without authority, or to the wrong project or site, they should contact Medius Earth promptly.

• Keep passwords, OAuth accounts, devices, and access tokens secure.
• Use the correct project, site, and task when adding field or document data.
• Do not share portal access with unauthorised people.
• Review project and site assignments regularly so access remains appropriate.
• Do not upload sensitive personal data unless the project workflow requires it.

13. Data Processing Roles

For account management, access control, platform security, and Medius Earth operational records, Medius Earth acts as the operator responsible for deciding how such information is processed. For client project data uploaded or generated for a client's project, Medius Earth generally processes that data to provide the portal and related services for the client or authorised project owner, subject to the applicable contract, project instructions, and legal obligations.

14. Disclaimer

The platform and its outputs — including geospatial analyses, carbon and financial models, monitoring reports, and other generated estimates — are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis for informational and decision-support purposes. They may rely on third-party data, satellite imagery, and modelled assumptions, and are subject to uncertainty.

Medius Earth makes no warranty as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for a particular purpose of any output, and accepts no liability for decisions made in reliance on them. Outputs do not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice and should be independently verified before use in regulatory, commercial, or carbon-crediting contexts.

15. Governance, Review & Changes

We may update this Privacy Policy & Disclaimer from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by an updated version date, and continued use of the platform constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

We review this policy when there are material legal, technical, operational, or platform changes. The current policy owner/contact is Medius Earth technology and platform operations, reachable at tech@mediusearth.com.

16. Version History

• 2026-06-25.3: Added layman summary, scope, principles, retention, vendor, incident-response, responsibility, governance, and version-history sections.
• 2026-06-25.2: Expanded the policy for user data, client project data, and existing platform protections.
• 2026-06-25: Initial privacy policy and disclaimer used for signup consent.

17. Contact

For questions about this policy or your personal data, contact us at tech@mediusearth.com.