Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 1, 2026 · Supersedes the policy dated July 1, 2026.

Travel Bause is operated by Copernicus AI LLC (“we,” “us”). Postal address: 3540 N Desert Dr., Atlanta, GA 30344. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, and the control you have over it.

1. What we collect

• Account — your email and authentication identifiers.
• Your preferences & Diary (you provide these) — stated preferences (dietary, seat, cities, style), remembered stays, travel companions, and observed/inferred signals you let Copernicus keep.
• Your trips — itineraries you save to your Portfolio, and the price/coverage alerts you set.
• Photographs and video you add — the files themselves, stored privately, along with any caption, the place you attached them to, and the time they were taken. This includes photographs in your trips, posts you publish to the member feed, your profile picture, and any screenshot you send us with feedback.
• Verified captures — when you choose to prove you were somewhere, we record your device’s location at that moment (latitude, longitude, and how accurate the reading was), the time your device reported, and whether that put you inside the place you were claiming. This happens only on a capture you start.
• Your home location, if you set one, so the map and planning can start near you.
• Notifications — if you turn them on, your browser gives us a subscription: an address to deliver to, the keys that encrypt the message, and which browser it is, so we can stop sending when it stops working.
• What you send other members — direct messages, comments, and the posts, photographs and places you like or save.
• Usage — basic technical and operational data needed to run the service.
• Billing — managed by Stripe. Card data is entered into Stripe’s hosted checkout and never touches our servers; we store only a link to your Stripe customer and your current plan.

2. How we use it

• To run Copernicus (your concierge) and personalize planning for you — your record is private to you.
• To provide Sterling editorial coverage, your Portfolio, and the alerts you opt into.
• To show what you choose to publish to other members, and to deliver what you send them.
• We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use your private record to train shared models.
• Copernicus is an AI persona, disclosed as AI by design; Sterling ratings are produced under named editorial voices (also disclosed as AI). Copernicus may use live web lookup on paid plans for factual trip logistics; it does not rate or review.
• If you send Copernicus an image — a screenshot of a booking, a photograph of a menu — that image is passed to our AI model provider to answer that message, and is not kept in the conversation afterwards.

3. How your data is protected

• Per-customer isolation — your record is access-scoped to you at the database layer; there is no cross-customer read path.
• Your media is private by default — photographs and captures are stored in a private bucket and served only through short-lived links. Nothing you have not published is publicly reachable.
• No dark copies — when you delete data, we remove the structured record and the raw originals behind it, including the stored files, not just a display row.

4. Your rights and controls

• Export — you can export your full record at any time.
• Delete anything — individual Diary entries, trips, photographs, posts, and captures can be deleted on their own.
• Delete your account — in Your plan → Delete your account, you can erase the whole account. This removes your Diary and preferences, your trips, notes and alerts, your photographs and videos including the stored files, your verified captures and their locations, your profile, posts, comments, likes and messages, your notification subscriptions, and your login itself. Two things do not go: any numbered seat returns to Travel Bause unclaimed rather than being destroyed, and the payment records described in section 5 remain.
• How to exercise these controls — Export and Delete are in your account settings; deleting your account is explained step by step there. You can also write to legal@travelbause.com. We will respond to requests within 30 days.

5. Data we are legally required to retain

If you delete your account, we purge your record as described above. We are legally required to keep basic transaction and payment records to meet tax and accounting law, for up to 7 years. Those are: the records held by Stripe as our payment processor, under their own legal obligation; and, if you took part in the Maven programme, the earnings, payouts and any adjustments we recorded for you. They are limited to what the law requires (for example: date, identifier, amount, tax) and are not used for any other purpose.

Because those Maven records cannot be removed on request, an account carrying them cannot be erased by the button alone. Start it there and we will finish it by hand — erasing everything the law allows and telling you exactly what remains.

6. Third parties (processors)

• Stripe — payments, and the legally required financial record.
• Anthropic — AI model provider, including any image you send Copernicus.
• Supabase — authentication and our database host.
• Cloudflare — hosting, CDN, media storage (Cloudflare R2), and inbound email routing. We also use Cloudflare’s privacy-preserving web analytics on our marketing site, which sets no cookies and does not track people across sites.
• Resend — delivery of our email to you.
• Mapbox — maps and geocoding.

7. Contact & changes

Questions, or to exercise your rights: legal@travelbause.com. We will post any changes here and update the effective date.