Privacy Policy

1. Overview

This Privacy Policy explains how Places Beyond Reality collects, uses, discloses, and protects personal information when you use placesbeyondreality.com, create an account, subscribe to the newsletter, use saved place lists, view pricing, or purchase paid features.

Places Beyond Reality is an interactive atlas and editorial discovery service. We collect only the information we need to operate, secure, analyze, and improve the service, communicate with users, and provide account and billing features.

2. Information you provide

You may provide personal information directly when you sign in, manage your account, subscribe to the newsletter, contact us, or use account features.

• Account information, such as name, email address, authentication provider, account identifiers, and profile details provided by your sign-in provider.
• Newsletter information, such as email address, subscription status, confirmation tokens, and unsubscribe preferences.
• User-generated account content, such as saved place lists, list names, saved locations, preferences, and related metadata.
• Support communications, such as messages, requests, attachments, and contact details you send to us.
• Billing-related information entered at checkout, which is collected and processed by Paddle rather than stored directly by Places Beyond Reality.

3. Information collected automatically

When you use the service, we and our service providers may collect technical and usage information.

• Device and browser information, including IP address, approximate location derived from IP address, browser type, operating system, language, time zone, and device identifiers.
• Usage data, including pages visited, referrers, interactions, search/filter activity, map usage, errors, performance data, and timestamps.
• Cookie and local storage data, including language preference, session state, analytics identifiers, and similar technologies used to remember settings and understand how the service is used.

4. Payments through Paddle

Paid purchases and subscriptions may be processed by Paddle. Paddle may act as merchant of record and/or payment processor, depending on your region and the checkout flow.

Paddle may collect and process payment details, billing name and address, email address, tax information, transaction identifiers, invoices, receipts, subscription status, fraud and compliance signals, and refund or chargeback information. Places Beyond Reality receives limited billing metadata needed to activate, manage, support, and audit your plan, but we do not store full card numbers.

Paddle processes payment information under its own privacy terms and legal obligations. You should review Paddle policies shown during checkout for details about Paddle data handling.

5. How we use information

We use personal information for the following purposes.

• Provide, maintain, personalize, and secure the service.
• Create and manage accounts, authentication sessions, saved lists, plan limits, and user preferences.
• Send newsletter confirmation emails, subscription messages, service notices, support responses, and account-related communications.
• Process paid plan status, subscription renewals, cancellations, refunds, invoices, and billing support with Paddle.
• Analyze traffic, diagnose issues, measure performance, prevent abuse, enforce terms, and improve content and product decisions.
• Comply with legal obligations, tax requirements, accounting rules, fraud prevention, security, and dispute handling.

6. Legal bases where required

Where privacy laws require a legal basis, we process personal information because it is necessary to provide the service or perform a contract, because we have a legitimate interest in operating and improving the service, because we need to comply with legal obligations, or because you gave consent, such as for certain newsletter or analytics choices where required.

7. Cookies, analytics, and similar technologies

The service may use cookies, local storage, pixels, tags, and similar technologies for authentication, preferences, security, analytics, and performance measurement.

We use Google Analytics to understand aggregate usage, diagnose friction, and improve the atlas. Google may collect usage data through its own scripts and process it under its own policies.

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Blocking some technologies may affect sign-in, preferences, analytics opt-outs, or site functionality.

8. How we share information

We do not sell personal information in the ordinary meaning of selling a user database. We may share information with service providers and partners who help operate the service.

• Hosting, database, storage, API, security, cache, and infrastructure providers.
• Authentication providers used to sign you in.
• Email and newsletter providers used to send confirmations and messages.
• Paddle for checkout, taxes, invoices, subscription management, refunds, payment security, and compliance.
• Google Analytics, used to understand and improve the service.
• Professional advisors, authorities, or counterparties when required for legal compliance, rights protection, fraud prevention, or business transfers.

9. Data retention

We keep personal information for as long as needed to provide the service, maintain accounts, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, and maintain business records. Retention periods vary depending on the type of data and legal requirements.

You may request deletion of certain account information, but we may retain limited records where required for security, tax, accounting, payment, fraud prevention, legal compliance, or legitimate operational purposes.

10. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal information. No internet service can be guaranteed to be perfectly secure, and you are responsible for using secure devices, protecting your credentials, and notifying us of suspected unauthorized access.

11. International transfers

Places Beyond Reality and its service providers may process information in countries other than where you live. Those countries may have different data protection laws. Where required, we use appropriate safeguards for international transfers.

12. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, export, restrict, or object to certain processing of your personal information, and to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.

You can unsubscribe from newsletter emails using the link in the email. For other privacy requests, contact support@placesbeyondreality.com. We may need to verify your identity before fulfilling a request.

13. Children

The service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided personal information, contact us so we can take appropriate action.

14. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The updated version will be posted on this page with a revised date. If changes are material, we will take reasonable steps to provide additional notice.

15. Contact

Privacy questions and requests can be sent to support@placesbeyondreality.com.