Strata
Last updated 16 August 2026.
Strata is published on the App Store by Trent Vukich and is operated through TMCM Estates, LLC, a limited liability company registered in Alabama, United States ("we", "us"). The App Store lists Trent Vukich as the seller, and the trader details Apple publishes are his; TMCM Estates, LLC is the business behind Strata and the controller of the personal data described here. We operate from Portugal, which is our establishment in the European Union, and we are therefore subject to the General Data Protection Regulation directly. Either will reach us at the address at the foot of this page. This policy covers the Strata iOS app and this website.
Strata reads the history of the ground you are standing on. That only works if the app knows where you are, so location is the heart of what we handle. This policy says exactly what we keep, why, and who else sees it.
Where you dig. When you press the dig button we send those coordinates to our server. We store the coordinates of each dig, the time, and which account made it, so your journal can show you where you have been. If you choose a spot on the map rather than your own position, we store that chosen spot instead.
Your account. The app creates an anonymous account on first launch so your journal survives a reinstall. It holds no personal information. If you sign in with Apple we also receive the email address Apple gives us — which may be a private relay address you can turn off at any time — and, on first sign-in only, the name you agree to share.
Purchases. If you buy a pass or dig credits, Apple tells us that the purchase happened and gives us its transaction identifiers so we can unlock the right features. Apple never gives us your card details, and we never see them.
Technical logs. For each dig we record which map square it covered, whether it came from cache, how long it took, and how much work it took to write. We use this to keep the service fast and affordable.
There is no advertising, no tracking across other apps or websites, and no analytics or attribution software of any kind in Strata. We do not sell, rent or share anything about you with anyone for their own purposes, and we do not build advertising profiles. We do not store your IP address; it is held in memory only, briefly, to stop one device from overloading the service.
For readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Brazil and other places with equivalent law, our legal bases are:
To write a report, our server sends the location of your dig and the reference material we gathered about it to Anthropic, whose Claude models compose the narrative. Nothing identifying you is included.
We use Supabase for our database and sign-in, and Render for hosting. Both act on our instructions under written data-processing terms.
Some things load straight from your phone rather than through us, which means those services see your device's IP address: Apple Maps draws the map, Esri supplies satellite imagery for the report, and Wikipedia supplies photographs — including, when we look for pictures near you, the coordinates of your dig. Each has its own privacy policy.
We operate from Portugal, and the processors we use to run Strata — our database, our hosting and the service that writes the reports — are in the United States. So your data does leave the European Economic Area, not to reach us, but to reach them. Where the law requires a transfer mechanism we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and their equivalents elsewhere) in our agreements with those processors. If you are in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada or Brazil, the same arrangements carry your data to the same places. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant terms.
Your journal and your dig coordinates are kept until you delete your account, at which point they go immediately. Purchase records are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires, normally seven years. Technical logs are kept for up to twelve months.
The written reports themselves are stored by map square rather than by person, are shared between everyone who digs that square, and stay in our cache indefinitely — they are what makes the app fast and cheap, and they contain nothing about you.
Wherever you live, you may ask us to give you a copy of what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to what we do with it, or send it to another service in a portable form. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting what we did before you did so.
The fastest route is in the app: Settings → Data and privacy → Delete account. That erases your account, your journal, and the record of where you have dug. It is immediate and cannot be undone. Clearing your journal from Settings is a different, gentler thing: it empties the list on that phone and leaves your account untouched.
You can also write to us at the address below and we will do any of it for you. We answer within 30 days and we do not charge for it. We will never treat you worse for asking.
We do not make decisions about you by automated means that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Reports are written by AI, but they are about places, not about you.
Please tell us first — but you do not have to. You may complain to your data protection authority:
In the twelve months before this policy was written we collected the categories of personal information described above: identifiers (an account identifier and, if you sign in with Apple, an email address), geolocation data, and commercial information (which passes you bought). We collect it for the purposes described above and from you, through the app. We have not sold or shared personal information, and we do not. Strata contains no advertising or cross-context behavioural tracking, so there is nothing to opt out of. Your rights to know, delete, correct, and not be discriminated against are the ones described under "Your rights" above, and are exercised the same way.
Strata is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. In the European Economic Area we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under the age at which their country allows a child to consent, which is between 13 and 16. Elsewhere we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.
If this policy changes we will update this page and the date at the top. Material changes will be announced in the app.
Write to us about anything in this policy, including any request under it. The same address reaches the person responsible for the protection of personal information for the purposes of Quebec's Law 25, and our data protection contact for the purposes of the GDPR and the LGPD.
Trent Vukich · TMCM Estates, LLC · trent@trentvukich.com · Terms of Use · Support