Effective October 4, 2026 • Version 2026-10-04

Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and how to reach us

"The Binder" refers to the Pokémon TCG portfolio application at thebinder.xyz and its mobile and desktop apps. The controller of the personal information described here is:

The Binder Ltd., a Colorado limited liability company
4801 Signal Tree Drive L308
Timnath, CO 80547
United States
support@thebinder.xyz

This Privacy Policy explains what information the Service collects, why, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and the choices you have. For any privacy question or request, including one exercising a right under section 16, write to the address or email above.

2. The short version

• We collect what is needed to run an account and sync your collection: your email, your handle, your cards, and your settings.
• We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for advertising. There are no advertising or analytics trackers in the Service.
• Scan photos are forwarded to our card-recognition provider and are not kept afterwards.
• You can export everything and delete your account from inside the app, at any time.
• Without an account, your collection stays on your device and never reaches our servers.

3. Information you give us

• Account information. Your email address, a password (stored only as a salted hash by our authentication provider — we never see it), your chosen @username and display name, and the date and version of the Terms you accepted. If you sign in with Google, Apple, or Discord, we receive the email address and basic profile details that provider releases to us. Signing in with Apple using Apple's private relay address is supported; we only ever see the relay address.
• Profile information. An optional avatar image, an optional banner, your bio, featured cards, whether your profile is public or private, and whether your portfolio total is hidden from visitors. Avatar images you upload are checked and resized as described in section 5 before being saved to your profile.
• Collection and portfolio data. The cards and sealed products you add; quantity, condition, grade, grading company, purchase price, date acquired, and any notes; the binders you create and their names, colours, and settings; watchlist entries; price alerts; completion goals; and your transaction log.
• Preferences and settings. Display currency, accent colour, light or dark mode, text size, chart and view modes, notification switches, and other in-app settings.
• Social content. If you use the social features: who you follow, likes, posts and replies (where posting is enabled), images attached to them, direct messages and any images in them, and the blocks, mutes, and reports you make.
• Support correspondence. If you email us, we keep the message and our reply so we can help and follow up.

4. Information created by your use of the Service

• Authentication data. Session tokens, refresh tokens, and related metadata managed by our authentication provider, so you stay signed in.
• Usage counters. A per-month count of card scans and of Byte AI messages, tied to your account, so we can apply your tier's allowance. These record how many and when, not what the scan or the message contained.
• Portfolio history. Daily snapshots of your portfolio's value, so the value chart can be drawn.
• Diagnostic and server data. Standard server logs, which include IP address, user agent, requested URL, and timestamp, kept to operate the Service, detect abuse, and diagnose faults. If the app hits an error it may send us a short technical report describing what failed.
• Subscription status. Which tier your account is on, and when it changes.

5. Camera and photos

The card scanner uses your device camera, and only after you grant permission. You can also choose an existing photo from your device instead. The image is sent to our server, forwarded to Scrydex for card identification, and discarded once the response comes back: we do not store scan images, and they are not attached to your account or used to train anything.

When you set a profile picture, or attach a picture to a post or a direct message, the image is sent to our server, which makes a smaller copy and has it checked automatically by Anthropic's Claude models to keep explicit or harmful images out of the community. Only pictures that pass are stored: profile pictures in your profile, and post and message pictures in our file storage so they can be displayed. A picture that does not pass, or that cannot be checked, is discarded and not stored. The check looks only at the picture; it is not used to identify you or to train any model.

You can withdraw camera or photo permission at any time in your device or browser settings. The scanner stops working; nothing else is affected.

6. The Byte AI assistant

Byte is powered by Anthropic's Claude models, called from our server. When you use Byte:

• Your message and the recent conversation are sent to Anthropic for processing, along with the instructions that define Byte.
• If you ask about your own collection, Byte may look up data from your account — such as your cards, binders, set progress, totals, Transaction Log, wishlist, and price alerts — and include it in what it sends to Anthropic so it can answer.
• Anthropic processes this data as our service provider under its own terms and does not use it to train its models.

Anthropic's Claude models also check the pictures you upload for safety, as described in section 5. A picture is sent for that check only.

Please do not send Byte passwords, payment details, government identifiers, health information, or other people's personal information. If you would rather nothing about your collection reached the model provider, do not use Byte.

7. Using the Service without an account

In guest mode your collection, watchlist, binders, and settings are stored only in your own browser or app storage on that device. They are not uploaded to our servers, not backed up, and not visible to us. Clearing your browser data or uninstalling the app deletes them permanently. If you later create an account, you can bring that local data with you, and from then on it syncs as described in this Policy.

8. How we use your information, and our legal bases

We use the information described above to:

• create, authenticate, and secure your account, and keep you signed in — to perform our contract with you;
• store your collection and sync it across your devices, and provide the features you use — to perform our contract with you;
• identify cards you scan and price the cards you hold — to perform our contract with you;
• operate paid tiers and apply usage allowances — to perform our contract with you;
• show social features to the people you have chosen to share with — to perform our contract with you;
• send essential service messages, such as account, security, billing, or terms notices — to perform our contract with you, and our legitimate interest in running the Service;
• keep the Service working, diagnose faults, prevent abuse and fraud, and enforce our Terms — our legitimate interest in a secure, functioning service;
• review reports and moderate content — our legitimate interest in user safety, and our legal obligations;
• understand which features are used, in aggregate, to decide what to build — our legitimate interest in improving the Service;
• comply with law and respond to lawful requests — our legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, we do not use it for targeted advertising, and we do not use your collection data or your Byte conversations to train AI models.

9. Who we share information with

We share personal information only with the service providers below, each acting on our behalf and under its own privacy policy, and only with what they need:

• Supabase — authentication, the database that holds your account, collection, and social data, and file storage for post and message images. Hosts essentially everything tied to your account.
• Railway — hosting for our application server, which processes requests in transit.
• Anthropic — the Byte AI assistant, and the automatic safety check on pictures you upload. Receives your prompts, any collection data Byte looks up to answer them, and uploaded pictures. See sections 5 and 6.
• Scrydex — card pricing, catalogue data, and image recognition. Receives scan images at the moment you scan. Requests are routed through our server, so Scrydex does not receive your IP address or account identity.
• pokemontcg.io and tcgdex.net — card metadata and images. Routed through our server; no personal data is sent.
• eBay — marketplace listings for a card you are viewing. Routed through our server; no personal data is sent.
• Google, Apple, Discord — only if you choose to sign in with them, and only to complete that sign-in.
• Apple App Store, Google Play, or a payment processor — if you subscribe. They handle the payment and tell us that your subscription is active. We never receive your full card number. RevenueCat keeps track of subscription status for us; it receives your account ID and your purchase records from the store, not your payment details.
• Apple and Google push notification services — only if you allow notifications on your device, to deliver them. They receive a device token and the notification itself.

We also use two public data sources that receive no personal information at all: an open exchange-rate feed, for converting prices into your chosen currency, and a public market-index feed used to draw a comparison line on charts.

Beyond these, we disclose personal information only where we must: to comply with law or a valid legal request, to enforce our Terms, to protect the rights, safety, or property of our users or the public, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets — in which case we will tell you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

10. What other people can see

Some information is public by design. Your @username, display name, and avatar appear in collector search and anywhere you interact with others, whether or not your profile is public. If your profile is public, visitors can also see your bio, join date, featured cards, follower and following counts, badges, and the binders you have made public — and your portfolio total unless you have hidden it. Setting your profile to private means it cannot be opened, though your handle and avatar remain visible in search.

Posts and replies you make in community areas are visible to other users. Direct messages are visible to the people in the conversation, and to us only where a message is reported or where we must access it to investigate abuse or comply with law.

You control most of this in Settings → Data & privacy, and per-binder in each binder's settings.

11. Cookies and local storage

We use no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, and no third-party trackers. The Service uses:

• Authentication storage set by our authentication provider, which keeps your session so you are not signed out on every visit. This is strictly necessary for the Service to work.
• Local storage on your device, which holds your preferences (accent colour, currency, text size, view modes), a cached copy of your collection and watchlist so the app opens instantly and works offline, guest-mode data, and whether you have seen onboarding. In guest mode this is the only place your collection exists.

Clearing site data in your browser, or uninstalling the app, removes all of this. Signed-in data is restored from your account the next time you sign in; guest-mode data is not recoverable.

12. Notifications and email

We send essential service email — sign-in and password recovery, account and security notices, billing notices where applicable, and material changes to these documents. You cannot opt out of these while you hold an account, because they are part of operating it.

Price alerts you set appear in the app's notifications. If you allow notifications on your device, they are also delivered as push notifications; for that we store a push token for the device, and you can turn them off at any time in the app or in your device settings. We will not send you marketing email without your consent.

13. Data retention

• Account and collection data is kept for as long as your account is active.
• Scan images are not retained: they exist only for the duration of the identification request.
• Uploaded pictures that do not pass the safety check are not retained.
• Byte conversations are held in your device's session while you are chatting and are not stored on our servers as a transcript. Only the monthly message count is kept.
• Server logs are kept for a short period, normally no more than 90 days, for security and debugging.
• Usage counters are kept per calendar month for as long as your account is active, so allowances can be applied.
• Moderation records (reports, and the action taken) may be kept longer than the content they relate to, so repeat abuse can be recognised.
• When you delete your account, your authentication record is deleted and every table keyed to it — profile, binders, collection, watchlist, settings, posts, likes, follows, messages, value history, usage counters — is removed with it. Copies may persist briefly in encrypted backups, which are overwritten on a rolling schedule, and we keep the minimum we are required to keep by law.

14. Security

Every table that holds your data is protected by row-level security in the database, scoped so that a row is readable and writable only by the account that owns it. Traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and are never visible to us. Administrative keys are held only on our server and are never shipped in the app. The publishable key that does appear in our client code is safe by design: it can do nothing that the row-level security policies do not already allow.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law.

15. International transfers

Our providers operate in the United States and other countries, so your information may be processed outside the country where you live, including in countries whose data-protection laws differ from your own. Where we transfer personal information out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, in our agreements with those providers.

16. Your rights and choices

Whatever your location, you can, from inside the Service:

• See and correct your profile and collection data at any time;
• Export your collection as CSV, or download a full JSON backup of your account, from Settings → Data & privacy → Your data;
• Delete your account, permanently, from Settings → Data & privacy → Danger zone;
• Control visibility of your profile, portfolio total, and binders;
• Block, mute, or report other users, and review every block you have made.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, you also have the rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and object to our processing of your personal information, and to data portability; where we rely on legitimate interests you may object at any time. If you are a California resident, you have the rights to know, delete, correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing — we do neither — and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any right. Other jurisdictions grant similar rights.

To exercise a right that is not available in the app, email support@thebinder.xyz. We will respond within the period the applicable law requires and may need to verify your identity first. You can also authorise an agent to act for you where the law allows it. If you believe we have handled your information improperly, you may complain to your local data-protection authority, though we would appreciate the chance to put it right first.

17. Children's privacy

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 under 13 has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete the account and its data promptly. Where local law sets a higher age for consent to data processing, we rely on that age instead.

18. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy as the Service changes. The "Effective" date at the top reflects the latest revision. Material changes will be highlighted inside the Service, and where the law requires it we will ask for your consent or give you advance notice.

19. Contact

Questions, requests, or complaints about this Privacy Policy can be sent to support@thebinder.xyz, or by post to The Binder Ltd., 4801 Signal Tree Drive L308, Timnath, CO 80547, United States.