Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 8, 2026

Liquid Symbol LLC ("Liquid Symbol", "we") makes VCAT, an iPhone app and web portal that compost facilities use to assess and document compost quality from photographs. This policy explains what information we collect through the VCAT app, the customer portal and the website liquidsymbol.com, and what we do with it.

VCAT is a tool for businesses. Most of what it handles is information about compost, not about people. Some personal information is involved, and this policy covers it.

1. Who this policy covers

• People who use VCAT on behalf of a compost facility: operators, managers and others with a login.
• Visitors to liquidsymbol.com, including anyone who sends us a message or asks about an offer.

2. Information we collect

When you use the VCAT app or the customer portal

• Account information: your email address, your password (stored in protected form; we cannot read it), and the facility your account belongs to.
• Report information you enter: facility name, operator name, batch and pile identifiers, feedstock, composting method, pile temperature, and any notes you type.
• Photographs of compost that you take in the app. Photographs can incidentally include people, vehicles or signs near the pile. We do not use photographs to identify anyone. Please keep people out of frame where you can.
• Location: if you allow it, the app records GPS coordinates when a report is created. VCAT uses them to show each report on the portal's map and to match a new report to earlier reports of the same pile, which is how a pile's history is built. The app asks for location only while it is in use. You can refuse or switch this off in your iPhone's settings. Reports will then have no coordinates, so they will not appear on the map and cannot be matched to earlier reports by location.
• Time and device details: the date and time of each assessment, your iPhone model, and the app version.
• Results: the scores and flags VCAT produces from your photographs.
• Corrections and feedback you give us about a result, for example marking a flagged item as wrong.
• Changes to a report: if a report is corrected, we record who made the change, when, and why.
• Diagnostic reports, only if you choose to send one: the app can produce a diagnostics report for our support team. It contains technical details about your iPhone, your network connection, your sign-in status, and how the app has been running, including recent app activity logs. The app never sends this by itself. You start it, and you choose whether to share the result with us.

Photographs are analysed on your iPhone. The finished report, including its photographs, is then uploaded to our servers so that it appears in the portal.

The app does not track you across other companies' apps or websites, and it contains no advertising.

When you visit liquidsymbol.com

• Messages and enquiries: the details you type into the contact form or an offer enquiry form, such as your name, role, facility, city and state, email address, phone number, and information about your operation.
• Website usage: the public pages of the site use Google Analytics, which collects information such as the pages visited, the approximate location derived from your IP address, and your browser and device type. Google Analytics uses cookies.
• Sign-in cookies and browser storage: the portal stores information in your browser to keep you signed in.
• Use of the app and the portal: our servers record when you sign in and the requests the app and the portal make. We may use this information, and information about which features and pages are used, to understand how VCAT is used and to improve it.
• Server logs: our web host records standard information about requests to the site, including IP addresses.

The site's Verify page checks a report file inside your own browser. The file you select is not sent to us.

3. How we use information

We use the information above to:

• provide VCAT: create your account, produce and store your reports, and show them to you and your colleagues in the portal;
• keep reports reliable, by recording when each was made and any later corrections;
• respond to your messages and enquiries, and contact you about your account or your subscription;
• provide support and fix problems;
• understand how the website is used, so we can improve it;
• improve VCAT and its models, as described in section 4;
• meet our legal obligations.

4. Using photographs and results to improve VCAT

VCAT's assessments are produced by machine learning models, which improve by learning from real examples. We use photographs, results, and the corrections users give us to test and improve these models.

Before we use a facility's photographs or results for this purpose, or in anything we publish, we remove the facility's name and location so that the facility cannot be identified. We keep photographs and results in that form indefinitely, including after an account is closed or deleted. We do not use a facility's name, or anything that identifies it, in marketing or other public material without that facility's separate written permission.

5. Who we share information with

Within your facility. Reports created by anyone at a facility are visible to the other VCAT users at that facility. That includes the operator name entered on a report.

Service providers. We use other companies to run VCAT. They process information on our behalf and only to provide their service to us. They are:

• the hosting companies that store the VCAT database, the sign-in system, your reports and this website;
• our email provider, which handles messages sent through the website's forms;
• Google, whose Google Analytics service measures use of the public website;
• the providers of the map images shown in the portal, which receive requests for the areas you view;
• Apple, which distributes the app;
• content delivery services that supply fonts and software components to your browser.

You can ask us for the names of these companies at any time.

Legal reasons. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Liquid Symbol, our customers or others.

A sale of the business. If Liquid Symbol is merged with or acquired by another company, information may pass to that company, which must continue to honour this policy.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

6. Where information is stored and how long we keep it

• VCAT data is stored on servers in the United States.
• Reports are kept for as long as your facility has an account, so that your history stays complete. Your subscription terms say what happens to them when a subscription ends.
• Account information is kept while your account is open.
• Messages and enquiries are kept for as long as we need them to deal with your enquiry and our relationship with you.
• Backups: we make regular backup copies of VCAT data. When information is deleted from VCAT, copies of it can remain in our backups for up to six months before they are removed.
• Photographs and results that have had the facility's name and location removed are kept indefinitely, to improve VCAT (section 4).

7. Security

We protect information with measures that include encrypted connections between the app, the portal and our servers; individual logins; and access rules that limit each facility's users to that facility's reports. Each report carries a cryptographic fingerprint so that any later alteration can be detected.

No system is perfectly secure. If we learn of a breach that affects your personal information, we will tell you as the law requires.

8. Your choices and rights

You can:

• See or correct your information. Much of it is visible in the portal. For anything else, email us.
• Withdraw a report. In the portal you can mark a report as void if it should not be relied on. A voided report stays on record, marked as void; voiding does not delete it and cannot be undone.
• Ask us to delete your information. Email us, and within 45 days we will delete your account and the information that identifies you or your facility, unless we need to keep it to meet a legal obligation. We keep the photographs and results with your facility's name and location removed, as described in section 4. Nothing is deleted automatically, and reports cannot be deleted from inside the app or the portal.
• Switch off location for the VCAT app in your iPhone's settings.
• Refuse analytics cookies through your browser's settings, or with Google's Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

If your account was set up by your employer, some requests may need to go through your facility, because the reports belong to it.

To make a request, email matt@liquidsymbol.com. We will not treat you differently for making one.

"Do Not Track". Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is no agreed standard for responding to it, and the website does not currently change its behaviour when it receives one.

9. Children

VCAT and this website are for businesses. They are not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version here with a new effective date. If a change materially affects how we use personal information, we will also email the address on each VCAT account before the change takes effect.

11. Contact

Liquid Symbol LLC
171 Branham Ln, Ste 10 POB 1049
San Jose, CA
matt@liquidsymbol.com