Privacy policy

This site and the laboratory are operated by CertaSafe Labs Inc., registered at 780 Chadbourne Rd, Suite A, Fairfield, CA 94534. The registered address and the laboratory address are the same place. It is responsible for the information described here. Privacy questions go to support@certasafelabs.com.

CertaSafe is a business-to-business testing laboratory. Almost everything it holds is about an order and a sample, not about a person. The personal information it does hold is the small amount needed to run an account, take a payment, and get a COA to the right recipient.

CertaSafe does not sell your personal information, and does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is no advertising on this site and no advertising network embedded in it.

What is held: your name, your email address, your password in hashed form, your role, and the times you signed in. No telephone number is collected.

Why: to identify you, to secure the account, and to contact you about your orders.

Who can see it: you, CertaSafe staff who need it, and the administrator of your organization if you belong to one.

What is held: the organization name, its members and their roles, its billing details, and its COA recipients.

Why: to let an organization manage its own testing.

Who can see it: an organization administrator can see the organization's members, orders, samples, and COAs, including work submitted by other members. If you join an organization account, your activity in it is visible to that administrator. This is how the account is meant to work and it is stated here so it is not a surprise.

What is held: the tests ordered, the services and prices as they stood when you ordered (a snapshot, so an old order still reads correctly after prices change), order status, and its history.

Why: to perform and account for the work, and to answer questions about it later.

Retention: seven years. See the retention section below.

What is held: your sample names and lot labels, the description you gave, receipt and intake records, handling and storage records, and disposal records.

Why: to match your sample to your order and your COA, and to be able to account for what happened to it.

Note: sample identifiers are text you supply. If you put personal information in a sample name, CertaSafe will hold it. Do not put personal information in a sample name.

Retention: the material is retained 45 days after testing and then disposed of. The records about it are kept with the order.

What is held: the COA and its contents, its version history, who released it, who it was delivered to, and the record of who accessed it.

Why: to deliver your COA, to keep it available to you, and to maintain its integrity so verification means something.

COAs are confidential. They are disclosed to you, to recipients you configured, to CertaSafe staff who need them, and where the law requires.

Card payments are handled by Stripe, CertaSafe's payment processor. You enter your card number, expiry date, and security code into Stripe's own form on the review page, and they go from your browser directly to Stripe. Card details never reach CertaSafe, and CertaSafe never receives or stores them.

What CertaSafe holds: the amount, the currency, the date, whether the payment succeeded or failed, and Stripe's references for the payment and for any refund or dispute on it.

Stripe has its own privacy policy governing what it does with the payment details and the fraud prevention information it collects.

What is held: the email address you sign in with, the sign-in links sent to it, a record of each notification email sent to you (what it was about, when it was sent, and whether the mail provider accepted it), and any support message you send to CertaSafe and the reply to it.

Transactional email. CertaSafe emails the address on an order when the order is placed, when a sample is received at the laboratory, when a COA is released, and when the laboratory replies on an issue. Each message says that something happened and where to read it in your portal. It does not carry results, COA content, or the text of an issue message: your portal is the confidential channel, and email is not. These are messages about your own orders, not marketing, so they carry no way to unsubscribe. Sending them is done by a mail provider acting for CertaSafe, which receives the address and the message and nothing else; no open tracking or click tracking is used. Sending is not conditional on delivery: a COA is released, and an order is placed, whether or not the email arrives, and the released COA is always in your portal.

The contact form on this site does not accept submissions yet. Nothing is collected or stored through it. Support reaches CertaSafe by email at the address in the contact section below.

CertaSafe sends no marketing email. If it ever does, it will ask for your consent first, and every message will carry a way to withdraw it.

This site runs no third party analytics. No measurement service, tag manager, session recorder, heat map, or advertising pixel is embedded in any page.

These constraints stand as commitments on anything that might ever be added: analytics never receives COA content, sample identifiers, result values, or anything that identifies a customer's material, and analytics is not run inside the portal on pages that display protected records.

CertaScan lets someone holding a COA confirm that it is authentic and unaltered.

What a verification lookup reveals: that a COA with that identifier exists, that the copy presented matches the released one, the tests within its scope, and its status.

What it never reveals: your identity, your organization, your contact details, your other orders, or any COA you have not explicitly authorized for public verification.

A COA is publicly verifiable only if you authorize it. Authorization can be withdrawn, after which the lookup no longer resolves.

CertaSafe keeps a record of verification lookups for integrity and abuse monitoring. That record is about the COA, not about you.

Payment. Stripe, CertaSafe's payment processor, receives your payment details when you pay, and the amount and CertaSafe's reference for the payment. It also receives, through its form on the review page, information about the browser and device used to pay, which it uses to prevent fraud; that form also reaches hCaptcha, a bot protection service, which sets a cookie of its own. Refunds are issued through Stripe.

Email. The mail provider described under Communications receives the address and the message for each notification email, and nothing else.

Hosting. The managed cloud platform described under Security runs the application and its database and holds the backups.

Nobody else receives your information from CertaSafe, except where the law requires it. CertaSafe does not sell or share personal information.

This site sets only the cookies it needs to sign you in and to keep an order you are building. On the review page, where you pay, Stripe sets fraud prevention cookies for the payment you are making, and the bot protection its form uses sets one more; no other page loads anything from Stripe. No analytics, measurement, or advertising cookie is set by anyone. The cookie policy lists every one of them by name.

COAs, their versions, their fingerprints, and their authorization records are kept indefinitely on purpose. A COA that cannot be produced later cannot be verified later, and verification is part of what CertaSafe sells.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask CertaSafe to:

• Tell you what it holds about you, and give you a copy.
• Correct information that is wrong.
• Delete information it no longer needs.
• Export your information in a portable form.
• Restrict or object to certain processing.
• Withdraw consent you gave, without affecting what was done before you withdrew it.

California residents additionally have the right to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing. CertaSafe does not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of, and no right to limit use of sensitive personal information arises because CertaSafe does not collect it for those purposes. CertaSafe will not discriminate against you for exercising a right.

Limits. Some records cannot be deleted on request. A released COA, its version history, and its integrity record are what make verification meaningful, and business and tax records must be kept for their statutory period. Where CertaSafe cannot delete something, it will say so and say why.

To make a request, contact support@certasafelabs.com. CertaSafe will verify that the request is really from you before acting on it, and will respond within the period the applicable law allows.

Privacy requests and questions. support@certasafelabs.com, telephone 707-731-9296, 8 to 5 daily.

A privacy complaint goes to the same address, marked as a complaint.

CertaSafe may change this policy. The current version and its effective date are always published here. Material changes are notified to account holders before they take effect.

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Access to customer records is limited to the staff who need it, and every account's records are separated from every other account's in the database itself, not only in the interface.

Card data never reaches CertaSafe's systems. It goes to Stripe, the payment processor, and stays there.

The application and its database run on a managed cloud platform, which holds the backups. If a breach affects your information, CertaSafe will notify you as the law requires.