Privacy Policy

Blindspot Labs (“we”, “us”) provides a search and analysis interface over Irish planning applications and the Dublin City Development Plan. This page sets out, in plain language, what data we collect about you, what data we display about planning applications, and the third-party services involved.

Short version: the planning data is already public. We do not collect personal data beyond the minimum needed to authenticate your account and store work you explicitly save. We do not sell your data to anyone.

The records shown on Blindspot Labs (search results, precedents, map markers) are public planning applications submitted to Irish local authorities under the Planning and Development Act 2000 (as amended). Under that Act, planning applications and the decisions made on them are matters of public record, accessible by any member of the public from the relevant local authority.

We re-publish these records as received from the Department of Housing's national planning data service. We do not edit, censor, anonymise, or supplement application contents. If you are an applicant or third-party objector and you believe a record on our service is inaccurate, the authoritative source remains the relevant local authority — contact them to correct the original record.

The Dublin City Development Plan 2022–2028 Written Statement is published by Dublin City Council and reproduced here for search and reference. Citations on AI responses use the format (Dev Plan Ch.<n>, p.<page>) so you can verify any quoted material against the official document.

If you create an account, we collect only the minimum needed to run the service:

• Account identifier and email address. Sign-in is handled by Clerk; we receive a stable user ID and your email address from them on each authenticated request.
• Display name (optional). Used to greet you on the hub. You can leave this blank.
• Work you explicitly save. AI searches you press “Save” on, precedents you bookmark, and projects you create (with the address, items, and notes you choose to add). Nothing is stored automatically; if you don't click Save, it isn't persisted.

We do not collect: marketing analytics, IP-based location tracking, browsing history outside our service, third-party advertising IDs, or any special-category personal data (race, religion, health, etc.).

When you ask a question on the AI Search page, your question text, the assistant's previous turns in that conversation, and the retrieved planning records / policy excerpts are sent to Anthropic (the maker of Claude) for processing. We use Anthropic's API under their commercial terms; per those terms, your prompts are not used to train Anthropic's models.

We do not log the full content of AI prompts or responses on our servers in normal operation. The only exception is when you click the Save button on a response — at that point the prompt, response, and source citations are stored under your account so you can revisit them from your hub. You can delete a saved search from the hub at any time.

We do not sell, rent, or barter your personal data to third parties. We do not run advertising networks, retargeting pixels, or marketing analytics on this site. The third parties listed below are purely operational — we use them to run the service, and only the data described in this policy is shared with them.

• Vercel — hosts the Next.js frontend. May log request metadata (IP address, user agent) for security and abuse prevention, per their privacy policy.
• Render — hosts the FastAPI backend that runs the planning records / policy retrieval pipeline.
• Clerk — authentication. Stores your email and issued sessions. Operates from the EU and US; privacy policy.
• Neon — managed PostgreSQL database (Frankfurt region) that stores your account row, saved searches, saved precedents, and projects.
• Anthropic — provides the Claude AI model used for question answering. See section 4.

• Account data. Kept while your account is active. If you delete your account, your row, all saved searches, saved precedents, and projects are deleted within 30 days.
• Public planning records. Mirrored continuously from the source. We do not promise long-term retention beyond what the public source itself provides.
• Server logs. Aggregate request logs may be kept for up to 30 days for debugging and abuse prevention; they do not include the contents of AI prompts or responses.

Blindspot Labs operates from Ireland. As a user in the EU/UK you have the right to access the data we hold about you, correct it, export it, restrict our processing of it, and delete it. To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@blindspotlabs.ie. We will respond within one month.

The legal basis for processing your account data is performance of a contract (you sign up, we run the service for you). The legal basis for showing public planning records is that the records are already in the public domain under the Planning and Development Act 2000.

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in (set by Clerk) and to run the site (Next.js / Vercel). We do not set marketing or analytics cookies.

The service is not directed at people under 16 and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

If we make material changes, we will update the “last updated” date at the top of this page and, where the change affects how we use your personal data, contact you by email before the change takes effect.

For privacy questions: privacy@blindspotlabs.ie. For everything else: see the Terms of Service.