Privacy Policy

This explains what Vii collects when you use this site or submit an instrument for identification, why we collect it, and who we share it with.

What We Collect

When you submit an instrument through Vii, we collect:

  • your contact information (name, email, and phone if you give it);
  • details you tell us about the instrument (type, age, maker, condition, measurements, label text, history, and how you acquired it);
  • the photos you upload; and
  • the IP address and browser user-agent recorded when you accept the consent checkbox — kept as a record that consent was given, and to help us spot abuse of the submission form. Retained with the submission record; never shown in our admin tools alongside the submission.

We strip location and camera metadata (EXIF/IPTC/XMP data, including GPS coordinates and device serial numbers) from photos before we store them, so a photo you send us doesn't carry your home address or device information along with it.

Separately, our web server's access logs may record visitor IP addresses for every request, like most web servers do — this is for security (spotting abuse and diagnosing outages), not tracking. These logs are kept for a limited period as part of routine server operation, not indefinitely.

Why We Collect It

  • To identify your instrument and respond to you — this is the whole point of a submission.
  • For our reference library — instruments and makers we've seen help us (and future submitters) with future identifications.
  • For research and to improve our AI/ML models — including models operated by third parties we work with, as described in our Terms of Submission.
  • For marketing emails — only if you haven't unsubscribed; every commercial email we send includes an unsubscribe link, and we honor it immediately.

Who We Share It With

We don't sell your information. We do share it with:

  • Service providers who run the site on our behalf — DigitalOcean (hosting and photo storage) and Google Workspace (email).
  • AI providers, when we use AI assistance to help draft an identification assessment for you.
  • Law enforcement or stolen-instrument registries, if an instrument you submit appears to match one reported stolen — see our Terms of Submission for how that works.

Retention

We keep submission information for as long as needed to provide the service and maintain our reference library, or until you ask us to delete it — whichever comes first. When you ask us to delete it, we remove your personal details and photos from our live site and database. Copies may still exist for a while in our routine backups — up to about 30 days in our daily backups, or up to roughly 13 months if a copy was captured in a periodic monthly backup — until those backups themselves expire on their normal schedule.

Your Rights

You can ask us what we have about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — write to info@paytonviolins.com and we'll respond. As explained in our Terms of Submission, we can remove your personal details and stop displaying your photos (subject to the backup timing described under Retention above), but we can't undo AI/ML model training already performed using an earlier submission.

If you're in the EU or UK, GDPR gives you the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or port your personal data, and to object to certain uses of it — contact us at the email above to exercise any of these.

If you're a California resident, the CCPA/CPRA gives you similar rights to know what personal information we've collected, to delete it, and to opt out of its sale — we don't sell personal information, so there's nothing to opt out of there, but the other rights work the same way: email us.

Cookies

We only use essential cookies — ones the site needs to function, never marketing or analytics cookies:

  • a session cookie, used to keep a staff member's admin session working between page loads;
  • an authentication cookie, used to keep staff and reviewers signed in to the admin area;
  • an anti-forgery cookie (a security cookie the underlying web framework uses to protect forms from cross-site forgery) — this may be set if you visit a page with a sign-in form, such as /login.

None of these are used to track visitors across other sites or for marketing. Browsing the public pages of this site (learning about identification, submitting an instrument) does not set the session or authentication cookies — those are only set for signed-in staff.

Children

Vii is not directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data? Reach us at info@paytonviolins.com or (585) 325-7250, or by mail at Payton Violins, 250 N Goodman St, Suite 1/A, Rochester, NY 14607.

Version 2026-09-26 · effective September 26, 2026. See also our Terms of Submission.