Who we are
ArtScope is operated by ArtScope LLC ("ArtScope", "we", "us"), 1460 W Argyle St, Chicago, IL 60640, United States. We make software that galleries and museums use to publish exhibits, which visitors then browse by scanning a code at the venue.
This policy covers the ArtScope marketing site, the visitor-facing exhibit app, and the gallery-facing app. It explains what we hold about four different groups of people, because what we collect from each is genuinely different: exhibit visitors, gallery and museum staff, artists, and buyers.
For much of the information in this policy, the gallery or museum decides what is collected and why, and we hold it on their behalf. Where that is the case we say so, because it affects who you should ask about your information. Section 13 explains how to reach either of us.
The short version
The detail matters, but here is the honest summary.
- We record what you look at in an exhibit, and we link those actions together. When you first open an exhibit we generate a random visitor ID, store it in your browser, and attach it to what you do in that exhibit for up to 30 days. Nothing connects you to a different exhibit, a different venue, or any other website. This is described fully in sections 3 and 4.
- You are not asked to sign in, and you are not asked first. Visitor tracking begins when you open the exhibit. See section 13 for how to object or ask for deletion.
- Some exhibits use your camera, and no image ever leaves your phone. Pointing the camera at a piece to identify it runs entirely inside your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is kept, and we do not use facial recognition anywhere. Section 3.
- We do not record your IP address, device fingerprint, or location in our databases, and we run no advertising or analytics trackers on our website.
- We never receive your card number. Payments are processed by Stripe on their own checkout page. Your name, email and phone number, however, are entered into our form and are held by us.
- We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising.
- All data is held in the United States, in Amazon Web Services'
us-east-1region.
If you visited an exhibit
You do not create an account to browse an exhibit. You scan a code, the exhibit opens, and you read. Two kinds of information are collected.
Recorded automatically as you browse
These are written as a side effect of using the exhibit. You do not type them in.
- That the exhibit was opened, and which pages of it were viewed
- The first piece you scanned, and each artwork whose details you opened
- What you navigated from, so the gallery can see the path through the show
- Where you began a purchase but did not finish it
- Catalogue downloads
- The language you are reading in, and any language you switch to
- The date and time of each of these, and the visitor ID described in section 4
The language you read in is recorded against your visitor ID. We record it so galleries know which translations their audience actually uses. We recognise that the language a person reads in can indicate their nationality, ethnicity or immigration status. We do not use it for that purpose, we do not combine it with anything else to infer those things, and we do not share it outside the gallery whose exhibit you were viewing.
Information you type in
Only if you choose to. Each of these is optional and none is required to browse an exhibit.
- Guest book — your name, email address and any message you leave
- Enquiry about a piece — your name, email, phone number and message
- Comment on a piece — your name, email and the comment
- Reporting a problem — your name, email and description
- Buying a piece — covered in section 7
When you submit one of these, it is delivered to the gallery or museum running the exhibit. They decide what to do with it, and they can reply to you directly.
The camera, and what happens to what it sees
Some exhibits let you point your phone's camera at a piece and have the app tell you which one it is. The exhibit asks your browser for camera permission before anything switches on, and you can refuse — the rest of the exhibit works without it. Nothing in the app can turn the camera on without your browser asking you first.
No image from your camera is ever sent to us, to the gallery, or to anyone else. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is recorded, and no photograph is kept — not by us, and not on your phone. The recognition runs inside your own browser: the app downloads the gallery's model to your device and compares the live camera view against it there.
The camera view is examined a few times a second and each frame is discarded immediately. Frames are never written to a file, never placed in storage, and never included in any request to our servers. There is no point at which a picture of you, of the room, or of anything else the camera happened to be pointed at leaves your device.
What is recorded is the answer, not the image: that a visitor with your visitor ID identified a particular artwork, in the same way as if you had tapped that piece from a list. That is the "first piece you scanned" entry in the list above, and it carries no image with it.
The model the app compares against is trained by the gallery, in the gallery's own browser, from photographs they take of their own artworks before the show opens. It is built to recognise paintings and objects, not people. It was never trained on visitors, on faces, or on anything a visitor's camera has seen, and it cannot be — we never receive that footage in the first place.
We do not use facial recognition anywhere in ArtScope, and we do not perform any biometric identification or analysis. If that ever changes, it changes in this policy first.
What we do not collect from visitors
We do not record your IP address, browser user-agent, device fingerprint or geographic location in any of our databases, and we do not attempt to identify you across different exhibits or across different venues. We do not buy information about you from anyone, and we do not add anything to your record from outside sources.
The visitor ID, in plain terms
This is the part of our system most worth understanding, so we would rather over-explain it than bury it.
The first time you open a given exhibit, we generate a random identifier — not derived from you, your device or your network — and store it in your browser's local storage. For as long as it lasts, every action described in section 3 is recorded with that identifier attached.
The effect is that the gallery can see a single visit as a connected journey rather than as unrelated events: this person scanned this piece, then read about these three others, then started a purchase, then signed the guest book.
The limits, which are enforced in our code
- It expires after 30 days from your first visit. After that you are a new visitor with a new identifier.
- It is specific to one exhibit. A different exhibit generates a different, unconnected identifier. There is no visitor ID that follows you between shows or between venues. The app does keep two other things in your browser, and one of those is the same across exhibits on your device — both are listed in section 16.
- It is not a cookie and is never transmitted as one. It is stored locally and included in the exhibit's own requests.
- Clearing your browser's site data removes it immediately and permanently. Private or incognito browsing generates a fresh identifier each session.
On its own, the visitor ID is a random string that tells the gallery nothing about who you are. But if you sign the guest book, send an enquiry, leave a comment, or buy a piece, you provide your name and email address — and those are stored alongside the same identifier.
From that moment, the browsing recorded under that identifier, both before and after, is associated with your name and email and can be seen by the gallery. If that is not what you want, do not submit those forms; or contact us at privacy@artscope.io and we will delete the connection.
If you run a gallery or museum
You have an account with us, and this is ordinary business information.
- Account — email address and password, managed through Amazon Cognito. You may instead sign in with Google, Facebook or Amazon, in which case that provider confirms your identity to us and we receive your email address.
- Organisation — business name and type, website, and your postal address
- Team members — name, email, phone, role, and which exhibits each should be notified about
- Payout setup — your Stripe connected-account identifier and its status, so we know you are able to receive funds. We never see your bank details.
- Your content — exhibits, artwork records, images, and the artist roster you enter
- Recognition training photographs and the model built from them — if you set up the camera feature described in section 3, the photographs you take of your own pieces and the model trained from them are held in your account's own storage. The training runs in your browser, not on our servers. You can delete a model at any time.
- Support — reports, feedback and correspondence
Information you enter about other people — the artists on your roster, and buyers whose sales you record manually — is covered in sections 6 and 7. You are responsible for having a proper basis to enter it, and for telling those people that you use ArtScope.
If you are an artist
Your information can reach us two ways.
You applied to an open call
You submit directly to us without an account: your artist name, legal name, a description of your work, your website and Instagram, your email address and phone number, your sharing preference, and the images you upload. This goes to the gallery running the call so they can review your submission and contact you.
A gallery listed you on their roster
Galleries maintain their own artist records, which can include your name, email, phone, website, Instagram, location, address and the gallery's own private notes about working with you. We hold this on the gallery's behalf. If you want to know what a particular gallery holds about you, ask them first — and contact us at privacy@artscope.io if you would rather we handled it.
If you bought a piece
Bought through ArtScope
Before checkout you give us your name, email address and phone number, and if the piece is being shipped, a delivery address. If you chose collection rather than shipping, no address is stored.
You are then sent to Stripe's hosted checkout page to pay. Your card number, expiry date and security code are entered on Stripe's page and go to Stripe. They never reach ArtScope, and we have nowhere to put them. We keep the order: what was bought, the amount and currency, Stripe's transaction references, the receipt link, and whether it was paid or refunded.
"Your card number never reaches us" is true. It is not the same statement as "your details never reach us" — your name, email and phone are typed into our form, and we hold them. We would rather you know precisely which of those two sentences applies.
ArtScope takes a commission on each sale and is a party to the transaction: we own the checkout page, the receipt and any dispute. That is why we retain the sales record, as described in section 11.
You bought at the desk and the gallery recorded it
If you paid a gallery by cash, cheque, card on their own terminal, or over the phone, the gallery may record the sale in ArtScope. That record can include your name, email address and phone number, typed in by them, and we may send you a receipt by email if the gallery asks us to.
You may have never used ArtScope, and this may be the first you have heard of us. We hold this information on behalf of the gallery you bought from. You can ask us what we hold and ask us to delete it: privacy@artscope.io.
Marketing and newsletter
If you fill in a contact form on our website, we collect what you enter — your email, and optionally your name, organisation, phone, website, message and area of interest — along with which form you used and the web page that referred you. We use this to reply to you and to understand which parts of our site are useful. Our staff may add notes about our conversations with you.
Our newsletter is a separate list with a separate opt-in. Every newsletter email carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and it works without you having to log in or give your address again. Unsubscribing from the newsletter does not delete your enquiry, and vice versa; ask us if you want both removed.
Why we use this information
| Purpose | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Running the exhibit | Showing artwork, translating text on request, delivering catalogues |
| Gallery analytics | Telling a gallery how their show was visited — which pieces drew attention, which languages were used, where visitors stopped |
| Connecting you to the gallery | Delivering your guest book entry, enquiry, comment or report to the venue |
| Sales | Taking payment, sending receipts, arranging delivery or collection, handling refunds and disputes |
| Accounts | Signing gallery staff in, permissions, notifying the right people about a sale |
| Support and safety | Answering questions, investigating reports, preventing abuse of the service |
| Our own marketing | Replying to enquiries and sending the newsletter to people who asked for it |
| Legal and financial | Tax records, accounting, and complying with the law |
Where the law requires a legal basis for processing, we rely on: performance of a contract for accounts and sales; legitimate interests for exhibit analytics, security and service improvement; consent for the newsletter and for information you volunteer through a form; and legal obligation for financial records. Where a gallery decides the purpose, they determine the basis and we act on their instructions.
Where it is held
All ArtScope data is stored in the United States, in Amazon Web Services' Northern
Virginia region (us-east-1). Our providers may process data in other regions in the
course of delivering their service.
If you are outside the United States — including in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Switzerland — using ArtScope means your information is transferred to and stored in the US, which may not offer the same protections as your home country. Galleries and museums that need a data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses should contact privacy@artscope.io.
How long we keep it
We keep information for as long as it serves the purpose it was collected for, then delete it — except where the law requires us to keep it longer.
| Information | Retention | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Exhibit browsing Visits, scans, views, purchase attempts, downloads, language switches |
24 months | Long enough for a gallery to compare a show against the one before it. Its usefulness falls away quickly after that. |
| Guest book, enquiries, comments, reports | Life of the gallery's account, then 90 days | The gallery holds the relationship with you and decides how long to keep it. They can delete any of these at any time, and we remove what remains after their account closes. |
| Sales and payment records Orders, fulfilment, manually recorded sales, payments |
7 years | Tax and accounting law. We are a party to the transaction and cannot delete these on request. |
| Gallery accounts and artist rosters | Life of the account, then 90 days | Needed to run the service; removed shortly after the relationship ends. |
| Enquiries to us and newsletter | 24 months from last contact, or until you unsubscribe | We keep a minimal record of an unsubscribe so we do not email you again by mistake. |
| Open call submissions | Life of the gallery's account, then 90 days | Held for the gallery running the call. |
A gallery can delete a guest book entry, enquiry, comment, artist record or manually recorded sale themselves, at any time. Anything else, ask us.
Your rights
Wherever you live, and regardless of whether your local law requires it, you can ask us to:
- Tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy
- Correct anything wrong
- Delete what we hold, subject to the sales-record exception in section 12
- Stop using it for a particular purpose, including exhibit analytics
- Unsubscribe from any email, using the link in the message or by asking us
Email privacy@artscope.io. We will acknowledge within 7 days and respond within 30 days. There is no charge. We will ask you for enough information to be confident it is your data we are handing over or deleting, and nothing more.
A visitor ID is deliberately not connected to any account or login, so we cannot look you up from your name or email alone unless you also submitted a form. That is a privacy protection, but it makes a request harder to action.
If you gave your name or email in a guest book, enquiry, comment or order, tell us that and roughly when — we can find you and delete the whole connected trail. If you gave nothing, there is no way for us to distinguish your records from any other visitor's, which also means they are not identifiable as yours by us or by the gallery. Clearing your browser's site data ends the collection immediately.
If you are in the EEA or UK, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority. If you are in California, you have the rights to know, delete, correct and opt out of sale or sharing — we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any right.
Where a gallery entered your information, we will action your request and let them know. You may find it faster to contact them directly, and we will tell you who they are if you do not know.
Security and staff access
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Gallery accounts are separated so one gallery cannot read another's data. Our public interfaces are write-only for visitor events: even with the exhibit's public credentials, no one can read visitor records back out.
A small number of ArtScope staff can access customer and visitor records in order to run the service, investigate problems and provide support. We keep that group as small as the work allows. Staff access is restricted to what support and operations genuinely require, and misuse of it is a disciplinary matter.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.
Children
ArtScope is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.
We recognise that school groups visit museums and that a child may scan a code at an exhibit. Browsing an exhibit does not require any personal information, and nothing identifiable is collected unless someone chooses to fill in a form. If you believe a child has given us their details, contact privacy@artscope.io and we will delete them promptly. Schools and museums running education programmes should contact us about their specific arrangements.
Cookies and local storage
Our marketing website sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. We run no advertising, analytics or tracking scripts on it — no Google Analytics, no advertising pixels, nothing.
The exhibit app sets no cookies either. It stores three items in your browser's local storage, and nothing besides — no cookies, no session storage, no offline database.
- The visitor ID described in section 4. It is stored with the date it was created, which is what the 30 days is counted from, and with a note of whether you have already downloaded the catalogue, so that a second download is not charged to the gallery twice.
- A note that you got past the opening screen — that you were shown the terms and allowed camera access — so the exhibit does not ask you again. It records that the prompt happened. It records nothing about you, and it is not an acceptance of anything: browsing an exhibit does not require you to agree to a contract with us. What the camera does, and what becomes of what it sees, is in section 3.
- An anonymous identifier from Amazon Cognito, written by the AWS software this app is built on. It stands in for the account the app does not have, so that it can make its requests to our servers at all. It is not linked to your name, and it is not written into the records of your visit — nothing a gallery can see is filed under it, which is why it does not join up what you did at one show with what you did at another. Two things are still true of it that are not true of the visitor ID, and we would rather say so plainly: it does not expire on its own, and it is the same value for every exhibit you open on that device.
None of the three is a cookie, none is sent as a header, and none can be read by any other website. Clearing your browser's site data removes all three.
Gallery sign-in uses cookies, set by Amazon Cognito, which are necessary to keep staff signed in. Those are set when someone signs in to a gallery account, and never for a visitor browsing an exhibit — if you scanned a code at a show, you have no sign-in with us and we set you no cookie.
What we do not do
- We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
- We do not sell or license artists' work.
- We do not run advertising or third-party analytics on our website.
- We do not store card numbers, expiry dates, security codes or bank details anywhere.
- We do not track visitors across different exhibits, different venues, or other websites.
- We do not buy information about you, and we do not enrich your record from outside sources.
- We do not use your information to train machine learning models.
- We do not use facial recognition, and we do not carry out biometric identification or analysis of any kind.
- We do not receive, store or transmit any image from a visitor's camera — see section 3.
Changes
We will update this policy as ArtScope changes. Every version carries the identifier printed under the title, and it changes whenever the substance does — a new category of information, a new recipient, a changed retention period, a changed right. Correcting a typo does not move it. Where you have accepted this policy alongside the Terms of Service, that identifier is what we recorded, so it is always answerable which text you agreed to.
If we make a change that materially affects how we handle information we already hold about you, we will give notice — by email where we have your address, and by a notice in the product — before it takes effect.
Contact us
For any privacy question, or to exercise any right in section 13:
- privacy@artscope.io
- Entity
- ArtScope LLC
- Address
- 1460 W Argyle St
Chicago, IL 60640
United States - Response
- Acknowledged within 7 days, answered within 30
If your information was entered by a gallery or museum, they are the first place to ask — but you are welcome to come to us and we will handle it either way.