Security Summary
OPAL protects your agricultural boundaries and personal information using industry-standard serverless security. User accounts are isolated using strict Firebase database rules, database archives reside exclusively within the European Union (EU) to meet GDPR regulations, and coordinates are processed transiently without long-term location logging. Users maintain complete ownership and can export or delete their entire account instantly with a single button.
1. User Authentication & Credential Security
OPAL implements Google Firebase Authentication to manage user login profiles and access credentials. Because authentication is delegated to Google’s identity servers, OPAL never handles, processes, or stores your raw passwords. All connections use Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.3) to encrypt data in transit between your mobile device and the Google database cloud.
2. Database Residency & Regional Isolation
OPAL structures its database layout to prevent data leakage and ensure sovereign protection for EU growers:
- Data at Rest: All user profile data, coordinates, and analysis histories are written exclusively to Firestore databases pinned in the
europe-west1region (Belgium). Under EU regulation, this ensures personal agricultural data remains resident within the European Economic Area (EEA). - Transient Compute Processing: Cloud Run analysis workers operate in Google Cloud’s US-based servers. Coordinates are passed as transient parameters during analysis and are not saved in long-term server logs.
- Security Rules Isolation: Access control is enforced at the database layer. Firestore rules restrict read/write access so that users can query only their own fields, preventing unauthorized cross-tenant requests.
3. Permanent Deletion & Data Ownership
OPAL believes that you own your agricultural data. Consistent with GDPR data portability and erasure mandates, the platform provides direct self-service options in your Settings console:
| Right | Self-Service Action in OPAL | Technical Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Portability | Settings → Privacy → Download my data |
Exports your entire Firestore profile, field coordinates, and historical analysis records into a standard JSON file instantly. |
| Erasure | Settings → Privacy → Delete my account |
Triggers a cascading delete script. All coordinates, calibrations, settings, and reports are permanently deleted. No offline backups are maintained. |
4. Weather & Satellite API Ingestion Security
When fetching crop weather and satellite profiles, OPAL minimizes the data shared with external APIs:
- Open-Meteo Integration: Only the latitude and longitude of your field centroid are passed to Open-Meteo to download local agrometeorological values. Your email, username, and field boundaries are never shared.
- CDSE Ingestion: Polygons are sent to the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem to calculate aggregated index statistics. Raw, unaggregated coordinate records are not maintained on CDSE's processing logs.