Security Summary
OPAL protects your agricultural boundaries and personal information using industry-standard serverless security. User accounts are isolated using strict Firebase database rules, and your field and account data is stored at rest in Google's europe-west1 region (Belgium). Some analysis processing currently runs on Google Cloud servers in the United States, and diagnostic logs — which can include the approximate location of an analysed field — are retained for up to 30 days before automatic deletion; see our Privacy Policy for the full data-retention schedule. 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. Connections between your device and Google's servers are encrypted in transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS).
2. Database Residency & Regional Isolation
OPAL structures its database layout to prevent data leakage between accounts, and to be clear about where data is stored and processed:
- Data at Rest: User profile data, coordinates, and analysis histories are written to Firestore databases pinned in the
europe-west1region (Belgium). - Transient Compute Processing: Cloud Run analysis workers currently operate on Google Cloud's US-based servers. Field coordinates are passed as parameters during analysis.
- Diagnostic Logging: Standard server and diagnostic logs — which can include your account identifier and the approximate location of an analysed field — are retained for up to 30 days and then automatically deleted. See our Privacy Policy for the full retention schedule.
- 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: Field polygons and dates are sent to the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (CDSE) to calculate aggregated index statistics. OPAL does not itself store a separate copy of this request beyond the diagnostic-log retention described above. CDSE's own log retention is governed by its published terms, which are outside our direct control.