Privacy & Transparency — Blue Life Commons

Privacy & transparency

The public surface, without hidden machinery

What this site handles today, where contributions go, and where the commons stops and upstream scientific systems begin.

Contribute on GitHub Review open pull requests

Current technical baseline

This is a source-based description of the deployed public site, not a promise about features that may exist later.

Public website delivery

Vercel hosts and delivers this website. As with ordinary web hosting, request information such as IP address, user-agent, requested URL, timestamp, and security diagnostics may be processed to serve and protect a page. We do not publish a retention promise we have not independently verified.

No browser identity layer

The current site source does not install a browser analytics SDK, advertising pixel, account system, or visitor profile. It does not ask for an email address or hide a contribution form. If that baseline changes, this page and the relevant consent surface must change first.

Approved public media

Approved image files may be delivered from Vercel Blob. Rights, credit, review state, and source pointers remain in the repository. Candidate and reviewer-only media are not intended for public rendering.

Contribution boundary

GitHub is the intake and review record

This website does not collect contribution text, field records, files, email addresses, or grant applications. Contribution calls hand off to a GitHub issue or pull request, where the submitter can see the repository record and review history.

1Start from a repository issue or the documented contribution template.
2Put sources, rights, sensitivity, and required review state in the artifact metadata.
3Open a pull request. CI and human reviewers inspect the item before its status can advance.
4The public site renders the merged repository state; it is not a second source of truth.

Scientific data and controller boundaries

A citation or API read preserves a route back to the source. It does not transfer ownership, make the commons the authority for an upstream record, or turn a third-party dataset into a verified Blue Life Commons artifact.

Repository artifacts: Blue Life Commons renders versioned Markdown and metadata from this repository. Each artifact keeps its own sources, license, contributors, status, and applicable review fields.
OBIS and GBIF signals: The Guardian route reads public OBIS and GBIF API responses on the server and presents source-labelled counts or availability. The upstream providers and dataset publishers remain authoritative for source records, terms, corrections, and provenance; this site does not claim ownership or control of those records.
External destinations: GitHub, dataset sources, media sources, sponsors, and partner links are separate destinations. Following a link sends a request to that operator under its own terms and privacy materials. A link does not make every destination a Blue Life Commons processor or partner.

Item-level trust

Citation and review state travel with each artifact

Every artifact exposes its own status, source list, license, contributors, and applicable science, ethics, and editorial review fields. Readers should inspect that item-level evidence, including whether a gate is pending, required, approved, or not applicable.

Blue Life Commons does not claim blanket ethics or scientific approval for the whole site. Ethics review is mandatory for artifacts involving animal interaction and for the other welfare-sensitive cases defined in the repository policy. A citation, link, or repository merge is not by itself an expert endorsement.

Your choices

You can read the public site without creating a Blue Life Commons account. You can choose whether to follow an external link or contribute through GitHub. Do not include sensitive personal, clinical, or precise vulnerable-animal location data in a public issue; follow the repository sensitivity rules instead.

Corrections and questions

Open a GitHub issue to challenge a public claim, source, rights record, review state, or this transparency description. For an upstream occurrence record, use the correction path provided by the source dataset or publisher as well.

Open the public issue tracker

Last reconciled with the public source on 2026-07-10. This page is an operational transparency statement, not a substitute for provider policies or jurisdiction-specific legal advice.