Legal

Effective August 23, 2026. Terms of Service · Privacy Policy

Terms of Service

Rare Facets is a community and marketplace for mineral collectors: a place to catalog specimens, share collections, message other collectors, and buy and sell. By creating an account or using Rare Facets you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use Rare Facets.

Your account

You must be at least 18 to use Rare Facets. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping access to your sign-in email secure. One person, one account — operating multiple accounts to evade blocks, bans, or trust signals is prohibited.

Your content

You own what you post — photos, specimen records, posts, comments, messages. You grant Rare Facets a non-exclusive license to host, display, and distribute that content as needed to run the service (for example, showing your public specimens in the gallery). Content you mark private stays private to your account; provenance events are append-only by design and cannot be edited after the fact. You are responsible for the accuracy of provenance and locality claims you publish.

The marketplace

Rare Facets is a venue, not a party to transactions. Listings, offers, and direct sales are agreements between buyer and seller; Rare Facets does not hold funds, guarantee authenticity, provenance, or delivery, or act as escrow. You are responsible for complying with the laws that apply to your transactions, including mineral import/export and cultural-property rules in the relevant countries. Payment processing, where offered, is provided by Stripe under Stripe's own terms.

Conduct

No harassment, no scams or misrepresentation, no illegal content or transactions, no scraping other members' content or data, no interfering with the service. Messages cannot be edited after sending and can be reported by recipients; blocks are enforced in both directions. We may remove content, restrict features, or terminate accounts that violate these terms, and we may preserve and share information as required by law.

Insurance records

The insurance features store your records and, if you request a quote, forward the details you submit to the partner named on the form. Rare Facets is not an insurer, broker, or advisor, and nothing on Rare Facets is insurance or financial advice.

Disclaimers

Rare Facets is provided “as is” without warranties of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Rare Facets and its operator are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, or for losses arising from transactions between members. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limitations, so they may not fully apply to you. These terms are governed by the laws of the United States; disputes will be resolved in the operator's home jurisdiction unless applicable law requires otherwise.

Changes

We may update these terms as Rare Facets evolves; material changes will be reflected in the effective date above. Continuing to use Rare Facets after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Privacy Policy

The short version: we collect what the service needs to work and to stay safe, we show others only what you choose to make public, and we do not sell your data. Ever.

What we collect

• Account & profile — your email (for sign-in links), username, display name, and whatever you add to your profile. Location is optional and stored as a coarse city-level point you pick, never a precise home coordinate.
• Content — specimens, photos, posts, comments, journals, and records you create. Visibility follows your settings: private means private. Acquisition prices and financial details are visible only to you.
• Messages — direct messages are stored so both participants can read them; they cannot be edited after sending and can be reported by the recipient for moderation review.
• Device & network signals — when you use Rare Facets signed in, we set a random device identifier cookie and record which accounts use which devices (with browser type and first/last-seen times), the country of your connection (from a coarse geo lookup), and a one-way salted hash of your IP address. The device identifier is random and the IP is never stored in a readable form — these read nothing from inside your machine and are not a device fingerprint. We use them solely for trust and safety, such as detecting accounts created to evade blocks or run coordinated fraud.
• Product analytics — cookie-less page analytics and a small set of named internal product events (for example, “quote requested”) tied to feature use, reviewed only in aggregate by the operator.

Cookies

Rare Facets uses cookies for signing you in (Supabase auth cookies), for the device sessions described above, and a local preference for your light/dark theme. No advertising cookies, no third-party trackers.

Who processes your data

Rare Facets runs on Supabase (database, authentication, and file storage) and Vercel (hosting and cookie-less analytics), with sign-in emails delivered by Resend and payments, where offered, processed by Stripe. Each processes data on our behalf to provide the service. If you request an insurance quote, the details you submit are shared with the named partner to prepare that quote. Beyond these, your data is not shared with third parties unless the law requires it.

Your choices

You control the visibility of everything you post. You can export your full specimen catalog anytime from /specimens/export. To delete your account and its data, or for any privacy question, contact the operator at jwarmkessel@gmail.com and we will act on the request promptly.

Contact

Rare Facets is operated as an independent service. Questions about these terms or your data: jwarmkessel@gmail.com. To report content or behavior, use the report form.