Privacy Policy

Effective date: June 21, 2026  ·  Last updated: October 11, 2026

Stratum Audit ("Stratum") is a workplace safety inspection platform for mining operations of every type: surface and underground, metal/nonmetal and coal. This policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and your rights as a user.

1. Who We Are

Stratum is operated by Stratum Audit LLC. For privacy questions, contact us at support@stratumaudit.com.

2. Who Uses Stratum

Stratum is an invite-only, B2B application for mining organizations. There is no open registration. Accounts are created by an organization administrator and are associated with a specific organization and one or more mine sites. Personal data is processed on behalf of the employing organization.

3. Data We Collect

3a. Account & Identity Data

Collected when an administrator creates your account or when you sign in:

• Name
• Full legal name (first, middle, last) — collected the first time you sign a document, and printed on the records you sign so a signature can be attributed to a specific person
• Email address
• Phone number (optional, used for notifications)
• Home address and emergency contacts (optional) — only if you add them yourself on My Account: your address, and the name, relationship and phone number of up to three people to contact in an emergency. Only you can change them. They are visible to you, to your organization's administrators, and to the managers over your crew — not to your co-workers. They are deliberately kept out of Stratum's tamper-evident audit log, so that deleting them actually deletes them
• Your handwritten signature, drawn on-screen and stored as an image, applied to inspection reports, toolbox talk attendance records, signed forms, and contractor orientation sign-offs
• Authentication tokens, held by your browser for the Stratum origin and cleared when you sign out
• Push notification token, if you enable notifications

3a-i. Location Data

Stratum collects your precise location only at the moment a contractor checks in to or out of a site, to timestamp and place that site visit. It is collected in the foreground, while you are actively using the app, and only when you tap check in or check out.

• We do not collect location in the background, or when the app is closed.
• We do not keep a continuous track of where you go, and we do not record your location between visits.
• We do not collect location during inspections or photo capture.
• If you decline the location permission, check-in still works — the visit is simply recorded without coordinates.

One other screen reads your location without storing it: while the site map is open, the app follows your position to draw your own marker, in the same way any map app does. That position stays on your device, is not sent to us, is not written to any record, and stops being read the moment you leave the screen.

What your employer can see. A contractor check-in and check-out is a timestamped record with coordinates, visible to your organization's managers. It is a record of site attendance. Some states require employers to give written notice of electronic monitoring — that obligation sits with your employer, not with Stratum, and this paragraph is here so the facts are available to them.

Location is also read once when you log a fugitive dust environmental reading, to fill in the current wind and weather conditions at the site — the conditions an MSHA inspector asks about when a dust reading is over the action level. The coordinates are sent from our server to our weather provider (Tomorrow.io) to look up conditions; nothing identifying you or your organization is sent with them. Declining location, or having no signal, simply leaves the weather field for you to type.

3b. Organization & Site Data

• Organization name and structure (sites, crews, assignments)
• Site names and identifiers
• Employee records (name, role, site assignments) within your organization

3c. Inspection Data

• Inspection type, date, site, crew, and status
• Checklist responses
• Photos of equipment and work areas taken during inspections
• Findings: identified hazards, severity, applicable MSHA regulation citations (30 CFR)
• Corrective actions and their resolution status

3d. Safety, Training & Health-Related Records

Stratum is an MSHA compliance system, so most of what it holds is a record about a person at work. These are the categories that are about you specifically. Your employer is the controller of all of them; Stratum stores and processes them on your employer's behalf.

• Training records — Part 46/48 training completions, course and quiz results, toolbox talk attendance, the documents you have signed off as read, and your signature on each
• Certifications and credentials — what you hold, when it was issued, when it expires, and the card or certificate on file
• Task training and competency evaluations — records of being trained or signed off on a task or machine, Competent Trainer evaluations, the criteria an evaluator did or did not confirm, and any free-text notes or reason for revoking a designation
• New miner and newly-hired experienced miner onboarding — the 30 CFR 46.5 record
• Accident, injury and illness records (30 CFR Part 50) — where you are the subject of a reportable incident: the narrative of what happened, your name and job title, witnesses, the injury classification under §50.2(e) (including whether there was medical treatment, lost or restricted days, or loss of consciousness), whether the case is an occupational illness, and the date of diagnosis
• Medical surveillance records — where your employer runs a surveillance programme (for example the silica programme under 30 CFR Part 60), the fact and date of an examination and when the next one is due, together with any document your employer files against it. Stratum does not receive or store clinical findings from an examining physician unless your employer chooses to upload a document containing them
• Personal exposure sampling — where a sampling pump is worn by a named person, the reading, its unit, the action level it was judged against, and who was monitored
• Site attendance — contractor check-in and check-out times, with coordinates where location was permitted
• Safety observations — reports of hazards, near misses and unsafe conditions or behaviour submitted by colleagues, which may describe or name a person in free text

Who can see these records. Access is not uniform, and the distinctions matter:

• Your medical surveillance records, competency evaluations, onboarding record and task training records are visible to you and to your organization's administrators and managers. They are not visible to your co-workers.
• Your credentials (the non-medical ones — licences, task sign-offs, Competent Trainer designations) are visible across your organization. This is deliberate and is a safety feature: people working alongside you need to be able to check that whoever is operating a machine is qualified to.
• Part 50 incidents appear to everyone who can see the site as a deadline record — that an incident occurred, when, its regulatory classification, and the reporting clocks it started. The narrative, your name, your job title, the witnesses and the injury or illness classification are visible only to management and to the person the record is about.
• A personal exposure sample is visible to you and to management. An area sample, which names a place rather than a person, is visible to everyone who can see the site.
• Your stored signature image is visible to you and to management. It appears on the compliance documents you have signed, which are organizational records.

3e. Usage & Diagnostic Data

• Aggregated counts of inspections and findings by site (used for analytics within your org)
• Sync status and upload queue state (stored locally, not transmitted separately)

We do not collect background location (see §3a-i for the one foreground use). We do not collect microphone audio or video. We do not access your photo library. We do not use data for advertising, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

4. How We Use Your Data

Push notifications are delivered through your phone maker's push service (Apple or Google), encrypted so that service cannot read them.

5. Artificial Intelligence — Anthropic Claude

5a. Inspection photographs

Inspection photographs are never sent to Anthropic or to any other third party. They are uploaded to your organization's private storage bucket, readable only by members of your organization, and they go no further.

This section previously described an automated hazard-analysis feature that sent inspection photos to Anthropic's Claude API for review. That feature has been removed from Stratum entirely. The code that performed it, and the server-side permissions that allowed any Stratum system to read your photographs, have both been deleted. Every finding in Stratum is now written by the person doing the examination — they write the description and select the 30 CFR standard on the device.

5b. Strat, the compliance assistant

Strat is a chat assistant available to administrators and managers only. When one of them asks it a question, Stratum sends rows from your organization's own records to Anthropic's Claude API alongside the question, so the answer can cite real records rather than guess. The same commercial API terms described in §5a apply: no training on your data, and inputs and outputs deleted within 7 days.

Strat is restricted in two ways that are worth stating plainly, because they are the difference between an assistant and a disclosure:

• It can only see what the person asking could already see. Every query it runs uses the asking manager's own credentials and the same access rules that govern the dashboard in their browser. It cannot reach another organization's data, and it cannot reach records their own role does not permit.
• Health and personnel detail is withheld from it by design. Strat is not given injury narratives, the name or job title of an injured person, witnesses, the §50.2(e) injury classification, whether a case is an occupational illness, the diagnosis date, the name attached to a personal exposure sample, competency evaluations, onboarding records, task training records, or any notes field on a certification. For Part 50 it receives a deadline ledger — that an incident occurred, its classification, and the reporting clocks — and nothing describing a person.

What it does receive: inspections and their findings, corrective actions and due dates, form submissions, environmental readings with the person's name removed, safety observations, toolbox talk sessions, MSHA citations, chemical and SDS records, equipment and site records, Part 50 reporting deadlines, quarterly employment and hours filings, and lists of which workers have an expired or missing credential or outstanding required training. That last category names workers, because "who is out of compliance" is the question the assistant exists to answer; it carries the name, the credential and the date, and never an examination result.

Your past conversations. Stratum keeps the text of each Strat conversation — the questions asked and the answers given — so the person who had it can see a list of their past conversations and carry one on. No one else in your organization can see that list or those conversations, including an administrator. Hiding a conversation takes it off the person's own list; it does not delete it, because a record of what Strat was asked and what it answered is kept unchanged. Files added to a conversation are not part of that record (§5c).

5c. Photos and documents you show Strat

An administrator or manager can add files to a Strat conversation — most often a form that exists on paper, which Strat can rebuild as a digital Stratum form, but also anything else they want to ask about. Strat reads photos (including one taken with the camera from inside the chat), PDFs, Word and Excel files, and CSV or plain-text files, up to five with one question. Those files are sent to Anthropic's Claude API together with the question, under the same commercial terms as the rest of this section: no training on your data, and inputs and outputs deleted within 7 days. A form Strat builds from them is a draft, which a person reviews and publishes in Form Builder.

The limits on this, all enforced in code rather than by policy:

• It is never automatic. A file reaches Anthropic only because a person chose it, dropped it or took it in the chat and sent a message with it. Nothing is uploaded in the background, and Strat cannot attach a record on someone's behalf. The camera is switched on only when someone picks Take a photo, and off again as soon as the photo is taken or cancelled.
• A file stays with its conversation, visibly, and only while the page is open. So that follow-up questions can refer to it, a file added to a conversation is sent again with each later question in that conversation. While that is happening it is shown above the message box, marked as one Strat can still see, with a button to remove it. It is held only in that browser tab's memory — it is not saved to Stratum's database or file storage — and it is gone when the person removes it, starts a new conversation, or reloads, leaves or closes the page. The conversation's saved text records the file's name, not its contents.
• Photos are reduced before they leave the device. A photo is redrawn in the browser at the largest size Strat actually reads, which also removes the metadata a phone or camera embeds in it, such as the GPS location where it was taken.
• Strat still cannot reach your stored photographs. It has no ability to open your storage bucket, read an inspection's photos, or fetch a file by name or link — the only bytes it ever receives are the ones the browser sends with a question in that conversation. The server-side permissions that would make anything else possible were deleted when the feature described in §5a was removed, and they have not been restored.

6. Third-Party Services

7. Data Storage & Security

Inspection data, records and photos are stored in Stratum's own Amazon Web Services account in the US East (Ohio) region: records in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database and files and photos in Amazon S3. Both are encrypted at rest, and data is encrypted in transit via HTTPS/TLS.

Stratum is delivered as a web application, including the field app you install to your home screen. Your session is held by your browser's own storage for the Stratum origin, isolated from other websites by the browser, and cleared when you sign out.

Offline records, stated precisely. Work captured in a dead zone — inspection details, form answers, incident reports and the photographs attached to them — is held in your browser's storage for the Stratum origin until connectivity returns, and is deleted once the upload is confirmed. While it is queued:

• It is readable only by the Stratum origin. Other websites cannot reach it.
• It is not separately encrypted by Stratum. It rests on whatever disk encryption your device and operating system provide — on a company phone or laptop with device encryption enabled, that is the protection it has. We would rather say this than imply an encryption layer we have not built.
• It can therefore include the text of a queued Part 50 incident report until that report syncs. If your organization issues shared devices, this is a reason to require a device passcode and disk encryption on them.
• Signing out does not upload a queued record. Let the app sync before handing a device on or wiping it.

Access to your organization's data is restricted to users who belong to your organization. Data from one organization is not accessible to users of another organization.

What Stratum staff can see. Stratum staff can see account-level information about your organization in an internal tool. That covers your organization's name, its sites, the names, email addresses and roles of your people, your subscription status, and counts and dates of activity (for example, how many records were filed last month). We use it to support you, keep the service running and bill correctly. That tool cannot show the content of your records: form answers, findings, photographs, signatures, incident reports, training records or Strat conversations. Every use of it is logged. If we ever need to look at a record to help you, we will ask you to invite a Stratum support account, which your administrator controls and can remove.

8. Data Retention

Inspection records, findings, photos, and corrective actions are owned by the organization and retained for the lifetime of the organization's account. These records may be subject to MSHA recordkeeping requirements (30 CFR Part 50) that mandate minimum retention periods independent of this policy.

Account (personal) data — name, email, phone, auth credentials — is retained while your account is active and deleted or anonymized when you request account deletion (see §9).

Your organization can export its complete data set at any time from the web dashboard's Reports page in standard formats (PDF, CSV, JSON). If a subscription is terminated, organizational data is retained for a 90-day grace period so it can be exported before deletion. Stratum never sells, shares, or discloses customer data to any third party.

When you leave the organization. Your profile is deactivated rather than erased: your contact details, stored signature and push token are cleared, your sign-in is revoked and your authentication account is deleted, but the record of whose training and whose certifications those were has to remain attached to a name for your former employer to stay compliant. Your training completions and toolbox talk attendance are held for 60 days after your employment ends, which is the minimum 30 CFR 46.9 requires, and are then deleted automatically.

Legal hold. Your employer can suspend that 60-day deletion for an individual where records must be preserved — for example because a claim, charge or investigation is foreseeable or underway. While a hold is in place those records are exempt from automatic deletion, and both placing and lifting a hold is recorded with the reason and the person who did it. Stratum provides the mechanism; the decision to use it is your employer's.

9. Account Deletion & Your Rights

You can delete your account yourself, in either place:

• In the app — More → Delete account.
• On the web, without installing the app — sign in, open My Account → Profile, and choose Delete my account at the bottom of the page.

Both use the same process. When you delete your account:

• Personal data — name, full legal name, email, phone number, home address and emergency contacts, your stored signature image, push notification token, and authentication credentials — is deleted. Your home address and emergency contacts are also deleted if your organization removes you as an employee.
• Organizational data (inspections, findings, photos, corrective actions you authored) is retained as part of your organization's compliance records. This data belongs to the organization, not to your individual account, and may be subject to mandatory MSHA retention requirements.

If you are the sole administrator of an organization, you must transfer organization ownership to another user before your account can be deleted. If no other user exists, contact us at support@stratumaudit.com to wind down the organization and initiate full deletion.

A name you already signed onto a document — an inspection report, a toolbox talk attendance sheet, a signed form — stays on that document. That is what makes it a record, and it is retained under the same organizational-records rule above. No new documents can be signed in your name once your account is deleted.

If you cannot sign in, you may also request deletion by email: support@stratumaudit.com, subject line "Data Deletion Request", including the name and email address associated with your account. We will respond within 30 days.

9a. Seeing and correcting your own record

Deleting your account is not the same as seeing what is in it, and the records in §3d are the ones people most often want to check.

• On the web, My Account → Profile shows your name, phone number, home address and emergency contacts, and you can change them there yourself. A new email address is changed through your sign-in account, which confirms it before it takes effect.
• In the app, the Training tab shows your own training completions, the credentials you hold and their expiry dates, the talks you have signed for, and the documents you still owe a sign-off on. The Competent Trainer evaluation screen shows your own evaluation.
• Corrections are made by your employer, not by Stratum. Every record in §3d is written by an administrator or manager — this is deliberate, because a training record somebody can amend for themselves is not evidence of anything. If something about you is wrong, raise it with your employer's Stratum administrator, who can correct it. Every correction is written to a tamper-evident audit log, so the change and who made it remain visible.
• If your employer will not act, or you cannot reach an administrator, write to support@stratumaudit.com and we will pass the request to the organization that controls the record and tell you we have done so. Because your employer is the controller of this data, we cannot change or release their records on our own, and we will not do so without them.
• Where local law gives you additional rights over your personal data — access, correction, deletion, portability, or restriction — those requests are also directed to your employer as the controller, and we will support them in answering you.

10. Children's Privacy

Stratum is designed for use by adult employees of mining operations. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18 years of age. This app is not directed at or suitable for children.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy periodically. When we do, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. Continued use of Stratum after an update constitutes acceptance of the revised policy. Material changes will be communicated via in-app notification or email.

12. Contact

For privacy questions, data requests, or to exercise your rights, contact:
Stratum Audit LLC
support@stratumaudit.com