Where your data is kept

Mapit GIS works with no signal and no sign-in. Every project, and every feature somebody collects, is on the phone that collected it. A personal project never leaves the phone unless its owner uploads it or exports it.

A cloud project is also on each phone that downloaded it, and each sync keeps those copies and the one in Mapit Cloud in step. Photos and videos never leave the phones that took them: only their details sync. Matching photos to features explains how to bring them together.

Everything Mapit Cloud holds is in the EU: the database, the stored project files and the servers that handle them.

Each cloud project is stored encrypted with your organisation’s own key. It is decrypted into memory only while somebody is syncing or working with it, and encrypted again once it is idle. When an organisation is deleted its key goes with it, which makes its stored data unreadable at once.

Nothing is shared until somebody shares it. Everything in Content starts private to the person who made it and your admin, and is shared with groups or with the whole organisation deliberately.

Contributors, publishers, managers and your admin work in the cloud projects they belong to. Viewers never reach a cloud project’s data: a project shared with them shows its outline (layer names, what each collects, how many features and when it last changed), and its data reaches them only as a WFS or a web map shared with them. Admins and managers also see the team activity board, which counts what each person collected and when they last synced, and shows no locations and no field values.

Publishing a WFS makes a separate copy of only the layers and fields you chose, rebuilt after each sync. That copy is not encrypted the way the project is, because publishing is the moment data leaves the sealed store for its readers. It stays in the EU, and its readers are only the people you share it with and the access tokens you issue. Nothing is published to the whole internet.

Encryption with your organisation’s key protects the stored files. It does not protect your data from us: Mapit staff with access to production can reach an organisation’s data, as they can on any platform that merges your crew’s records or serves you a map. What we do instead is keep a record: every time a member of staff opens an organisation on our own reporting pages, it is logged, and those pages show counts and sizes, never your project data.