Version 2.4.1 · Effective September 25, 2026
Privacy Policy
Q Fabrication Labs qfablabs.com
Version 2.4.1 Effective date: September 25, 2026 Last updated: September 25, 2026
This version supersedes all earlier versions. The version that applies to your order is the one shown to you and recorded when you placed it. Changes in v2.4.1: we clarify that deleting something does not instantly erase it from our encrypted backups, which hold a copy for a limited period until they age out; we make the retention table's cross-reference point to the right row; and we state that an email you send us directly about a quote — including a file you attach — is kept in our support inbox under the same retention as our other quote emails. No change to what we collect, how we use it, or our deletion timescales.
The short version
- We collect your name, email, shipping address, the model file you upload, your order notes, and your order details. That's basically it.
- We never see or store your card number. Stripe handles payments.
- Your files and order records live in our Google Drive. Your model file is deleted after 180 days. Financial records are kept longer, because tax law requires it.
- We don't sell your data. We don't advertise. We don't train AI on your files.
- Your model file is only seen by the people who need it to make your part. Nobody else.
- We keep your order records in case something goes wrong — so we can look up what you ordered, reprint it, refund it, or sort out a payment problem.
- Want your data deleted? Email support@qfablabs.com and we'll do it.
The rest of this document is the detail.
1. Who's responsible for your data
Q Fab Labs LLC, an Arizona limited liability company operating as Q Fabrication Labs, based in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The company is the data controller for the information described here.
We serve the United States only. We don't accept orders from outside the U.S.
Contact: support@qfablabs.com Location: Tucson, Arizona, United States
We don't publish a street address. Email reaches us directly and is the right channel for every kind of request, including privacy requests — it's monitored and a person replies. If you need a postal address to serve a formal legal notice, ask and we'll provide one.
We're a small company. There's no privacy team — your email goes straight to the people who run the business, and a person replies.
2. What we collect
2.1 Things you give us directly
| What | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Name | When you order | To identify the order, address the package, and issue receipts |
| Email address | When you order, or when you ask us to quote a file by hand | To send your quote, confirmation, receipt, shipping notice, and to contact you about the job |
| Shipping address | When you order a shipped item | To ship your parts |
| Phone number (if you provide one) | Optional, at checkout | Carrier delivery contact |
Your 3D model file (.stl, .step) |
When you request a quote | To slice, price, and print it |
| Order notes — the free-text "Additional Notes" box, and descriptions on custom requests | When you order | So we know what you want. Please don't put sensitive personal information in this box. |
| Your print settings and choices | When you order | Material, quantity, layer height, infill, rush, finishing options |
| Your agreement to the Terms | At checkout | We record that you ticked the box, which version of the Terms you agreed to, and the timestamp — this is a legal record of your consent |
2.2 Things generated about your order
- The slicing results for your file (estimated grams of material, estimated print time, layer count, whether supports are needed).
- The quote breakdown and final price.
- The job/ticket record: order status, our internal notes, print and shipping dates.
- Payment references from Stripe (a payment ID, the authorized amount, the captured amount, and whether the payment was a charge or a hold).
2.3 Payment information — we do not have it
We never receive, see, or store your full card number, CVC, or expiry date. Your card details go directly to Stripe, our payment processor, in your browser. What comes back to us is a payment reference, the amount, and enough to display a receipt (typically the card brand and last four digits).
If we place an authorization hold on your order (see Terms §8.3), we store the authorized amount, the captured amount, and the hold's expiry — not the card.
2.4 Technical data
Our site sits behind Cloudflare and runs on a DigitalOcean server. Both automatically log basic technical information for security and reliability — your IP address, the time of the request, your browser type, and the pages you requested. This is standard, we don't use it to build a profile of you, and we don't sell it.
2.5 Cookies
We use strictly necessary cookies only — the ones that keep your session working through the quote and checkout flow, and the security cookies Cloudflare sets to block bots and attacks.
We do not use advertising cookies, marketing trackers, or third-party analytics that follow you around the web.
This is why you don't see a cookie banner here. It isn't an oversight. We don't set any cookie that would require your consent, and our analytics (below) don't use cookies at all — so there's nothing to ask you to agree to. If that ever changes, we'll update this policy and ask for your consent first.
2.6 Website analytics — cookieless, and not about you
We want to know basic things like how many people visited, which pages they looked at, and roughly where our traffic comes from. We do not want to know who you are.
We use privacy-preserving, cookieless analytics:
| Tool | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | In use | Counts page views and visits. Sets no cookies and stores no persistent identifier. |
| Plausible Analytics | Named here in advance — we may enable it | Counts page views, visits, referrers, and general device/browser/country info. Sets no cookies. Instead of tracking you, it generates a daily-rotating hash of your IP address and browser — the salt rotates every day, so yesterday's visits cannot be linked to today's. Cross-day tracking is impossible by design. |
We're naming Plausible now, before publishing, so that you always know in advance what we might use — rather than us quietly bolting on a new tracker later and hoping you don't reread this page. If we do enable it, it works exactly as described above. If we ever adopt anything that isn't cookieless and anonymous, that would be a material change, and §11 applies: new version, and we email recent customers.
What these tools never do:
- set a cookie, or store anything on your device;
- collect your name, email, or anything that identifies you;
- follow you across other websites;
- build a profile of you;
- feed advertising, of any kind.
All of it is aggregate statistics. Nothing in our analytics can be traced back to you personally, and none of it is connected to your order.
2.7 What we don't collect
We don't collect your date of birth, Social Security number, government ID, financial account numbers, health information, biometrics, precise location, or anything about your race, religion, politics, health, sex life, or union membership. We don't want it, and we don't ask for it. Please don't send it to us in the notes box.
We don't knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18. Our service is for adults (Terms §1.5). If you think a minor has given us information, email us and we'll delete it.
3. Why we're allowed to use it (legal bases)
If you're in a place with data-protection law that works this way (the UK/EU, for example), here are our legal bases:
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Producing your quote, printing your part, taking payment, shipping it | Performance of a contract with you |
| Emailing you about your order (quote, confirmation, receipt, status, problems) | Performance of a contract |
| Keeping financial and tax records | Legal obligation |
| Preventing fraud and abuse, securing the site, rate-limiting uploads | Legitimate interests — running a business that isn't defrauded or taken down |
| Cookieless, aggregate website analytics (§2.6) | Legitimate interests — understanding basic traffic without tracking or identifying anyone. No cookies are set, so no consent is required |
| Reviewing an order flagged for manual review | Performance of a contract / legitimate interests |
| Defending ourselves against a legal claim (e.g. an IP dispute over an uploaded file) | Legitimate interests / legal claims |
| Photographing your finished part for our marketing | Consent — only if you tick the box at checkout, and you can withdraw it any time |
| Any marketing email (if we ever send one) | Consent — and you can withdraw it any time |
We don't do any automated decision-making that produces legal effects for you. Our automated quoting decides a price, not anything about you, and a human can review it.
4. Who else touches your data
We use a small number of service providers. Here's the complete list, what they get, and where they are.
| Provider | What they handle | What they get | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe, Inc. | Payments, holds, captures, refunds | Your card details (direct from your browser), name, email, billing address, amount | USA |
| Google LLC (Google Workspace / Google Drive / Gmail) | File storage, backups, order records, and our own mailbox | Your uploaded model files, order records, receipts, your name and email | USA |
| DigitalOcean, LLC | The server the website runs on | Everything, in transit and while a job is active | USA |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Security, HTTPS, DDoS protection in front of the site | Your IP address, request metadata | USA |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics (Cloudflare, Inc.) | Cookieless page-view and visit counts | Aggregate visit data. No cookies, no persistent identifier | USA |
| Plausible Insights OÜ (Plausible Analytics) — named in advance; may not yet be enabled | Cookieless page-view, visit, and referrer counts | Aggregate visit data. No cookies. Uses a daily-rotating hash, not a stored identifier | EU (Estonia; servers in Germany) |
| Resend (Resend, Inc.) | Sending your quote, confirmation, receipt, and order-status emails | Your name, email address, and the contents of those emails | USA |
| EasyPost (EasyPost, Inc.) | Generating shipping labels and rates, and tracking your parcel | Your name and shipping address, and the weight and dimensions of your parcel | USA |
| Shipping carriers (USPS, UPS, FedEx — we choose per order) | Delivering your parts | Your name and shipping address | USA |
Each of these has its own privacy policy. We've chosen providers with reasonable security practices, but we don't control what they do internally.
4.1 People who work on your order
Q Fabrication Labs is small, but it isn't always just one pair of hands. Your model file and order details may be seen by other people we work with — but only where they need to see them in order to make, finish, or ship your part. That could include, for example, someone helping with finishing or hand-work on a part, someone helping run or maintain the printer, or a partner shop we use for a step we can't do in-house.
The rules are the same for everyone:
- They only get what they actually need for the job — not your payment details, and not your file if their task doesn't require it.
- They may use it only to work on your order, and for nothing else.
- They're bound to keep it confidential.
- Nobody outside that circle sees your file. We do not show your designs to anyone for any other reason.
If your file is commercially sensitive and you'd like a written NDA before you upload it, email us first and we'll sort one out.
We don't sell your personal information. We don't share it for advertising. We don't rent, trade, or disclose it to data brokers. We have never done this and we don't plan to.
We may disclose information if we're legally required to — a subpoena, court order, or lawful government request — or where we need to in order to establish or defend a legal claim (for example, if a rights holder claims a file you uploaded infringes their copyright).
If the business is ever sold or reorganized (including converting to an LLC), your data may transfer to the new entity, which would remain bound by this policy.
5. Your model files, specifically
Your model file is the most sensitive thing you give us, and it gets treated accordingly.
- Your file is confidential. We don't publish it, share it, sell it, or resell it. This is true no matter what you tick at checkout — even if you give us permission to photograph your finished part (Terms §6.7), your model file itself is never published, shared, or shown to anyone. The permission covers photographs of the physical object, nothing else.
- We only photograph your part if you say we can. The checkbox at checkout is unticked by default. Leave it alone and nothing about your order is ever posted anywhere. Ticking it changes nothing about your price or your place in the queue, and you can withdraw it later by emailing us.
- The only people who see it are the people making your part — a small, strictly need-to-know group: whoever is producing, finishing, packing, or shipping your order, and only for that purpose (see §4.1). Every one of them is bound to keep it confidential. Nobody outside that group sees it, ever.
- We don't use it to train AI models, and we don't license it to anyone who would.
- We don't reprint it for anyone else, or reuse it for our own products.
- We use it only to fulfill your order, exactly as described in Terms §6.3.
- It's stored in our Google Drive and, while your job is active, in a working copy on the server. Once your job closes, the server copy is deleted and the Drive copy is the only one.
- After 180 days, we delete it entirely. See §6.
- If you leave a file for a hand quote and don't go on to order, we delete it sooner — within 30 days of your request, not 180. See §6.
We are not a backup service. Keep your own copy of every file you send us.
6. How long we keep things
| What | How long | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your uploaded model files | 180 days from upload, then automatically deleted | So we can sort out a problem with your order — reprint a defective part, check what we actually printed, or handle a dispute. After that we don't need it, and holding your IP indefinitely is a risk to you and a liability to us |
| Files, and the email address you leave, for a hand quote that doesn't become an order | Up to 30 days from your request, then automatically deleted from our app and file storage | We hold them only long enough to price your file by hand and hear back from you. If you place an order, the normal clocks above apply instead (files 180 days; order emails 7 years). One copy of your email also reaches our support inbox as an alert — see the support-inbox row later in this table |
| Server working copies of your file | Only while your job is active; deleted when the job closes | Keeps the box lean and reduces exposure |
| Order and job records (what was printed, in what material, at what settings, its status, your notes) | 7 years | So we can resolve issues with an order — what you ordered, what we printed, what went wrong. Also business records and defending claims |
| Your contact and delivery details — name, email, phone (if given), and shipping address, including any earlier version of a shipping address you asked us to change | 7 years, kept with the order it belongs to | To identify the order, resolve a delivery dispute, prove a change was made at your request, and defend claims |
| Financial records — receipts, payment references, the amounts authorized and captured, our income ledger | 7 years | Required for tax. These are not deleted at 180 days |
| Order emails in our inbox | 7 years | Same |
| Emails in our support inbox about your quote — both the alert we generate when you use the hand-quote page and any email you send us directly | Up to 7 years in our support inbox, even if you don't place an order | They let us reply to you, and can contain your email address, your reference, the details of your request, and — if you email a file to us — the file you attached. Our automatic 30-day cleanup runs on our app and file storage and can't reach our email inbox, so these follow the same retention as other order emails |
| Server and security logs | Up to 180 days (usually much less), then rotated out | Security and troubleshooting |
| Stripe's own records | Per Stripe's retention policy — we don't control it | Payment compliance |
The 180-day file purge is automatic, runs on a schedule, and applies to model files only. Files you leave for a hand quote that doesn't become an order are deleted sooner — within 30 days of your request. When we delete something, our encrypted backups may still hold a copy for up to 60 days afterward, until each backup ages out on its normal cycle and is overwritten. We keep backups only to recover from a system failure, not to bring back data we have deleted. Everything in the "financial" row survives it, because we're legally obliged to keep it. That means: your design goes away; the record that you bought something does not.
7. Your rights, and how to use them
Whoever and wherever you are, we'll honor these. Just email support@qfablabs.com.
- Access — ask us what we hold about you, and we'll send it to you.
- Correction — tell us something's wrong and we'll fix it.
- Deletion — ask us to delete your data and we will, except for (a) the financial and tax records we're legally required to keep, and (b) records we need to keep to establish, exercise, or defend a legal claim — for example, the order and delivery records tied to an open or reasonably anticipated dispute. We'll tell you exactly what we kept and why, and we'll delete it once the reason to keep it has passed (§6).
- Delete my file right now — you don't have to wait for the 180 days. Ask, and we'll purge your model file.
- A copy of your data, in a portable format.
- Object to, or restrict, our processing on legitimate-interests grounds.
- Withdraw consent for anything you consented to.
- No retaliation. We will never treat you worse — refuse an order, charge you more, or give you a lesser service — because you exercised a privacy right.
We'll respond within 30 days. We may need to verify who you are first, usually by confirming you control the email address on the order — we're not going to hand over someone's CAD file to a stranger.
If you're in California: we don't sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in the CCPA/CPRA, and we don't process sensitive personal information for the purposes that would give you an opt-out right. The rights above cover what the CCPA provides. You can designate an authorized agent to make a request for you.
Wherever you are: we'll honor the rights above regardless of whether a law compels us to. If you're unhappy with how we've handled a request, tell us — we'd much rather fix it than have you escalate it.
8. Where your data lives
We are a United States business and we serve United States customers only.
Everything connected to you or your order stays in the United States. Your name, email, address, uploaded model files, order records, and payment data are held entirely by U.S. providers (Stripe, Google, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Resend, EasyPost) on U.S. infrastructure. None of it leaves the country.
One exception, and it has nothing to do with your order. If we enable Plausible Analytics (§2.6), the anonymous, cookieless visit statistics it collects are processed and stored in the European Union — Plausible is an Estonian company and its servers are in Germany. This data is aggregate only, contains nothing that identifies you, sets no cookies, and is never linked to your order or your account. We think it's worth being precise about this rather than claiming a blanket "everything stays in the US" that wouldn't be true.
We do not accept orders from outside the United States. If you place one anyway, we'll cancel and refund it — and the limited data you gave us in the attempt is deleted along with it.
9. How we protect it
- The site runs over HTTPS, with Cloudflare in front of it.
- The server is hardened: no root login, a firewall that allows only the ports we need, automatic security updates.
- Admin access to the site is tightly limited to a small number of authorised people. Anyone helping with an order gets only the specific file or detail they need for it — not access to the system.
- Uploaded files are validated by type and size, and never executed.
- The Google account holding your files has two-factor authentication enabled.
- Files are removed from the server as soon as the job closes, so there is less sitting there to lose.
But be realistic: no system is perfectly secure, and we're a small operation, not a bank. We can't guarantee your data will never be compromised. If we ever discover that someone has gained unauthorized access to your personal information, and we judge that it creates a real risk of harm to you, we will tell you — promptly, honestly, and with what we know at the time — and we will notify any regulator the law requires us to, within the deadlines the law sets. Not every security problem puts your personal information at risk; when an incident doesn't, we'll fix it, but you may not hear from us about it. Where the law of your state sets a specific standard for telling you, that standard governs.
10. Emails you'll get from us
- Transactional emails only, by default — your quote, your order confirmation, your receipt, your shipping notice, and anything we need to ask you about the job. You can't opt out of these; they are the service.
- We don't currently send marketing emails. If we ever start, it'll be opt-in, and every one will have an unsubscribe link.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we'll update the version number and the date at the top and post the new one on the site. If a change is significant — new provider, new use of your data, shorter or longer retention — we'll email people with recent orders rather than quietly swapping the page.
We keep old versions, so it's always clear which policy applied to your order.
12. Contact us
Questions, requests, complaints, or "please delete my stuff":
Q Fab Labs LLC, operating as Q Fabrication Labs An Arizona limited liability company Tucson, Arizona, United States
support@qfablabs.com
A person reads every message. Please do get in touch.