Quest is private by default. Your collection, your chases, your stories, and any values are visible only to you unless you explicitly share them. Quest never sells your personal information, never runs advertising against your collection, and never exports collector data to dealers or anyone else. The rest of this policy is the detail behind those sentences.
Email address, display name, and handle, collected at signup through our sign-in provider. Quest never sees or stores your password.
What you add: cards and items you record, quest names and definitions, photographs, written stories, voice notes — which are audio recordings of your voice, stored as files — values you enter, and your collecting story if you choose to tell it. Your collecting story and the preferences drawn from it are private and used only to shape your own experience — they are never shown to other collectors.
If you look for a card and Quest doesn't have it, you can send us what you typed. Quest stores that text as you wrote it, linked to your account, so we can add the card to the catalog. Nothing is stored unless you choose to send it — Quest does not keep a record of what you search for.
If you join Quest by scanning a dealer's code, a referral marker is stored on your account so Quest knows which dealer introduced you. It is never displayed publicly, and it does not give the dealer access to your account or your collection. See Section 5.
Quest sells memberships and one-time documents. Quest does not process the payment: Stripe does. Stripe collects your name, email address and card details and handles the transaction under its own terms and its own privacy policy.
What Quest receives is confirmation that the payment succeeded and the last four digits of the card, so you can tell which card you used. Your card number never reaches Quest.
What Quest stores is the record of the arrangement and nothing about the card: which plan you are on, whether it is billed monthly or yearly, its current period, and Stripe’s identifier for it.
If you pay for an identity check, you photograph an identity document through your camera and take a live image of yourself. Both go to Stripe Identity, not to Quest: Stripe captures them, matches one against the other, and keeps them. Quest treats this as sensitive personal information and uses it for one purpose only — deciding whether your account gets a checkmark.
What Quest’s own systems store is: whether a check passed and when, how many attempts have been made, the country that issued the document, what kind of document it was, and a code from Stripe if a check failed. Quest stores no image, no document number, and none of the dates on the document. Section 10 says where to look for how long Stripe keeps what it captured.
If you use the phone app and turn notifications on, your device gives Quest a push token — an address for your device, not an identifier of you. You choose which kinds of notification you want and can turn any group off. A small number of operational messages — about your account, your membership, or a hold — are sent outside those groups because they are not marketing.
A photograph you take is stored whether or not Quest manages to identify the card in it. If a read is refused or fails, the picture is kept and the card joins your collection unidentified — nothing is thrown away because the machine could not read it.
Ordinary service logs (device type, browser, IP address, pages and features used) for security and debugging. This website runs no analytics and no trackers. The web app is built with Sentry for error monitoring; an error report includes technical context such as device, browser, and IP address — errors only, no session replay, no behavioral analytics. The phone app has no error reporting. When a new error appears, an alert telling Quest about it is delivered through Telegram: it carries the error's own summary — its title, the place in the code, when it was last seen, how often it has happened, and a link to the full report — and it is scrubbed of identifiers before it is sent. The report itself stays in Sentry; the alert is only notice that one exists. No advertising or cross-site tracking anywhere.
When someone responds to a show a collector shared with them — tapping a card to say they have it — Quest stores the name and contact details that person types and the card they are responding to. Quest uses that information for one purpose: passing the message to the collector who shared the show. It is not used for marketing, is not sold or shared, and does not create a Quest account. If you sent a response and want it removed, write to hello@collect.quest and we will delete it.
Quest processes no payments and stores no payment card details. Quest is not a marketplace and holds no funds. Memberships and documents are sold through Stripe, which collects the payment under its own terms — see “Payment information” above. Quest also collects no precise location, tracks you across no other sites, and runs no advertising.
Quest is for collectors 13 and older. We do not create accounts for, or knowingly collect personal information from, children under 13. If we learn we hold personal information from a child under 13, we delete it and close the account. If you believe a child under 13 has a Quest account, contact hello@collect.quest.
To build the shared card catalog: Quest uses your card photographs and card descriptions — stripped of your name, handle, contact details, and anything identifying your collection — to build and improve the catalog, the systems that recognise cards from photographs, and reference imagery. You keep ownership of your photographs and your words. One photograph of yours becomes a picture other collectors can see only if it is promoted onto a catalog record, through a logged process. Until that happens — and for every photograph that never does — your collection photographs stay yours alone. See Section 4.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Only when you make it so:
One more path, and it runs through a decision rather than a setting: a photograph you contributed can become reference imagery on a catalog record — the picture other collectors see when they look that card up. That happens only by promotion through Quest's logged process. The catalog record is about the card, not about you: it carries no name, handle, or collection information.
The dealer program is built on a one-way rule: requests flow to dealers; your identity doesn't. If Quest routes a want — something you're chasing that a dealer may be able to supply — the dealer sees the request, not your name or your collection. Who you are is revealed only when you choose to engage. Dealers receive no lists, no exports, and no browsing access to collector data, ever.
Quest runs on a small set of processors, each receiving only what its function requires:
Each is bound by its own data-protection terms; none may use your data for its own purposes. Apple and Google are not on this list because they are not Quest’s processors: when you install the app from their stores, they receive what their platforms receive under their own policies. See Section 14.
Quest uses cookies for signing you in, for security, and — if you arrived through a dealer's code — a referral cookie so attribution survives signup. No advertising cookies, no cross-site trackers.
Your content is kept while your account is open. You may export your data at any time, and you may delete your account yourself, from inside Quest, without asking anyone and without waiting for us. On the phone app and on the web it is the same door, in the same words: your account corner → Account → Delete my account → Yes, delete everything. It is immediate, and it cannot be undone. You can also write to hello@collect.quest and ask us to do it, if you would rather. Export runs from your account screen on the web or in the app. Quest gives you two spreadsheets: your collection — what each card is, its grade and cert where you recorded them, the job you gave it, and the quests it serves — and your want list, with the grade you'll accept for each card you're chasing. Photographs, shows, moments, written stories and voice notes are not in either file; nor are any catalog or third-party reference numbers. The files describe your cards in the ordinary way collectors do — year, set, number, and who or what the card is of.
When you delete something, it is deleted. Delete a photo, a story, a voice note, a card, or your whole account, and the thing itself — the pixels, the audio, the words — is removed from our systems. What survives is the record that a change happened: your collection's history will still show that a photo was removed or an entry deleted, and that record is marked as exactly that — a record of a change, not the content. The history stays honest; the deleted thing is gone.
Two things survive that are worth naming rather than burying. First: if Quest has ever put your account on hold, the record that it did — the account, the date, nothing from your collection — is kept even after the account is closed and its content deleted. Quest keeps it to stop a held account simply being deleted and re-opened, and as a record it may need to establish or defend a legal claim. Second: content that appears to be unlawful is preserved rather than deleted, as Section 21 of the Terms describes.
And one thing Quest cannot recall: a file already sent. An image generated to travel with a share you sent is a copy in someone else’s hands. Retiring the share stops the link; it does not unmake the copy.
Replacing is different from deleting. When you swap a photo for a better one, the replacement is your choice to improve the record, not a request to erase it. Today, replacing a photo removes the replaced file and keeps the record of the change. Quest intends to keep replaced images in a deep archive as part of the card's history; when that archive exists, this policy will say so plainly.
Deletion completes within a reasonable period, except copies in routine backups (retained briefly) and records we must keep by law. Catalog corrections you contributed remain in the catalog — they describe cards, not you.
California collectors — and, as a matter of Quest policy, everyone: you have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, to receive a portable copy, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information — noting that Quest does not sell or share personal information as California law defines those terms. You will never face retaliation for exercising any of these rights. To make a request, email hello@collect.quest; we may need to verify your identity before acting on it. California's privacy statutes do not yet legally apply to a company of Quest's size — we honor these rights anyway, because private-by-default is what this product is.
Global Privacy Control: we honor the GPC signal.
Quest processes your information on these legal bases: to provide the service you signed up for (performance of a contract) — your account, your collection, your quests, and the sharing you initiate; our legitimate interest in keeping Quest safe — service logs, abuse prevention, and error reports; and your consent, where we ask for it — such as your collecting story, and any feature that asks before it acts. Where consent is the basis, you can withdraw it at any time, and nothing else about your account changes.
You have the right to complain to your data protection authority — in the EU, the supervisory authority of your country; in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. We'd welcome the chance to put it right first at hello@collect.quest, but you don't have to ask us before you go to them.
Our data protection contact is hello@collect.quest.
Where your data lives: your information is stored and processed in the United States, except in the two cases named below. The providers named in Section 6 hold and process it on United States infrastructure, and the machines Quest uses to generate motion from your photographs run in United States regions. When you use Quest from outside the United States, you give your information directly to us on US servers, and it travels to them across the ordinary internet. Our service providers’ data-protection terms include the EU standard contractual clauses, which stand behind that arrangement.
The first exception is Stripe, which collects payments and runs identity checks under its own terms. Stripe is a global company and processes some payment information outside the United States through its own affiliates and providers. Stripe’s identity-verification data is held in the United States. What Stripe does with what it collects is set out in Stripe’s privacy policy, at stripe.com/privacy.
The second is Anthropic, which reads cards from photographs and drafts checklists for Quest. What reaches Anthropic is a photograph of a card, sent to be read, and the text of a quest you asked Quest to build — never your name, your handle, or your contact details. Anthropic’s published list of the providers behind that service includes cloud providers it lists as operating worldwide, and support providers in Canada and South Africa, so a photograph sent to be read may be processed outside the United States. What Anthropic does with what it receives is set out in Anthropic’s own terms and its Trust Center, at anthropic.com.
Verifying your identity is optional and you pay for it. Quest treats what the check involves — an identity document and a live image of your face — as sensitive personal information.
Who holds it. Stripe Identity runs the check. Stripe captures the document and the live image, matches them, and keeps them. Quest’s own systems store no image of either.
How long it is kept. Quest never held your document, so Quest makes no promise about how long it lasts: Stripe captured it, Stripe keeps it, and how long Stripe keeps it is set out in Stripe’s own privacy policy, at stripe.com/privacy. Quest’s own record — whether a check passed and when, how many attempts, the issuing country, the document type — is kept while your account is open and is deleted when you delete your account.
What it is used for, and nothing else. Deciding whether your account gets a checkmark. It is not used to build a profile of you, is not shown to other collectors, is not sold, and is never used for advertising.
What other collectors see is the checkmark and nothing behind it. Not your name as it appears on a document, not the document, not the country, and not whether you ever tried and failed.
Who can see what. Following someone lets you see what they have chosen to open to the people who follow them. Joining a room lets the people in that room see what you put in it. A private connection between two collectors exists only once both of you have opened your collections to each other. None of these is on by default and none of them reveals your collection wholesale — each opens a specific thing to a specific set of people.
Messages. A message you send is stored so the person you sent it to can read it. A conversation with you can only be started by an act you took toward the other person. Messages are words and a pointer to a card; images, files and links cannot be sent. Quest does not read your messages to build a profile of you and does not use them for advertising, and staff do not read them except where a report or the law requires it.
Blocking. If you block someone, Quest records that you did — it has to, in order to keep the block working. The person you blocked is not told.
Reports. If you report something, Quest keeps the report, what you reported, and what it decided, so that decisions stay consistent and repeat problems are visible. See Section 8 for how long enforcement records are kept.
Quest can show a changing few of your photographed cards to collectors you are not connected to — a small window into what you collect, so that people with a shared interest can find each other.
It is off unless you turn it on. There is one switch for it in your settings and turning it off stops it immediately.
What it will never show, even when it is on: anything in your Keep pile; any card Quest has not identified; how many cards you own; and what anything is worth. It is a few pictures of cards, not a picture of your collection.
Push notifications on the phone app. Turning them on gives Quest a token from your device, which is an address for the device rather than a name for you. Notifications come in groups and you can turn any group off. Quest holds a floor of at most one round of notifications a day so a busy day cannot become a stream of interruptions. If you want one of them, it is because you asked for it — including notices when a card of yours moves in value by more than a few per cent.
Email. Quest sends operational email through Resend: things about your account, your membership, a hold, a gift someone sent you, or a knock you asked for. Operational email sits outside the notification groups, because a notice that your account is on hold is not something to opt out of. Quest sends no marketing email today; if that ever changes, it will be a group you opt into.
Gifts. If a member gives you a month of Quest, Quest records who gave it, to whom, and when. A gift is sent to a collector by their handle, so no new contact details are collected from anyone to deliver one.
Quest’s phone app is distributed through Apple’s TestFlight and Google Play. Apple and Google are not Quest’s processors: when you install or update the app, they receive what their platforms receive, under their own policies, and Quest does not control that.
Permissions the app asks for. The camera, so you can photograph a card; and your photo library, if you want to add a picture you already took. Both are asked for at the moment they are needed, both can be refused, and refusing either leaves the rest of the app working.
Where photographs live. A photograph you take is uploaded to Quest’s storage so it is on every device you sign in from and survives losing your phone.
Data in transit is encrypted; access to production systems is restricted; sign-in is handled by a dedicated identity provider. No service can promise perfect security — if a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you as the law requires.
Material changes are posted here with a new version number and effective date, with notice to account holders before they take effect.
Quest is operated by Quest Collect, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Reach us at hello@collect.quest, or by mail: PO Box 2394, Saratoga, CA 95070.