Privacy & data redaction

Last updated: 2026-05-02

Deep Tech Hub (community-hub) is a community-managed resource hub for the Mountain West deep tech ecosystem. We surface organizations, people, grants, patents, and funding opportunities sourced from public-record federal databases. This page describes how we handle that data and how you can request its removal.

Data sources we use

We aggregate data from public-record federal sources and academic open-data APIs. We do not collect data directly from individuals.

  • SBIR / STTR — Small Business Innovation Research / Technology Transfer awards
  • NIH RePORTER — National Institutes of Health grant records
  • USPTO — United States Patent and Trademark Office patent records
  • USASpending.gov — federal contract and grant disbursements
  • SEC EDGAR — Securities and Exchange Commission filings
  • DOE OSTI — Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information
  • OpenAlex — open scholarly metadata graph
  • NSF — National Science Foundation award records
  • NASA — NASA Technology Transfer awards
  • ClinicalTrials.gov — registered clinical trial sponsors

User-driven contributions (community edits, claims, news submissions) are opt-in and require an authenticated account.

How we keep data fresh

We pull updates from upstream sources on a monthly sync cadence. Each record carries a "last synced" timestamp surfaced in the UI as a relative time (e.g., "Synced 3 days ago"). When a record has not been refreshed in more than 30 days, an orange dot indicator appears on its provenance footer to flag potential staleness. Every record links back to its authoritative public source via the provenance footer.

Your right to redaction

You may request that your record be removed from community-hub at any time. Process:

  1. Email redactions@deeptechhub.example with the subject line Redaction request — {your full name}.
  2. Include the URL of the record on community-hub, your ORCID iD, or your UEI (Unique Entity Identifier) so we can locate the canonical record.
  3. Review window — we acknowledge your request within 7 days and queue it for admin review.
  4. Soft redaction — once approved, we set is_redacted = TRUE on your record. Row-Level Security policies immediately hide the record from public reads. The record remains in our database in a recoverable state for 30 days in case the request was made in error.
  5. Hard deletion — after the 30-day recovery window, we hard-delete the record. Foreign-key constraints cascade through entity_edges, removing all relationship rows that reference the record.
  6. Audit log retained — we retain an audit log row (request received, redacted, hard-deleted timestamps) indefinitely for compliance evidence. The audit log does not contain your bio, contact info, or other sensitive content — only the action timestamps and request metadata.

Important caveat: We can only redact records that we hold. We cannot redact records held by upstream public-record sources (SBIR, NIH, USPTO, etc.). If you want your name removed from those underlying records, you must contact those agencies directly.

Contact

Changes to this policy

We update this policy as our data sources, retention practices, or legal posture changes. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Material changes are announced in the #announcements feed.