Your location stays on your device — with one exception, spelled out below. When you tap "Use my location", the distance sorting happens in your own browser. Nothing about where you are is sent anywhere while a search is working.
The exception: if a search finds no printer close enough, an approximate location is recorded — rounded to one decimal place, roughly an 11 km square. Not your position, an area. That's what builds the demand map, and the demand map is what convinces printer owners to list somewhere they're actually needed.
Nothing is recorded when a search succeeds. Only the dead ends count, and only as a coarse square with a date on it — no name, no device, no way to connect two visits.
If you're just looking for a printer
You don't have an account and you aren't asked to make one. Nothing identifying is collected while you browse.
One exception: if you tap Send an RFQ, you're asked for your name, verified email and a structured job brief. You can select up to three owners. Each gets the same brief after you confirm your email, but owners do not see who else you selected. Your email is released only to an owner who accepts. Owner phone numbers and emails are never returned to your browser.
| What | Why | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Your name, as typed | So the owner knows who asked | Up to 60 days; 24 hours if unverified |
| Job title, description, quantity, material, colour, dimensions, deadline, delivery choice and any extra requirements you enter | So an owner can assess the job before accepting | Up to 60 days; closed or connected requests are removed after 30 days |
| Your verified email | To confirm the request, send a private status link, and let an accepting owner reply | Same as the request |
| The selected listings, their responses, notes and timestamps | To show accept, decline and questions on your status page, and publish factual aggregate response history | Same as the request; only anonymous counts remain afterwards |
| An optional link to a file on Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or WeTransfer | So selected owners can inspect a file you chose to share; 3DPO stores the link, not the file | Same as the request |
3DPO does not store your raw IP address or browser details and sets no cookies for this. To rate-limit contact requests, the Worker turns the connection IP into a short keyed fingerprint that cannot be reversed and stores only that fingerprint in a temporary rate-limit bucket. It is used only to stop one source flooding everybody else. Like any host, Cloudflare processes the web request and can see the connection information needed to deliver it; there is more about that under Who else is involved below.
The demand map
When somebody looks for a printer and there isn't one near enough, that counts for something — it's the argument for an owner in that area to list. Two things feed it:
| What happened | What's recorded | What's shown publicly |
|---|---|---|
| You filled in "I need something printed" | Your city, what you need, your email, plus PIN if you gave it, and an area-level position | Only your city and a number. What you wrote, and how to reach you, are never published |
| A search found nobody close enough | An 11 km square, the date, and how far the nearest owner was. Nothing else | Counted towards that area's total |
Repeat searches from the same square on the same day count once. A search that succeeds records nothing at all.
Both are aggregates by the time anyone sees them. The map can say "6 people wanted a print here" — it cannot say who, when, or what any one person asked for.
If you list your printer
You submit a form, so you're choosing what's on it. Two things stay private and never appear in the public listing API or on the site:
- Your phone number — optional and used only to prevent duplicate listings. 3DPO never gives it to visitors.
- Your email address — used to send your edit link and relay print requests from visitors.
Your address and PIN code are never published. By default the stored map position comes from your PIN area. Before the public listing API returns it, the Worker applies a stable 300–500 metre displacement and rounds the result, so the raw PIN centre does not appear in the page or API. 3DPO never asks for your street address and doesn't have it.
You can choose to be placed nearer to where you actually are — a slider, from your PIN area down through about two kilometres, one kilometre, or 500 metres — because a PIN code can span several kilometres and people searching a short distance may otherwise never see you. If you pick one of those, your browser reads your position, shifts it a random amount in a random direction, and sends only the shifted point. Your real position is never transmitted and never stored, so what ends up in the private database is the same kind of approximation as before, just centred on you instead of on your PIN area. The shifted point is then kept as-is; it is not redrawn each time you save, because a pin that wandered on every edit could be averaged out by anyone watching.
This is off unless you turn it on, and you can put it back to your PIN area at any time from your edit link. Worth knowing before you do: a smaller radius is a real trade. In a dense city 500 metres covers thousands of homes; in a small town it may cover very few, and your listing already shows your name, area and city alongside it.
What is public: your name or shop name, your area and city, a displaced map point, every machine you add and its stated process, build volume, materials, colours, availability, delivery choices and optional rate note, plus your turnaround and any notes, Reddit username or photo link you supplied. The site also shows factual trust signals: email confirmation, profile update date, machine count and aggregate response count. These are not a quality certification or star rating.
Changing or deleting your listing
You have a private link — it was emailed when you signed up, and it looks like ?edit=…. Open it and the form fills with your details. Change anything and save, or press Remove my listing and you're off the map immediately.
No password, no account to close. Treat the link like a key: anyone who has it can edit your listing, so don't forward it. Lost it? There's a box on the site that emails it back to the address you signed up with.
To have your row deleted outright rather than hidden — including your email, phone and request history — email the address at the bottom of this page and it's done the same day.
Who else is involved
3DPO is one person's project, not a company. It has no staff, no investors, and nobody to share your data with. Four third parties are unavoidable:
- Cloudflare hosts the site and its Worker API, stores listings and request records in a private D1 database, serves the mapping library, and provides Web Analytics. Like any web host, its servers see the requests that reach them, including the IP address and browser information needed to deliver and protect the service. 3DPO does not copy those connection details into its own database. Cloudflare says its analytics beacon discards the source IP at the nearest data centre and does not store or read cookies, local storage or other browser storage. Contact requests are rate-limited and processed by the Worker; no owner phone number is returned.
- Google sends transactional emails through Gmail using a small authenticated Google Apps Script relay. Listing and request data are not stored in Google Sheets anymore. The site's fonts are also served by Google, so loading any page tells Google your IP address.
- CARTO draws the map tiles. Their servers see your IP address and which tiles you asked for — roughly the area you are looking at, which is not the same as where you are.
- OpenStreetMap is the map data underneath those tiles, and it also turns PIN codes into map positions. A PIN code is sent to them for that lookup — never your precise location.
Three smaller ones are conditional. If the mapping library fails to load from Cloudflare it is retried from unpkg, which then sees that one request. If a listing has a photo, the owner supplied a link to it — usually Imgur — so your browser fetches the image from that host and it sees your IP address. And if a requester includes a Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or WeTransfer link, opening it sends the selected owner to that provider under the provider's own privacy terms. 3DPO does not fetch or copy the linked file.
One payment provider is also conditional. If you choose to support 3DPO, you can use a Razorpay-managed UPI QR or open a contribution page hosted by Razorpay. Razorpay and your chosen payment app receive the information needed to process that payment under their own privacy policies. The 3DPO website does not collect or store your card number, personal UPI ID or other payment credentials.
No advertising or advertising profiles. 3DPO carries no ads or advertising cookies and does not use Google Analytics, AdSense or any social-media tracking pixel. Nothing about you is sold, rented or shared with an advertiser, because there are no advertisers.
Basic visitor numbers are measured with Cloudflare Web Analytics. It counts visits and page views and reports broad information such as page path, approximate country, device/browser type, referrer and page performance. 3DPO uses those aggregate figures to understand whether the site is being used and where it needs fixing; it does not use them to identify you or build an advertising profile. Cloudflare's analytics beacon does not place or read cookies or browser storage, and Cloudflare says the source IP received with the beacon is discarded rather than stored in its analytics databases or logs.
No cookies, no account, and no identifier added by 3DPO to link one visit to another. Requests still pass through Cloudflare because it hosts the service, but 3DPO does not use those connection details to build visitor profiles. If any of this ever changes to something that tracks individuals, this page changes first.
What 3DPO does not do
- Handle payments between people requesting prints and printer owners. You pay the owner directly, however you agree between yourselves. Optional contributions toward 3DPO's running costs are processed through Razorpay's managed UPI QR or hosted checkout, not by 3DPO.
- Vet quality, hold money, or settle disputes. It's a directory, not a marketplace.
- Rank listings by money. There are currently no paid placements or promoted listings.
- Track you across other websites.
How long any of it is kept
Raw request data is temporary. An hourly cleanup removes expired and old request records. Anonymous city demand, connection totals and owner response counts can remain because they no longer contain the requester's name, email, job description, file link, private tokens or response notes.
- Your listing stays until you remove it or ask for the row to be deleted. Removing it yourself hides it immediately; the row stays unless you ask for it to go.
- Contact requests — your name, what you needed, verified email, hashed verification token, a random duplicate-prevention key and delivery time — are removed after 24 hours if unverified, 30 days after delivery, or 60 days after creation at the latest. The printer owner receives the request only after you confirm your email.
- Structured RFQs keep the job fields listed above, your verified email, selected owners, response states and notes, hashed requester/owner/verification links, and event timestamps. Unverified rows are removed after 24 hours. Closed or connected rows are removed 30 days after their last update, and every structured RFQ is removed after 60 days. Anonymous connection and owner-response counts can remain.
- Failed-search records keep only the coarse area, nearest-owner distance and date. They are rolled into anonymous city totals and removed after 90 days. Wanted requests keep the city, request details, material, optional PIN, verified email and hashed verification token privately so 3DPO can notify you when an owner lists nearby. Unverified rows are removed after 24 hours, completed rows once they are 30 days old, and every wanted request after 60 days. Anonymous city and successful-match totals can remain. Choosing “keep looking” reopens the request, while “close” stops future nearby-printer emails for it.
Ask and any of it is deleted the same day. There's no form for this and no process — email the address at the bottom.
Children
3DPO isn't intended for under-18s and no listing should be submitted by one. If you believe a minor has submitted their details, email the address below and the row will be deleted.
Changes to this page
If what's collected changes, this page is updated before the change goes live, not after. The date below is when it was last touched.
Contact
Questions, deletion requests, or something on the site that looks wrong: privacy@3dpo.in. It reaches a real inbox read by a real person and deletion requests are handled the same day.