What "you own your data" actually means

"You own your data" is the most over-promised sentence in software. It usually means: you can see your data, inside our app, as long as you keep paying. That's not ownership. That's tenancy.

Here's the version we hold ourselves to.

You can leave with everything

At any time you can export a complete copy of your account — a single portable bundle. Not a screenshot, not a partial CSV of the fields we felt like giving you. The real thing:

• Every artwork record, with all its fields — medium, dimensions, editions, prices, status, provenance, private notes.
• Your exhibitions, open-call applications, and projects.
• Your CV and bio.
• The images themselves, not just links to them.

The bundle is documented and plain enough that it's useful outside 1BURO. Leaving isn't a threat we're daring you to carry out — it's a supported, first-class action.

You can run it yourself

1BURO is designed to be self-hosted. If you'd rather not depend on us at all, you can run your own copy on your own box:

git clone the repo
npm install
node server.js

That's the actual shape of it. There's no phone-home, no licence server that has to say yes, no feature that quietly dies when a subscription lapses. The hosted service exists because most people don't want to run a server — not because the software is hostage to it.

If we ever shut the hosted service down, self-hosting is the exit that was there the whole time.

We don't surveil you

Ownership isn't only about export. It's also about what we collect, and the answer is: as little as possible.

• No third-party trackers. No analytics SDK sitting on your pages reporting to someone else.
• No per-user behavioural profiling. We don't build a dossier of what you clicked.
• Any measurement we do is first-party and aggregate — counts, not surveillance.

Your private fields stay private. Anything marked hidden — a work you've set not to show, a price you've chosen not to publish, your internal notes — is stripped from every public surface: your public site, link previews, structured data, all of it. That's enforced on the server, not left to the browser to honour.

Why we build this way

None of this is charity. It's the positioning: 1BURO is a tool for independent artists and the small organisations around them, and the relationship only works if the artist is genuinely in control. Lock-in would make us money in the short term and betray the entire premise.

Own your data. Not as a marketing line — as the thing you can actually verify by exporting it, reading it, and, if you like, walking away with it.