How Teleport handles user data and sharing

Teleport helps enthusiasts and professionals capture and share their world in immersive, high-quality 3D, while respecting each user’s rights to their own data. In this post, we go over how Teleport handles user data and permissions in more detail.

Many competing applications have unsuitable terms for professional use

While Teleport takes a user-centric approach emphasizing the user’s own control, many other applications in this space do not share the same goal. Their business model is the monetization of user data, for example offering scanning tools as a means for getting 3D models of real-world places and objects to be used or sold elsewhere. 

This leads to competing apps having problematic terms of usage, where you might easily end up handing over the rights to everything you scan. Relinquishing of rights can be very problematic especially for professional and commercial use cases. 

Teleport takes a different approach more suited for professional use cases. Our aim is not to harvest user data for any other purpose, and we want to be transparent about how we currently use, and plan to use, the data from the scans that you make.

When you use Teleport, you agree to our overall privacy policy and terms of service. There are also more specific things that we do to protect your content and privacy.

You own the data you upload

All Teleport users own the data they upload to the Teleport site, as well as the models created from that data. Users can delete any scans that they’ve shared on our site at any time. In addition, customers on Professional or Enterprise plans can export the final 3D models and video fly-throughs out of our system and use them as they wish in their own tools (for commercial purposes or otherwise).

We will never sell the scans you make or any parts of those scans (such as individual scanned objects) to anyone.

How we use machine learning to improve Teleport

We use machine learning to continuously improve Teleport’s best-in-class reconstruction quality. One input we use for this is aggregate data from customer scans. 

We do not currently use the data you upload to train any generative models. However, we do think this could be a valuable feature in the future, as it could enable, for example, automatically filling in parts of the scene that were not scanned. If we decide to ever use scans for training generative AI models in the future, users on our Free Plans will have the ability to opt out from it entirely. Data from users on our Professional and Enterprise plans will not be used without their explicit opt-in.

Privacy and usage of scans

Visibility of scans

By default, the scans you upload are not visible to other users. You can choose to share them with other users using Magic Links, or publish them in the public Teleport Gallery. In addition, we will build more granular file access controls for our Enterprise users.

Even when not shared outside your account, the Teleport R&D team may occasionally have a look at your scans for product development purposes. This helps us understand how the product is being used, and to troubleshoot problems with model building. Avoid scanning something that you would not want anyone else to ever look at!

Marketing

If you have published a scan on the Teleport Gallery, we may also showcase it in our marketing materials or on our website. Where the format allows, we always endeavour to credit the creator of that scan.

For any non-published scan, we will secure your explicit permission before using it in any marketing activity.

In conclusion

Teleport offers a user-centric approach to 3D scanning. Our policies do not force you to hand over any rights to the scan data, so you are always in complete control. This makes Teleport a great fit for commercial and professional use cases, where the policies of other scanning applications could cause severe issues. 

If you haven’t tried out Teleport yet, you can get started here.

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