Last updated September 17, 2026
Valor Registry is operated by Heritage Data Labs, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN 42-2118034). We collect what the service needs to work and nothing more, we do not sell anything about you to anyone, and there is no advertising on this site.
Your collection is private by default. Nothing you record about a service member or a medal is visible to anyone but you unless you turn on discoverability for your account, and even then only the fields described below are shown. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information, and we run no advertising networks or retargeting pixels. The one measurement tag on the site is described under Analytics, and it is off for anyone whose browser says not to track them.
To create an account we ask for your name, your email address, and a password. The password is stored only as a one-way bcrypt hash; we cannot read it and we cannot recover it for you, only reset it. We record when you registered, when you verified your email address, when you last logged in, and when you were last active, so that we can tell live accounts from abandoned ones.
You may optionally add a profile: how long you have been collecting, a location, a short bio, and an area of specialization. These are blank unless you fill them in.
The sign-up form has a newsletter box, ticked by default. If you leave it ticked, your email address is added to the Heritage Data Labs mailing list, which is run through Brevo, an email marketing provider. Nothing else about you goes with it. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link, and unticking the box at sign-up means Brevo never hears about you.
The point of the service is the records you create about service members and their medals: names, service numbers, ranks, units, countries, eras, dates and places of birth and death, biographical notes, and the medals themselves. You may also record where a medal came from, what you paid for it, where it is stored, and whether it is for sale. Those last four are private to you in every case — provenance, acquisition price, storage location and sale status are never shown to another user. If you want to publish a provenance note, there is a separate public-provenance field for exactly that.
If you attach images to a record, we store the image file and any caption you give it. Image files are kept with Cloudflare, a storage provider, and are served from a web address that is not listed anywhere and is built from random identifiers, so it cannot be guessed — but it is not behind your login. Anyone you give that address to can open the image without an account, and so could anyone who found it. Please do not upload an image you would not want seen outside your collection.
Please remember that the people in your records are often real and sometimes living. You are responsible for what you enter about them. If a family member asks you to remove a record, we would ask you to honor that, and if they ask us, we will.
Every login attempt, successful or not, is written to an audit log with the email address tried, your IP address, your browser type, and the outcome. This is how we detect password-guessing and account takeover. The log is pruned after roughly 90 days. Separately, repeated failed attempts against an email address or from an IP address are counted for a short window so we can slow them down; that counter carries no other information.
When you log in we set a single cookie holding your refresh token. It is marked httpOnly so that scripts in the page cannot read it, and SameSite so that other websites cannot send it. It carries no name, no email address and no advertising identifier, and it is not used to track you anywhere else. Your short-lived access token is kept in the browser's local storage so that a page refresh does not sign you out; it expires after an hour and logging out removes it. Logging out revokes both.
If a record has medals you have marked as missing, once a day we compare the surname and service numbers on that record against listings from third-party medal marketplaces, and show you any listing that might be the same man. Records you have archived or deleted, and unattributed groups (which have no known name or number), are left out. For most marketplaces we download their catalog and do the comparison on our own servers, so nothing about your record leaves us. eBay has no catalog to download, so for it we send one search to eBay's public search API per record: the record's service number, on its own. No name, no unit, no medal, and nothing that identifies you or your account goes with it, and eBay sees it as a search from Valor Registry, not from you.
What we keep from a match is the listing itself — its address, title, price and which marketplace it is on — plus whether you chose to watch or dismiss it and any note you wrote about it. The link goes to the marketplace's own page. We have no relationship with any of them and receive nothing if you buy.
If you send a contact request to another user, we store who it is from, who it is to, which record it concerns, the message text, and whether it was accepted. The recipient sees it. We do not.
Our web server keeps standard access logs (IP address, timestamp, requested URL, user agent) for security and abuse prevention — detecting scraping, denial of service, and vulnerability scanning. They are not used for analytics or marketing.
This website is delivered through Cloudflare, which sits in front of our own server as a security and speed layer. Your connection is encrypted to Cloudflare, which then passes your request on to us, so every request you make passes through Cloudflare's network first. Cloudflare therefore handles the same things any web host or network provider would: your IP address, your browser type, the pages you ask for, and whatever you submit to the site while it is in transit, such as your password when you log in. We use it to block attacks and automated abuse and to serve files faster. We do not use it for analytics, advertising or profiling. Our own server still sees your real IP address, which is what appears in the login log and the server logs described above. Cloudflare's handling of that traffic is described in its own privacy policy.
We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and to see whether the pages people arrive on lead them to create an account, write to us, or record a service member. That is the whole of it: the three events we send carry no name, email address, or account identifier, and we have turned off Google's advertising features for this property, so it builds no advertising audiences and no remarketing lists from your visit. Google Analytics sets its own cookies to tell returning browsers apart; Google's description of how it handles that data is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
To opt out, turn on Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track in your browser: if either is set, the analytics script is not loaded at all. Google's own browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout also works. Analytics is only loaded on valorregistry.com itself; nothing you do while logged in is tied to your account in it.
By default, nobody but you. Discoverability is off for every new account. If you turn it on, other logged-in users can find your service-member records by name, service details and era, see your public-provenance notes, and send you a contact request. They still cannot see your acquisition prices, private provenance, storage locations, sale status, or anything about your account beyond the display name you chose. You can turn discoverability off again at any time and your records disappear from other users' searches.
Heritage Data Labs staff with administrator access can see account records in order to respond to support requests, investigate abuse, and deactivate accounts that are misusing the service.
Your account and your records are stored on servers in the United States operated for Heritage Data Labs. Image files are stored with Cloudflare, as described above, and Cloudflare also passes your requests to our server, as described under Cloudflare in front of the site. Transactional email (verification and password reset) is sent through Amazon Simple Email Service, which sees your email address for that purpose only. If you opted into the newsletter, Brevo holds your email address for that list. The only other outside service that receives anything derived from your data is eBay's search API, which receives a bare service number as described under Marketplace matches.
You can see and edit everything in your collection and profile from your dashboard, and you can delete any record you created. Depending on where you live you may also have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, or to have your account and everything in it deleted. Write to info@heritagedatalabs.com from the address on your account and we will do it. Deleting your account deletes your records; it does not un-send messages already delivered to other users.
If we change what we collect, we will change this page and the date at the top. Material changes will be noted here rather than made quietly.
Questions about this policy, or about anything on this site, go to info@heritagedatalabs.com. Valor Registry is a project of Heritage Data Labs, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.