Privacy Policy

What we collect

• Email address — if you subscribe to the newsletter or to topic alerts.
• Payment details — if you fund a crawl or take a paid alert subscription. Card data is handled entirely by our payment provider; we never see or store your full card number.
• Messages you send us — the name, email, and text you submit through the contact or correction forms.
• Technical data — limited, short-lived data such as your IP address, used to prevent abuse (rate limiting) and to keep the service secure and working. We use privacy-friendly, aggregate analytics that do not profile individuals.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use tracking or advertising cookies.

Why we use it (legal basis)

• Consent — to send you the newsletter or alerts you asked for. You can withdraw consent at any time (see below).
• Performance of a contract — to process a payment and deliver what you paid for.
• Legitimate interests — to secure the service, prevent abuse, monitor errors, and respond to your messages.

Who we share it with

We do not sell or trade your data. We use a small number of trusted service providers who process data on our behalf, under contract, only to deliver the service. These fall into the following categories:

• a cloud hosting and database provider (to run the site and store data);
• a payment provider (to process payments securely);
• an email delivery provider (to send newsletters and alerts);
• an error-monitoring and analytics provider (to keep the service reliable);
• a bot-protection provider (to stop automated abuse on our forms);
• an AI provider (to research and draft articles — this does not involve your personal data).

Some providers may process data outside the EU/EEA; where they do, appropriate safeguards (such as EU Standard Contractual Clauses) are in place.

How long we keep it

We keep your email for as long as you stay subscribed; once you unsubscribe, we remove or deactivate it. Payment records are kept as long as legally required. Abuse-prevention (rate-limit) data is deleted automatically within a short window. Messages you send us are kept only as long as needed to handle them.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you;
• have it corrected or deleted;
• object to or restrict its processing;
• receive it in a portable format;
• withdraw consent at any time (e.g. via the unsubscribe link in any email).

To exercise any of these, reach us via the contact page. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority (in the Netherlands, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens).

Changes

We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it last changed. Questions? Use the contact page.