What we collect, and what we publish

Records about companies

We publish a record for websites and the organisations behind them. Those records are built from public sources: public DNS and registration data, TLS certificates, email authentication settings, published traffic rankings, public link-graph data, and the content a site publishes on its own pages.

These records are about organisations and their websites, not about private individuals. Where a public source happens to contain a person’s name or contact details — a registrant contact, or the name of whoever replied to an email — we redact it rather than publish it.

When we email a business

One of the things we measure is whether a company actually responds to people who contact it. To measure that honestly, we may send a genuine customer-style enquiry to a business we profile, using an ordinary email address that does not identify AboutUs. If the address announced itself as a research programme, companies would answer it differently and the measurement would be worthless.

We think the honest way to do this is to be completely open about the programme while keeping individual messages unmarked. So: the method, what we ask, how we grade replies, and how we publish them are all documented at methodology/responsiveness.

• We send one real question, at most one polite follow-up, and then stop.
• We contact published business channels only — never a personal address.
• We never place orders, never transact, and never waste a company’s money.
• Any reply asking us to stop is honoured immediately and permanently.
• Replies are stored with personal names and contact details redacted.

A business can ask to be excluded from this at any time — see how to reach us below — and we will not contact it again.

Information you give us

If you claim a profile, propose a correction, or contact us, we keep what you submit so we can act on it: typically an email address, the domain concerned, and whatever you wrote. Claiming ownership also involves proving control of a domain through a DNS record, which we check and record the result of.

We use that information to process your request and to keep an audit trail of changes to a record. We do not sell it, and we do not use it for advertising. Verified owners may receive an occasional email about owner tools for their verified site, and can stop these emails by replying “stop”.

Owner accounts and Watch

When you sign in with Google, we receive your account email, name, and profile image when provided. We use these to identify your owner account and connect it to domains whose ownership you have verified. We also keep the name, email, and role you submit with a claim, verification results, and account activity needed to operate these services.

For Watch, we process the domains you monitor, public website and DNS observations, homepage text, screenshots, dated changes, and your monitoring preferences. Homepage captures can include personal information already published on that website. Private Watch history is available through authenticated owner access; the underlying public website information can also be used in AboutUs public records.

We use dns.pizza to run monitoring checks and provide evidence, and service providers to host data and deliver email. An enabled weekly brief shares your recipient address and the brief’s contents with our email delivery provider. We retain notification preferences and delivery records to honour your choices and diagnose delivery problems. You can turn off Watch emails in Watch settings; this does not stop billing receipts or other necessary account messages.

Cancelling a subscription or pausing Watch does not itself delete your account or saved records. To request access, correction, or deletion of your personal information, use the contact below. Payment records held by Stripe are subject to Stripe’s own retention requirements and privacy policy.

Payments

Stripe collects payment and billing information on its hosted checkout and billing pages. We share your account email, name when available, and the domain and plan being purchased so it can process and associate the subscription. AboutUs keeps customer and subscription identifiers, plan and payment status, renewal or end dates, and transaction event records. Billing may display a card brand and last four digits returned by Stripe; AboutUs does not collect full card numbers or card security codes.

Purchases identified as Sold through Link use Stripe Managed Payments for payment, taxes, transaction support, and related receipts and subscription messages. Stripe and Link process information under Stripe’s privacy policy. Watch email preferences are separate from these billing communications.

Analytics

We use PostHog and Vercel Analytics to understand which pages get used. We have deliberately configured this to collect as little as possible: automatic event capture is switched off, we record page paths rather than building behavioural profiles of anonymous visitors, and we do not run advertising trackers.

This processing is done on the basis of our legitimate interest in understanding whether the site works. If you are in a jurisdiction that gives you a right to object to that, you can — write to us and we will honour it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted. Write to us and we will respond.

Separately from personal-data rights: if a record about your company is wrong, you do not need a legal basis to get it fixed. Tell us and we will correct it, or claim the record and correct it yourself. Getting facts right is the entire point of the site.

How to reach us

Email privacy@aboutus.com for anything on this page — corrections, deletion requests, objections to analytics, or to be excluded from response-time measurement.