BeaconR

The short version

• You don't need an account. We only ask for your name and email if you send us a message.
• We only save your votes if you say yes. Saying no deletes any we've saved.
• No advertising, no analytics, no third-party trackers. We don't sell your data.
• Our contact form uses hCaptcha to keep out spam. It only loads once you start filling in the form.

What we collect

Your votes, if you accept. We give your browser a random ID and store the following on our servers under it:

• your up and down votes on companies, industries, people, and countries. A vote on one of them counts everywhere it appears on the site, not just where you cast it.
• which company cards you've collapsed
• when you accepted, and when you last changed each vote

The ID is random. It isn't based on your name, email, device, or IP address, and we don't store any of those with your votes.

Your votes, if you decline or haven't chosen. You can still vote, but your votes stay in your browser and are never sent to us. They're gone when you reload or leave the site. Suggestions are worked out from saved votes, so you'll only see them if you accept.

Messages you send us. If you use our contact form, we get your name, your email address, and your message, so we can reply. They arrive in our email inbox, and we don't copy them anywhere else.

The contact form's spam check. Once you start filling in the contact form, it loads hCaptcha, a service that tells people from bots. hCaptcha receives your IP address, details about your browser and device, and how you interact with the check, such as mouse movements and key presses. It tells us only whether you passed.

Technical information. To show you any page, our hosting provider's servers receive your IP address and browser details. We use them only to deliver the page and don't keep them. Our servers log errors and system activity for 30 days; those logs don't include your IP address, your voter ID, or anything you send through the contact form. If you send requests straight to our backend API instead of using the website, the API logs each request's IP address and browser details for 30 days, to keep it secure and working.

Cookies

We use two cookies, both our own. Neither can be read by scripts on the page, and neither is shared with anyone else. We don't use any third-party cookies, and hCaptcha, the contact form's spam check, runs without its optional features that store data in your browser.

Why we use it

Data protection law (such as the GDPR) requires a legal basis for each use of personal data. Ours are:

• Saving your votes: your consent. We use your votes only to show them back to you across pages and visits, to leave companies you've voted on out of the Vote page, and to work out your suggestions. We work those out from your saved votes each time you open the Suggestions page, show them only to you, and don't store them.
• The beaconr_consent cookie: needed to respect your choice and to show that you gave or refused consent, which the law requires of us.
• Messages you send us: our legitimate interest in answering them.
• The spam check: our legitimate interest in keeping spam and abuse out of our inbox.
• Logs: our legitimate interest in keeping the site secure and working.

How long we keep it

• Saved votes last as long as your beaconr_uid cookie: 13 months from the last time you accepted. Accepting again restarts that clock for all of them. After that they're deleted automatically, usually within a few days.
• If you decline, or withdraw from Cookie preferences, we delete your saved votes straight away.
• Messages you send us stay in our inbox for as long as we need them to deal with what you asked, and then we delete them.
• Logs are deleted after 30 days.
• Backups: our database keeps automatic backups for 35 days, so deleted votes can stay in them for up to 35 days. We only use backups to recover from failures.

Who we share it with

We don't sell your data or share it for advertising. These companies handle it for us, under data processing agreements:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) runs our servers, database, and logs, and delivers messages from the contact form to our inbox.
• Zoho hosts our email, so messages you send us are stored there.
• Intuition Machines, Inc. runs hCaptcha, the contact form's spam check. hCaptcha's privacy policy explains what it does with what it collects.

We'd also disclose information if the law required it.

Links to Wikipedia and Wikidata take you to sites that have their own privacy policies. We don't send them anything about you.

Where it's stored

Our servers and database are in the United States, in AWS's US West (N. California) region, and our email is hosted in Zoho's US data centers. hCaptcha runs on servers around the world. If you're in the EU, EEA, or UK, your data is transferred to the US under each company's data processing terms, which include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or export your data, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing doesn't affect anything we did before you withdrew.

Your saved votes are in your hands. You can see them all on your My Profile page and change them at any time. To delete them all, choose Cookie preferences, then Decline. That deletes everything saved from your browser straight away, and we stop saving your votes.

Your votes are linked only to the random ID in your cookie, so we can't find them from a message, whether by your name, your email, or how you voted. That's why deleting them happens in the browser you voted from, not through us. If you've cleared your cookies or switched browsers, nobody can tell which votes were yours, us included. They're still deleted automatically when they expire.

Messages you've sent us are different: we can find them by the email address you sent them from. Ask through the contact form and we'll show you or delete them.

If you're in the EU, EEA, or UK, you can also complain to your local data protection authority.

California residents

We don't sell or share your personal information, as California law defines those terms, and we don't use it for targeted advertising. Apart from hCaptcha checking for bots while you use the contact form, no third parties collect information about what you do on BeaconR over time or across other sites. Because we don't track you across sites, there's nothing for a Do Not Track signal to switch off, so we don't change anything in response to one.

Children

BeaconR isn't aimed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them. If a child has saved votes here, choose Cookie preferences, then Decline, in the browser they used, and they'll be deleted straight away.

Security

All traffic to BeaconR is encrypted with HTTPS, our cookies can't be read by scripts on the page, and our database is encrypted at rest. Messages from the contact form are only delivered to our inbox over an encrypted connection.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we'll update the date at the top. If we change what we collect or how we use it, we'll say so on the site and, where the law requires it, ask for your consent again.