Privacy

Who is responsible

Not yet named for this deployment.

What is collected

Two things are required, because the product cannot work without them:

• Your email addressUsed to sign you in and to tell you about meetings. Never shown to other members unless you switch it on yourself.
• Which communities you belong toA community is the boundary of who can see you.

Everything else is optional and starts switched off. You choose each one separately, for each community: your name, photo, headline, employer, role, industry, function, city, LinkedIn address, email address and phone number.

If you never grant your name, you are not listed at all — no pin, no entry, nothing.

Your city, not your location

AskAround never asks your device where you are. You type a city, and the map shows the centre of that city — the same point for everyone in it. Your address is not collected and could not be shown.

Photographs are re-encoded when you upload them, which removes the location data cameras and phones write into image files. The picture other members see cannot reveal where it was taken.

What is kept about how you use it

• Sign-in sessionsSo you stay signed in, and so you can be signed out everywhere if you need to be.
• A record of every consent changeWhen you switched a field on or off, for each community. This is what lets you check that the platform did what you asked, and it is why the record is kept rather than overwritten.
• Meetings you arrangeTimes, participants and any note you write.
• Rate-limiting countersShort-lived counts used to stop somebody hammering sign-in or search.

Who else sees it

Other members of your communities see exactly the fields you granted them, and nothing else. Members of one community cannot see what you granted to another.

There is one deliberate exception, and it is worth being plain about. When a meeting is confirmed, the calendar invite sent to everyone on it carries each participant's name and email address, because that is what a calendar invite is. Requesting or accepting a meeting means agreeing to that with the people on that meeting — nobody else. If you would rather not, decline; declining shares nothing.

A small number of services are used to run the platform:

• The hosting and database providerHolds everything above, encrypted in transit and at rest.
• The email providerReceives your address in order to deliver sign-in links and meeting notices.
• MapboxDraws the map and turns a city name into a point. It receives the city name you type and, when the map loads, your browser’s network address. It does not receive your profile.
• AnthropicRanks members against a question when you ask one. It receives your question and a shortlist of profiles, with email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn addresses and photographs removed first. Your question is not used to train models and is not kept for training.

Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared for advertising. There is no advertising.

How long it is kept

Your profile is kept while your account exists. Sign-in sessions expire on their own. Rate-limiting counters are discarded within a day. The consent record is kept for as long as your account exists, because its whole purpose is to be checkable later.

What you can do

• Change your mind, at any timeSwitch any field off in your profile. It disappears from the directory, the map and search immediately — including from photographs already loaded in someone’s browser.
• See what is heldYour profile shows everything you have entered, and the consent record shows every change you have made.
• Leave a communityYou vanish from it entirely while keeping your account.
• Delete your accountYour profile, your photograph and your contact details are erased. What survives is an opaque identifier in the consent record, so that the history of who agreed to what remains truthful — it can no longer be connected to you.
• ComplainIf you are in the UK or the EU you may complain to your data protection authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The legal basis

Your email address and membership are processed to provide a service you asked for. Every optional field is processed on your consent, given per field and per community, and withdrawn the moment you switch it off.

Security

Your browser never talks to the database; every read is decided on the server against the rules above. Sign-in is by a single-use emailed link rather than a password, so there is no password to steal. Sessions can be revoked and stop working immediately.