Privacy Policy

This policy covers shortlistedaeo.com and the Shortlisted app. The operator of Shortlisted decides how your personal data is used (the “controller” or “data fiduciary”). Assumption: that is Ashish Sharma, a sole proprietor in India trading as Lakhera Global Services.

Paddle, our merchant of record, handles payments and is responsible for the payment data it collects under its own privacy policy. We never see your full card number.

Account

Name, email, phone number, a hash of your password (never the password), or your Google account's name, email and profile photo if you sign in with Google. Used to sign you in, secure your account and contact you about it.

Workspace setup

Your brand's name, domains and other names, your competitors, brand facts you add (prices, plans, features, integrations), the buyer questions you track, fixes and their status, AI drafts, and the email addresses of people you invite. Used to run the service you asked for.

AI engine answers

The answers engines give to your questions and the pages they cite. These are public outputs about companies, not data about you, but they can mention people by name.

Answer checks (paid plans, once switched on)

To check AI answers that name your brand against your brand facts, we send OpenAI your brand's name and other names, your brand facts, and the parts of the answer that name your brand (at most 3,000 characters), with OpenAI's storage of the request turned off. Assumption: OpenAI may still keep API requests for up to 30 days to monitor abuse. We keep the sentences (at most 240 characters each) that contradict a fact, the fact as it was checked, and who in your workspace confirmed or dismissed them. Up to five of those sentences also sit in our background-job provider's run history until its own retention removes them (Assumption: the period is to be confirmed).

Free check

The domain and category you check, any questions and names you edit, a salted one-way hash of your IP address, campaign tags in the link you arrived from, and, if you unlock the full report, your email address and whether you ticked the box for marketing emails. The domain, category and questions are sent to OpenAI to suggest questions and names, and the questions to the AI engines. Used to run the check and send you the report. We email marketing only if you ticked the box and confirmed your address from the link we sent.

Google Analytics (only if you connect it)

Read-only access to the Google Analytics account of the admin who connects it; we read reports only from the one property they pick. We store daily session counts from known AI assistants (such as chatgpt.com) and the property's name, never visitor-level data, and an encrypted Google token to read them weekly. Disconnecting in Settings, removing the person who connected it, or deleting the workspace deletes the counts and the token and asks Google to end our access. Shortlisted's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Billing

Your plan, subscription status, Paddle's customer and subscription ids, and the subscription events Paddle sends us. Paddle holds your payment details.

Security and usage

A salted one-way hash of your IP address and email for rate limits, a log of team and settings changes, sign-in records, error reports and named product events. Used to keep the service safe and working, and to improve it.

Our legal bases are the contract with you (running the service), our legitimate interest (security, fixing errors, improving the product) and your consent where we ask for it. We don't sell personal data and don't use it for advertising. Assumption: these bases cover both GDPR and India's DPDP Act.

Apart from analytics (below), our cookies keep the app working: one keeps you signed in, one remembers your active workspace, short-lived ones carry a Google sign-in or a team invitation, and one remembers whether the app's sidebar is open. The sign-in cookies are httpOnly, and we store only a hash of the sign-in token. Your light or dark theme choice is kept in your browser's local storage. While you set up, the app keeps your unsaved onboarding entries in that browser tab's session storage (cleared when the tab closes or you sign out), and a short-lived note there decides where to put the focus after a free report unlocks. We don't use advertising cookies.

Product analytics (PostHog), once switched on, set no cookies and store nothing in your browser, so there is no cookie banner. PostHog says it tells visits apart by a hash of your IP address and browser details, computed on its servers with a key that changes daily. Analytics record no automatic clicks and no session recordings, only events we name (such as a free report being submitted). Assumption: how that hash works is PostHog's description, and whether PostHog can also discard the IP address from what it stores is to be confirmed before analytics go live.

These companies process data on our behalf, only for the purpose listed:

• Supabase: database and file storage
• Vercel: website and app hosting
• Inngest: background jobs
• Resend: sending email
• DataForSEO: asking AI engines your questions
• OpenAI: asking ChatGPT your questions, reading answers, writing drafts and checking answers that name your brand against your brand facts
• Cloudflare: domain and bot protection on public forms (Assumption: not set up yet)
• Sentry: error reports
• PostHog: named product events
• Paddle: payments, invoices and tax

Some are outside your country, including in the United States, so data may be transferred there under their standard contractual safeguards. Our database and app servers run in the United States (US East). Assumption: each provider's data processing agreement is still to be signed.

We keep your data while your account is open. AI answers, their text and the raw copies we stored are deleted automatically 13 months after we collected them. We keep what we calculated from them: the counts and ranges, and the links each answer cited and the names it mentioned. Sentences quoted from an answer by an answer check are deleted with it. A workspace's owner can delete it in Settings once any paid plan has ended: it disappears for every member at once, and it and all its data, stored files included, are removed for good 30 days later. Assumption: our database provider's backups can hold deleted data for up to 7 more days. Paddle keeps invoices and tax records; we keep the billing events Paddle sends us as long as tax law requires (Assumption: the period is to be confirmed). A free check's AI answers are deleted 30 days after the check, and the report itself (its link and results) after 90 days. The email address you gave to unlock it goes with the report, unless you ticked the box for marketing emails and confirmed it from our link: then we keep it until you ask us to delete it by email.

You can ask to see, correct, export or delete your personal data, object to or limit how we use it, and withdraw consent. A workspace owner can delete the workspace in Settings; for anything else, email support@shortlistedaeo.com and we'll reply within 30 days. You can also complain to your data protection authority. Every weekly email has a one-click unsubscribe link.

Grievance officer (India): the founder, at support@shortlistedaeo.com.

Data is encrypted in transit, passwords are stored only as hashes, and each workspace's data is kept apart from every other's. Shortlisted is for businesses and isn't meant for anyone under 18.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll email account owners before it applies. Questions: support@shortlistedaeo.com, or see the Contact page.