Privacy

So that we can tell a customer when their own organisation is named. That is the product. Matching a published name against a customer requires holding the published name — there is no version of this that works on counts alone.

Indefinitely. We are saying so plainly rather than leaving it as an undocumented default, because "we never got round to deleting it" and "we decided to keep it" deserve different words.

The reason is the one above, moved forward in time: a company that signs up in two years needs matching against posts published before it had an account. A post from three years ago is exactly what a new customer wants surfaced on their first day, and a retention window would have quietly thrown it away. A record leaves when we decide it should not have been stored, not on a timer — see below.

• No public surface carries a name. The public statistics are counts by day, country, sector and group, read from aggregate tables that have no name column in them. Not in charts, tooltips, the public JSON, RSS, sitemaps, link previews or error messages.
• There is no lookup by company name, at any tier. No endpoint, parameter, filter or internal tool takes an organisation name and answers whether it appears in this data — not for signed-in users, not for a paid plan, not on request. That feature would turn this into a targeting aid, and we will not build it. Listing a country’s claims is a different question and is described above; asking about a named company is the one we refuse.
• A signed-in customer sees matches for their own organisation, and can read a country’s list of claimed names. Matches to their own account are scoped to domains they have proved control of. Separately, an organisation that has proved control of its domain and accepted terms covering this specific data can list the claims recorded for a country and a window, with the names as published. That access is capped per day, and every read writes an audit row recording which organisation, which person, which country and which names were on the screen.
• Inside the company, reading a name needs a separate operator role with its own credential and a mandatory second factor — a role no customer account can hold. Every read writes an audit row recording who read what and when, and those rows are append-only: no code path updates or deletes one.

• We do not publish these names to the public, to search engines, or to anyone who has not proved they are an organisation and accepted terms covering them. There is no anonymous access to a name, and no name-keyed search for anybody.
• We do not sell this data, license it, or hand it to a third party.
• We do not contact an organisation because it turned up in the data. If your company is named in a record of ours, you will not get an email from us about it. A vendor that emails a company to say a criminal group has named it, and offers to help for a fee, is hard to tell apart from the pressure the group is already applying. We notify customers about their own organisation, and nobody else about anything.
• We do not assert that a named organisation was compromised. A post is an assertion by a criminal group, and every place this data surfaces says so.

Write to abuse@localhost from an address at that organisation's own domain, or with the same proof of control we ask a customer for — a DNS TXT record at the apex of the domain, or a token file served over HTTPS from it.

We ask because of the bullet above. Telling anyone who writes in whether a given organisation appears in this data is the lookup we refuse to build, run by hand instead of over HTTP, and it would be most useful to the two people who should never have it: somebody picking a target, and somebody looking for leverage over a competitor. So we do not answer either way for a stranger. Stopping our scanner is a different question and needs no proof of anything — that request we act on from anyone, because acting on it can only make us do less.

Once the connection is shown, we will tell you what we hold against that name, correct it if it is wrong, and remove it if you ask us to. A person handles this; there is no self-service button, and there is not going to be one.

Removal is a flag rather than a delete, and that is deliberate: the record stays marked as removed so a later read of the same post cannot quietly bring it back. It disappears from every internal view, from the counts behind the public statistics, and from the matching that would otherwise raise it against an organisation. It does not come back on its own, and putting it back is not something anyone here can do from a screen.

One thing is worth knowing before you ask. If your organisation later signs up, we will have nothing to match against, so we could not tell you the post had existed.

What we cannot do is take the post down. We did not publish it and the group's site is not ours to touch.