Privacy

What Trawl collects, why, and how to have it removed.

Trawl collects what creators have published themselves: public posts, channel descriptions and bios, the audience figures a platform shows, and the contact details creators put in those places on purpose. It reads public pages and public platform interfaces. It signs in as nobody, and it does not touch private channels, closed groups or direct messages.

The purpose is narrow: helping a client find channels worth approaching with an advertising offer. The legal basis is legitimate interest — a business contact is published in order to be contacted about business.

What is stored per channel: its name and handle, the platform, published audience figures, the language, any published contact details, and excerpts of the public material a score rests on — so that a score can be explained rather than merely asserted.

Data is kept while it is relevant to an active search. Deleting a search deletes everything collected for it, and a client who stops using Trawl has their searches removed along with their access.

Anyone whose channel appears in Trawl may ask for their data to be removed. Write to the operator — the address that invited the client whose search collected it — and name the channel. The data is deleted and the channel is not collected again.

Nothing is sold, and nothing is handed to a third party for their own use. What a search collects is visible to the client running it and to whoever operates this deployment.

Collection uses third-party services for web search and platform access. They see the queries sent to them, which are words and channel addresses, not who asked.

Figures and scores are read out of public text and can be wrong or out of date. That is what the removal request above is for, and it is why the material each score rests on is shown beside it.