Privacy Policy

1. Who we are, and our role

MentionChecker is a service of MentionLift Ltd, a company incorporated in England and Wales under company number 17438016, whose registered office is at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom (“MentionChecker”, “we”, “us”). MentionChecker is supplied to businesses and organisations; see clause 2 of the Terms of Service.

We are the controller of your account information, our billing records, our server and security records, our website measurement records, and the public web content and AI answers the service collects in order to produce your reports. Where your own configuration causes us to process personal information on your behalf, we are your processor and act only on your instructions. Our processing terms for that role are available on request.

Contact us about this policy, or about information we hold, at privacy@mentionchecker.com.

2. Information we collect

Account information. Your email address. We do not receive or store a password; sign-in is by a one-time link sent to your email address or by Google, and by no other method. If you sign in with Google we receive your email address, an indication of whether Google has verified it, your Google account identifier, and the name and picture on your Google profile. We request only the openid, email and profile scopes and no other Google data.

Your brands and configuration. The website address you enter; the brand name, its spellings, a short description and the proposed questions we derive from reading that website's public pages; the questions you keep, edit or write; the country you select; the AI engines you select; and any repeat schedule.

The answers the AI engines return. For each question in a check, the answer returned by each AI engine, in full, together with the names it mentions, the sources it cites, and the counts and rankings we compute from them. This material constitutes your report. It may contain the names of companies, products and, occasionally, individuals; see section 3.

People you invite. The email address of each person you invite into your account, the role assigned to them, the identity of the person who invited them, and the date.

Billing information. Our payment processor collects and holds payment card details; we do not receive or store them. We hold a customer reference, a record of each purchase (pack, amount and date), your credit balance, and a ledger of the credits consumed by each check.

Email delivery records. Whether an email we sent was delivered and, where an address has permanently rejected our email, a record preventing further sending to it.

Technical and security records. Server logs containing IP address, time and the page or endpoint requested; and short-lived rate-limit counters, keyed to an IP address or account, used to prevent abuse of the free allocation.

Website measurement. Records of how our website and application are used. Section 6 sets out what these contain and what we deliberately do not keep.

Correspondence. Anything you send us by email or through the contact form.

We do not ask for a name, a company name, a telephone number, a date of birth or a job title.

3. Information about persons who are not our customers

The service puts questions about a market to AI engines and records the answers. Those answers name companies, products and websites, and may name an individual, such as a sole trader, a practitioner or an author. The service also reads the public pages of the website a customer enters, which may be an individual's own website.

We process that information as controller on the basis of our legitimate interests and those of our customers, namely enabling an organisation to learn what AI engines say about it and about the alternatives they present. We have assessed that interest against the interests and rights of the persons concerned and have limited the processing accordingly. We collect only what an AI engine returns to any person who asks, and only publicly accessible web pages. We hold the material only within the account of the customer whose check produced it, and delete it with that account. We do not construct profiles of individuals, we do not combine material collected for different customers, and we do not sell or publish it. Clause 8 of the Terms of Service prohibits customers from using the service to monitor or target individuals.

A person named in an answer or a report may object to this processing and have the material removed; see section 9. No account with us is required and no reason need be given.

4. Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We use the information in section 2 to run the checks you request and present the results; to propose questions and identify the names an answer mentions; to retain your history so that a later check can show what has changed; to take payment and maintain your balance; to send you the sign-in link, the invitations you ask us to send, and messages concerning your checks, your schedule, your balance and the expiry of your credits; to respond to your correspondence; to operate, secure and improve the service and diagnose faults; to understand how our website is used; to tell you about MentionChecker as described in section 5; and to notify you of material changes to the service or to this policy.

Your information. Our lawful basis is performance of our contract with you; our legitimate interests in keeping the service secure, functioning and free of abuse, in understanding how it is used, and in telling our customers about it; our legal obligations in respect of tax and accounting; and your consent where we ask for it.

Information about other persons. Legitimate interests, as set out in section 3.

5. Marketing

Because you hold an account with us, we may send you email about MentionChecker: new features, changes to the service, pricing, and offers. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in telling our customers about the service they use; where the law requires it, we rely on the fact that you supplied your email address in the course of opening an account and were given the opportunity to decline such messages at that time. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and you may also decline by writing to privacy@mentionchecker.com. We act on a request to unsubscribe promptly.

Messages concerning your account, your checks, your schedule, your balance, the expiry of your credits, security, and changes to our terms or to this policy are service messages and not marketing. They are sent for as long as you hold an account and are not affected by unsubscribing. We do not sell or rent our customer list and we do not send email on behalf of third parties.

6. Cookies and website measurement

Strictly necessary cookies. The following cookies are set by us on our own domain, are required for the service to function, and are not used for tracking. None is readable by any other company.

Website measurement. We measure the use of our own website and application. The measurement is entirely first-party: it runs on our own domain, the records are written to our own database, and no third party receives them. For each page view we may record the page, the page you arrived from, any campaign parameters in the link, your approximate location derived from your IP address (continent, country, region, city, postal district and network operator), your device type, browser, operating system, screen size, language and colour-scheme preference, together with how long the page was visible, how far you scrolled, what you clicked, and how quickly the page loaded. In the application we record which screens are used and which actions are taken, attributed to your account.

We do not store your IP address. At the moment a request is handled it is converted into an irreversible code that incorporates the date and a secret we hold, and the address itself is discarded. That code changes every day. To recognise a returning visitor across days we set a first-party identifier cookie, mc_uid, on our own domain, containing a random value and nothing else. It is set without asking, it is not readable by any script on the page, it is never sent to any other company, it is not used for advertising, and it lasts two years from your last visit. It is shared between mentionchecker.com and app.mentionchecker.com so that a visit and the account it leads to are recorded once rather than twice. You may remove it at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser, and a browser set to refuse cookies is not prevented from reading this website. A second cookie, mc_int, marks a browser belonging to our own staff so that our visits are excluded from the figures; it is never set in a customer's browser without their asking for it.

Advertising. We may advertise MentionChecker elsewhere, and we may use advertising services that show our advertisements to people who have visited this website. Where we do so, that service places a tag on this website and receives a record of your visit. Any such tag loads only after you have agreed to it. In the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area we ask first; if you decline, or do not answer, no advertising tag is loaded. As at the effective date of this version no advertising or retargeting tag runs on this website; we will update this policy, and the choice offered to you, before one does. We do not sell personal information and we do not pass it to data brokers.

Website measurement records are retained for 25 months and then deleted.

7. Who can see it, and who we share it with

We do not sell personal information and we do not pass it to data brokers. Members of our staff may open a customer's account in a read-only view in order to respond to a support request or investigate a fault. That access is restricted to named staff, cannot consume credits or alter the account, and is logged.

Running a check requires the questions to be put to the AI engines you select, and those questions therefore leave our systems. Beyond the AI engines, we use a small number of processors, each performing one function on our behalf:

Each processor is bound by a data processing agreement and may use the information only to provide its service to us. Content sent to be read is not used by the provider to train its models under the terms we hold. We also disclose information where required by law or by a competent authority, and to a purchaser or successor if the business or its assets are transferred, in which case this policy continues to apply until you are notified otherwise.

8. How long we keep it

Your account, brands, questions, answers and reports are retained until you delete them. Deleting a brand deletes its questions, checks and reports. Deleting your account deletes all information held under it, including the answers collected for your reports and the email addresses of the people you invited, within 30 days, save that we retain purchase and credit records for as long as tax and accounting law requires, and a record of a permanently rejecting email address for as long as it serves to prevent further sending.

Rate-limit counters are discarded after 24 hours. Server logs are retained for a short operational period and then deleted. Website measurement records are retained for 25 months. A one-time sign-in link expires 15 minutes after it is issued, whether or not it is used.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, export or restrict the personal information we hold about you, to object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests, and to object at any time to direct marketing. The account owner may download all information held in the account, and delete the account, from within the application. For any other request write to privacy@mentionchecker.com; we will respond within one month. You may also lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority, which in the United Kingdom is the Information Commissioner's Office.

If you are named in an answer or a report and wish the material removed from our systems, or wish the pages of your website excluded from checks, write to privacy@mentionchecker.com or legal@mentionchecker.com identifying the name or the address concerned. No account with us is required and no reason need be given. This is also the means of objecting to the processing described in section 3.

10. Security

Information is encrypted in transit and at rest. Sign-in tokens are stored only as one-way hashes. Access to production systems is restricted to those who require it, and staff access to customer accounts is read-only and logged. No system is entirely secure. If a breach affects you, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by law.

11. International transfers

Our database is hosted in the European Union, as is the process that runs checks. The AI engines and some of the processors listed in section 7 process the questions, and in some cases your email address, in the United States. Where information is transferred outside the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area we rely on an adequacy decision or on standard contractual clauses, together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum where applicable.

12. Age

MentionChecker is supplied to businesses and organisations and is not offered to anyone under 18. It is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect a child's information, and we delete it if we learn that we have.

13. Changes to this policy

Each version of this policy bears a version number and an effective date, stated at the head of this page. The version applicable to any processing is the version in force at the time.

Amendments which correct or clarify, and which do not reduce your rights, take effect on publication. A material amendment takes effect not less than 30 days after notice is sent to the email address on your account. If you do not accept a material amendment, delete your account before it takes effect. Superseded versions are retained and are available on request.

14. Contact

Data protection, removal requests and objections: privacy@mentionchecker.com
Legal notice: legal@mentionchecker.com
Postal address: MentionLift Ltd, 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom (company number 17438016, registered in England and Wales)