Your privacy, in plain terms.

This Privacy Policy applies to personal information about:

• visitors to our websites, including our lookup pages and our public phone number pages;
• people who start a search or give us their email address;
• customers with a StoryCheck account, trial, or membership;
• people whose information appears in StoryCheck reports or on our public phone number pages (“report subjects”); and
• anyone who contacts us or makes a privacy or removal request.

If you live in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, our EU and EEA Privacy Notice or UK Privacy Notice also applies to you and explains our legal bases and your rights in more detail. This policy does not cover websites or services run by others, such as social networks or the original sources of images, which have their own privacy policies.

• What we collect. Contact and account details, search inputs and answers, purchase and payment records, device and usage data, communications, and, to build reports, information about report subjects from data providers and public sources.
• Why. To provide reports and memberships, take payment, support you, keep StoryCheck secure, market and improve our service, measure our advertising, and comply with the law.
• Selling and sharing. We do not sell customer information for money. We share customer identifiers and activity with advertising partners, and providing reports to customers can count as a “sale” of report subjects’ information under some US state laws. See Sale and sharing to opt out.
• How long. Only as long as needed for these purposes. Specific periods are in How long we keep personal information.
• Your choices. Unsubscribe from marketing, manage cookies, opt out of sale and sharing, get a copy of or delete your data at storycheck.com/data-request, and remove your information from StoryCheck at storycheck.com/opt-out.

Report information is gathered from our data partners and public sources when a customer runs a search. We keep the finished report so the customer can open it again, and we keep only what we need to run StoryCheck, for as long as we need it:

• Reports are deleted automatically 12 months after they are created, and breach details inside a report are removed after 90 days.
• Search records. The phone number, email address, or name searched (for a name, also the details the customer gave to find the right person, such as an age range and where the person lives), when it was searched, and the preview shown before purchase (such as a possible name, age range, and general location). Records that did not lead to a report are deleted after 90 days.
• Partner results cache. Results from some of our data partners are kept for up to 90 days, or 14 days when nothing was found, so the same lookup is not repeated.
• Images are not saved. Photos and page screenshots in a report load from their original source when the report is shown. Our hosting network may cache an image for up to 7 days to deliver it.
• Uploaded photos are deleted within hours. A photo you upload for an image search is deleted when the search finishes, and in any case within 7 hours.
• Session recordings never include report pages and are deleted after 14 days.
• Card numbers never reach our servers. Our payment processors collect and hold your card details.
• Records the law requires are kept. Account, purchase, and acceptance records are kept for as long as the law and handling disputes require, as described in How long we keep personal information.

• Contact and account details: your email address, and your name if you give it to us or to our payment processor.
• Search inputs: the phone numbers, email addresses, names, and other details you enter to run or add to a search, and your answers to optional questions, such as why you are searching. Your inputs and answers can reveal information about you and about the person you are searching for.
• Images: photos you upload to run a reverse image search.
• Purchases: what you buy, prices, currency, trial and renewal dates, credits, cancellations, refunds, and payment disputes. Our payment processors collect your card or other payment details, and we do not receive or store full card numbers. We receive limited information from them, such as the type of payment method, whether a digital wallet was used, the country of the payment method, and whether a payment succeeded or was declined and why.
• Acceptance records: when you accept our Terms or confirm a purchase, we record the date and time, your IP address, your browser and device details, the versions of our Terms and Privacy Policy, and the purchase terms recorded for your checkout.
• Communications: messages you send us, cancellation reasons, ratings and feedback, and reviews you choose to leave.
• Privacy and removal requests: the email address, phone number, or name and description of a person the request is about, the email address we send a verification code to, verification details (we store verification codes only in scrambled form), and the history of the request.

• Device and connection: IP address, the approximate location it indicates (such as your country), browser, device type, operating system, screen size, and language.
• Usage: the pages and reports you view, the steps you take on our site, clicks, time spent, errors, and whether you started or finished a checkout.
• Referral and advertising data: the website, ad, or email that brought you to us, campaign parameters, and ad click identifiers from partners such as Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, and AppLovin.
• Session recordings: how you interact with our pages, as described in Cookies, pixels, and session recordings.
• Email engagement: whether you opened our emails and which links you clicked. Links in our emails contain information that lets us recognize you when you visit.
• Browser storage: identifiers kept in cookies and local storage, such as a visitor ID, a session ID, your sign-in session, your consent choices, your language and country, and, once you have given it to us, your email address for advertising measurement.

• Data providers and public sources: information used to build reports, as described in Information about people who are searched.
• Payment processors and card networks: payment status, renewals, refunds, disputes and chargebacks, and updated card details.
• Advertising partners: information about how our ads performed, which may be linked to click identifiers.
• Other StoryCheck customers: details a customer gives us about you when they search for you, such as your phone number, email address, name, or photo.

A StoryCheck report is about the person who owns or uses a phone number or email address that a customer looks up, or the person a customer looks up by name. To build it, we combine the details the customer gave us with information from licensed data and technology providers, public websites, search engines and online platforms, and our own automated checks. Depending on what these sources return, a report may include:

• names, usernames, email addresses, and phone numbers linked to the number, email address, or name searched;
• age or age range and gender, where a source provides them;
• approximate location, such as city, region, or country, and general areas of public activity shown on a map (we do not show home street addresses);
• phone line details, such as carrier, line type, and signs of a recent SIM change for some US numbers;
• employment details, such as employer and job title;
• online accounts and public profile information on social media, messaging, professional, dating, adult, and other websites, including profile photos, bios, follower counts, and activity dates, and whether an email address is registered on particular websites;
• publicly available images, and the results of reverse image searches;
• mentions on public web pages and comments posted publicly online, which can include allegations that no one has verified;
• data breach information: known breaches in which the email address or phone number appears, the types of data exposed, and partially masked password fragments;
• spam, scam, and risk signals, such as whether a number is VoIP or prepaid, and listings on people-search websites; and
• information we generate, such as confidence scores, risk scores, and AI-written summaries.

We use this information to create reports for customers who search for the number, email address, or name, to publish public phone number pages that show general information about a number (such as its country, region, and line type), to keep reports accurate, to prevent misuse, to honor removal requests, and to comply with the law. Report contents are disclosed to the customer who requested the report and to our service providers. You can ask us which specific sources provided information about you.

When we confirm a removal request, we stop producing reports that match the phone number or email address, delete stored reports, search records, and cached partner results that match it, and remove the public page for that phone number. For a removal by name, we stop showing the person described in the request in name searches and delete the stored name reports and search records about them. Reports are otherwise deleted 12 months after they are created, and breach information inside a report is removed after 90 days.

• To provide StoryCheck: run searches, build and deliver reports and previews, maintain your account, and provide customer support.
• For payments and memberships: take payments, manage trials, renewals, credits, cancellations, and refunds, and prevent payment fraud, for example by declining certain prepaid cards.
• To set prices and language: estimate your country from your IP address or payment details to show the right language, currency, and prices, and to decide which offers are available to you. Across the countries we serve, trial access currently costs about US$1 to US$4.50 and membership about US$9 to US$41 per billing period, billed weekly or monthly; the price that applies to you is always shown at checkout.
• To test and improve StoryCheck: run tests of prices, trial lengths, page designs, emails, report layouts, and data sources, and analyze how StoryCheck is used, including through session recordings, to fix problems and improve the service.
• To communicate with you: send service emails and marketing emails, and measure how our emails perform.
• For advertising: measure and improve our ads, including cross-context behavioral advertising, with our advertising partners.
• For security and to prevent misuse: detect and prevent fraud, abuse, scraping, and breaches of our Terms, enforce usage limits, and protect people from misuse of StoryCheck.
• For legal reasons and disputes: comply with the law, respond to lawful requests, keep tax and accounting records, respond to chargebacks and payment disputes (including by giving our payment processor and your card issuer records of your purchase, your acceptance of our Terms, and your use of StoryCheck), and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
• To create de-identified information: information that no longer identifies anyone, which we may use for any purpose. We keep de-identified information in that form and do not attempt to re-identify it.

When you give us your email address, for example to see the results of a search, we may send you marketing emails about that search, our offers, and StoryCheck features. If you start a checkout but do not finish it, or if you cancel a membership, we may send you emails inviting you back. These emails can mention the phone number or email address you searched and details from its preview.

You can unsubscribe at any time with the link in any marketing email, with the unsubscribe button your email app may show, or by contacting us. We then keep your address on a suppression list so we do not send you marketing again. Unsubscribing does not stop service emails, such as sign-in codes, receipts, and account notices, and does not cancel a membership.

Our marketing emails use pixels and tracked links that tell us whether an email was opened and which links were clicked. You can limit this by turning off automatic image loading in your email app.

We and our partners use cookies, local storage, pixels, and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember your language, country, and choices, run our site, measure and improve StoryCheck, and measure and deliver advertising. Our Cookie Policy explains them in more detail.

• Advertising technologies. Our pages use advertising tags from Meta and Google and, where enabled, TikTok, Snapchat and AppLovin. Our servers also send some of these partners information about actions taken on StoryCheck, such as starting a trial, renewing, cancelling, receiving a refund, or disputing a charge, together with identifiers such as your email address or phone number in hashed form, your IP address, browser details, and click identifiers, for example through the Meta Conversions API.
• Session recordings. We record how visitors use our pages, including clicks, taps, scrolling, mouse movements, and the content shown on the page. Report pages are never recorded, text typed into form fields is masked, and payment card fields are not captured. We use recordings to find and fix problems and delete them after 14 days.
• Your choices. In the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, analytics cookies, session recordings, and advertising technologies that need consent run only after you opt in through our cookie banner; the Meta and Google tags load in a restricted mode until you do. Elsewhere, they are on by default. You can change your choices at any time with Cookie settings in the footer, opt out of sale and sharing as described below, or block cookies in your browser.

We disclose personal information to:

• Customers who request a report: the contents of a report go to the customer who searched for it.
• Service providers that process information for us under contracts that limit how they may use it, including hosting and database providers (such as Netlify and Supabase), email delivery and our support mailbox (such as Resend and Google), phone data and verification (such as Twilio), AI providers (such as Anthropic and OpenAI), and the data, search, image search, and web page capture providers we use to build reports.
• Payment processors (such as Stripe, and PayPal where offered), which receive order details, which can include the phone number or email address you searched and your acceptance records, to process payments, prevent fraud, and handle disputes.
• Advertising partners (Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, and AppLovin), which receive identifiers, device and browser information, and activity as described above, and which may also use it under their own privacy policies, including to improve their advertising services.
• Our review provider (Reviews.io): if you choose to leave a review, we pass on your email address, a report reference, your language, and the name you confirm, which we suggest from the first name on your payment card, so the review can be verified and published. We may also show your review on our website with that name and your country, which we show only when at least two of the country you visited from, your card’s billing country, and the country where your card was issued agree.
• Search engines: we submit the addresses of our public phone number pages so that they can be indexed.
• Card issuers, banks, and payment networks, to respond to chargebacks and payment disputes.
• Professional advisers, such as lawyers, accountants, and auditors.
• Authorities and others where required or permitted by law: to comply with legal obligations and lawful requests from courts, regulators, and law enforcement; to protect the rights, safety, and property of StoryCheck, our customers, and others; to prevent fraud and misuse; and to enforce our Terms.
• A buyer or successor in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, or sale of assets.
• Anyone else with your consent or at your direction.

We do not sell customer information for money. Some US state laws treat certain disclosures as a “sale” or “sharing” even when no money changes hands:

• Advertising. In the past 12 months we have shared identifiers (such as hashed email addresses and phone numbers, IP addresses, cookie and device identifiers, and click identifiers), internet activity (such as pages visited and actions taken), and commercial information (such as trials and purchases) with advertising partners for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• Reports. When a customer buys a report, we disclose information about the report subject to that customer. Under some state laws this may be a “sale” of the report subject’s personal information. The categories involved are listed in Information about people who are searched.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

To opt out of sharing for advertising in this browser, use the control below. To have your information removed from reports, use storycheck.com/opt-out.

Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, we treat it as a request to opt out of sale and sharing for that browser: our site does not load the TikTok, Snapchat or AppLovin tags and places the Meta and Google tags in their restricted modes. Opt-outs made in a browser apply to that browser, so repeat them on each browser and device you use.

We do not ask customers for sensitive personal information. Some information we handle can still be sensitive:

• your search inputs and answers can reveal personal circumstances, such as concerns about a relationship; and
• information in reports can reveal or suggest sensitive matters about the person searched, such as sex life or sexual orientation (for example, an account on a dating or adult website), allegations of criminal conduct in web mentions, or partially masked password fragments from data breaches.

We use this information only to provide StoryCheck as described in this policy. Anyone can ask us to remove their information at storycheck.com/opt-out.

We use automated systems, including AI models, to operate StoryCheck:

• Customer support. Automated systems read support messages, look up the matching account and billing records, take requested actions such as cancelling a membership, apply our policies to requests such as refund requests, and write replies. Messages you receive from support may be AI-generated.
• Reports. Summaries, narrative text, insights, confidence scores, and risk signals in reports are generated automatically from source data and from the customer’s answers.
• Payment disputes. We use automated tools to help prepare our responses to chargebacks from the records described in this policy.
• Service improvement. We analyze usage, session activity, and support volume with AI tools to find and fix problems.

To do this, we share the relevant content, such as a support message or the source data for a report, with AI providers, currently Anthropic and OpenAI, acting as our service providers. Under their terms for business use, they do not use this data to train their models. We do not use facial recognition to identify people.

Scores and summaries in reports are informational only. If you disagree with an automated reply or outcome, reply to that message or contact support@storycheck.com and ask us to look at it again.

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes in this policy, including to meet legal, tax, and accounting obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. In practice:

• Reports: deleted 12 months after they are created. Breach information inside a report is removed after 90 days.
• Search records, including the preview shown before purchase, that did not lead to a report: deleted after 90 days.
• Cached partner results: up to 90 days, or 14 days when nothing was found.
• Photos you upload: deleted when the image search finishes, and in any case within 7 hours.
• Session recordings: deleted after 14 days. Report pages are never recorded.
• Account and contact details: for as long as you have an account or we are in contact with you, and after that only as long as needed for the purposes above, for example to handle a dispute or legal claim.
• Purchase and payment records: for as long as tax and accounting laws require.
• Acceptance and dispute records: for as long as needed to show what was agreed and to handle disputes and legal claims.
• Unsubscribe and removal records: kept for as long as needed to keep honoring your choice.
• Privacy request records: at least 24 months.

When you ask us to delete your data, we act on your request rather than waiting for these periods to end, except for information we must keep by law or to honor your choices.

We use administrative, technical, and organizational measures designed to protect personal information, including encryption in transit, restricted access to our database, verification codes stored only in scrambled form, and limited staff access. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a security incident affects your personal information, we will notify you and the authorities where the law requires.

StoryCheck is operated from the United States, and our service providers are located in the United States and other countries. Your information may therefore be processed in countries whose data protection laws differ from those where you live. Where the law requires it, we use appropriate safeguards for these transfers, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

Wherever you live, you can:

• unsubscribe from marketing emails;
• change your cookie choices with Cookie settings in the footer;
• opt out of sale and sharing as described in Sale and sharing;
• ask for a copy of your data, or for your data to be deleted, at storycheck.com/data-request;
• remove your phone number or email address from StoryCheck at storycheck.com/opt-out; and
• ask us to correct inaccurate information by contacting support@storycheck.com.

How we handle requests. To protect your information, we verify requests before acting on them, for example by sending a code to the email address or phone number concerned, or by reviewing a request manually. We may ask for more information if we cannot verify a request. We may decline or limit a request where the law allows, for example where we cannot verify it, where it is manifestly unfounded or excessive, where it would reveal another person’s personal information, or where we must keep information to meet a legal obligation, handle a dispute, or honor your choices. A copy of your data is provided in a machine-readable format and does not include the contents of reports you ran, because those are about other people.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising your privacy rights.

Depending on your state (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia), you may have the right to:

• know what personal information we have collected about you, including the categories of information, its sources, the purposes for collecting it, and the categories of third parties to whom we disclosed it, and get a copy of it;
• have your personal information deleted, or corrected if it is inaccurate;
• receive your personal information in a portable format;
• opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information and of targeted advertising;
• opt out of profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects (we do not carry out that kind of profiling); and
• not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.

We offer these rights to all US residents. The categories of personal information we have collected in the past 12 months, with their sources, purposes, and recipients, are described in the sections above. In summary:

• About customers and visitors: identifiers; customer records (such as name, email address, and payment records held with our processors); commercial information; internet and other electronic network activity; approximate geolocation; visual information (uploaded photos and session recordings); and inferences drawn from your answers and activity. Identifiers, commercial information, internet activity, and approximate geolocation are shared with advertising partners. All categories are disclosed to service providers and payment processors as described above.
• About report subjects: identifiers and contact information; characteristics such as age and gender; professional information; online account and internet activity information; approximate geolocation; visual information; inferences; and sensitive personal information as described in Sensitive information. These are disclosed to customers who request reports, which may be a “sale”, and to service providers. They are not shared with advertising partners.

Making a request. Customers can use storycheck.com/data-request, report subjects can use storycheck.com/opt-out, and anyone can email support@storycheck.com. You may use an authorized agent, who must provide your signed permission; we may still ask you to verify your identity directly. We respond within the time required by law, normally within 45 days, and will tell you if we need longer.

Appeals. If we decline your request, you can appeal by emailing support@storycheck.com with the subject line “Privacy appeal”. We will respond within the time your state’s law requires. If you disagree with our decision on your appeal, you can contact your state attorney general.

Nevada. Nevada residents can ask us not to sell their covered information by emailing support@storycheck.com.

California “Shine the Light”. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes.

If you live in the European Economic Area or Switzerland, see our EU and EEA Privacy Notice. If you live in the United Kingdom, see our UK Privacy Notice. They explain our legal bases for processing, your rights to access, correct, erase, restrict, and port your data and to object to processing, and how to complain to a data protection authority.

If you live elsewhere, for example in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea, or the United Arab Emirates, the laws of your country may give you rights to access, correct, or delete your personal information, to object to or restrict its use, and to withdraw consent. We honor the rights that the law of your country gives you. Contact support@storycheck.com, which also reaches the person responsible for data protection at StoryCheck.

StoryCheck is only for adults aged 18 and over and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and our Terms prohibit searching for minors. If you believe a child has given us personal information or that a child’s information appears in StoryCheck, contact support@storycheck.com or use storycheck.com/opt-out, and we will delete it.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the updated policy with a new “Last updated” date, and if we make a material change we will take reasonable steps to tell you, for example by email or with a notice on our site. The updated policy applies from the date it is posted.

For questions about this policy or our privacy practices, email support@storycheck.com or use our support page. For requests about your data, use storycheck.com/data-request or storycheck.com/opt-out.

StoryCheck is operated by Magna Growth Partners LLC, 1021 E Lincolnway Ste 9489, Cheyenne, WY 82001, USA.