Privacy notice & safeguards

Tracery is a public-source research service offered only to users located in the United Kingdom. Requests from outside the UK are refused by our servers. Tracery is the controller for the personal data described here. Contact us about privacy through the rights request form.

• Look up or display home addresses, postcodes, private phone numbers, personal email addresses or government identifiers (such as National Insurance numbers). These are automatically removed from any text a source returns.
• Process special-category data (health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, trade-union membership, biometrics) or criminal-offence data.
• Perform facial recognition, create face embeddings or identify a person from a photograph.
• Log in to platforms, scrape restricted pages, or bypass rate limits or technical controls.
• Merge different people into one profile because they share a name or username.
• Keep a searchable archive of uploaded photographs.

Sources. Results are retrieved live from: the Companies House public register (officer names, roles, appointments, month/year of birth — we only show the year — and country of residence; correspondence addresses are never requested); Wikipedia; a licensed web and news search index (Brave Search, UK region); official public APIs of GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky and YouTube; and a licensed reverse-image provider (SerpApi / Google Lens).

Purpose and lawful basis. Legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) — enabling professional due diligence, verifying who someone is dealing with, journalism, research and image-provenance checks. We have balanced these interests against your rights by limiting results to information you or others have deliberately made public, excluding sensitive data, never compiling dossiers, keeping same-name records separate and not retaining results.

Storage. Search results are not stored by Tracery. They only persist if a signed-in user saves a bookmark (title and link only) or creates a share link (expires within 14 days).

Your rights. You can ask us to correct, remove or stop showing information about you, or object to processing, through the rights request form — from any country. Because results come from third-party sources, we may also point you to the original publisher.

• Without an account: we process your search terms only to run the search. We store a salted, one-way hash of your IP address for rate limiting (overwritten every few minutes) and use your approximate country, provided by our host, to enforce UK-only access.
• With an account: email, name (optional), and — if you leave it switched on — search history (deleted after 90 days), bookmarks/collections and share links. Lawful basis: contract (Article 6(1)(b)).
• On your device: theme, onboarding confirmation and (optionally) recent searches are kept in your browser’s local storage. We use only strictly necessary storage and a sign-in cookie, so no cookie banner is required under PECR. No advertising or analytics trackers are used.
• Uploaded images: metadata, including GPS, is read and removed in your browser before upload, the image is re-encoded and stripped again on our server, shared only with the reverse-image provider through an unguessable link, and deleted as soon as the search finishes (at most 10 minutes).
• AI assistant: when you ask a question, the retrieved public results are sent to a Google Gemini model via Netlify AI Gateway to generate a cited answer. Answers are not stored unless you include them in an export or share link.
• Reports and rights requests: kept for up to 12 months to handle and evidence the request.

Hosting and database: Netlify. Web search: Brave. Reverse-image search: SerpApi. AI: Google (via Netlify AI Gateway). Some processors are based in the United States; transfers rely on the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

Results may be incomplete, out of date or about a different person with the same name. Confidence scores describe how well a record matches your search terms, not identity. Tracery makes no decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about anyone. You must check the original source before relying on any result.

All traffic is encrypted. API keys exist only on our servers. Access to account data requires authentication and is limited to the account owner. Search endpoints are rate-limited and refuse queries asking for addresses, phone numbers, identifiers or face identification.

• Uploaded images: deleted after the search, maximum 10 minutes
• Search history (account holders, optional): 90 days, or until you delete it
• Share links: up to 14 days
• Rate-limit hashes: a few minutes (rolling)
• Reports and rights requests: 12 months

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please contact us first. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.