Privacy Policy

PAIDLANCE is a human search engine: the point of the product is to make professionals findable. That shapes this policy — the information you choose to put on your profile is published to the open web, while account and usage data stays private and is used only to operate the service.

Account information. When you sign up: your name, username, email address, and a password (stored only as a secure hash — we never see or store your plain password).

Profile information you choose to add. Photo, bio, profession, city and country, skills, portfolio items, work experience, social links, and contact details such as WhatsApp or phone numbers.

Connection & subscription data. Invitations you send and receive, accepts/declines/disconnects, and your plan and billing status.

Technical data. When you log in we record the time and IP address (used for security alerts). Standard server logs (IP, user agent, pages requested) are kept briefly for security and debugging.

We do not collect data from third-party trackers or advertising networks.

Everything you place on your profile — including your name, photo, bio, skills, location, portfolio, experience, connection list, and any contact details you add — is publicly visible to anyone on the internet and indexed by search engines such as Google. Public profiles may also appear on our homepage (featured, recently joined, and community sections) and in our social-media promotion.

Only add contact details you are comfortable making public. Your email login address is not published unless you add it to your profile as a contact method.

• to operate your account, profile, and search visibility;
• to deliver features you use: connections, payment links, gigs, subscriptions;
• to secure the service: login alerts, rate limiting, fraud and abuse prevention;
• to send the transactional emails described below;
• to understand aggregate usage (counts and statistics, e.g. member totals shown on the homepage) — not individual behavioral profiles;
• to comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell or rent your personal information to anyone.

We send transactional emails only, never marketing newsletters, and we never give your email address to other members; connection emails are sent by us on the other member's behalf. Account and security emails (verification codes, password reset codes and confirmations, login alerts, profile reminders) always send and can't be turned off. You can unsubscribe from connection notifications (invitations, acceptances, disconnections) at any time, either from the one-click link in those emails or from your account's email notification settings.

We use a single first-party session cookie (paidlance_session) to keep you logged in. It is encrypted, HTTP-only, and also carries the token that protects forms against cross-site request forgery. It persists for up to 30 days. We do not use advertising or third-party analytics cookies. If you block the cookie you can still browse public pages, but you cannot log in.

We share personal data only with service providers who help us run PAIDLANCE:

• hosting and infrastructure providers that store our database and files;
• Cloudflare, which sits in front of the site for security and performance;
• the email (SMTP) provider that delivers our transactional emails;
• payment providers, for members who use paid plans or payment features.

These providers process data only on our instructions. We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and integrity of PAIDLANCE and its members. If PAIDLANCE is ever part of a merger or acquisition, data may transfer to the successor under this same policy.

Card and payment details are collected and processed by our payment providers — they never touch our servers. We store only what we need to run your subscription: your plan, billing cycle, and payment status.

We keep your information while your account is active. If you delete your account, your profile and content are removed from the site and from our sitemap promptly; search engines may take some time to drop already-indexed pages, and we return "gone" signals to speed that up. Backup copies and minimal records needed for legal, billing, or abuse-prevention purposes may persist for a limited period before being purged.

Passwords are stored as salted hashes. Sessions are encrypted. Connections to the site use HTTPS. Access to production data is restricted. No internet service can promise perfect security — if we learn of a breach affecting your data, we will notify you as required by law.

You can view and edit your profile data at any time from your settings. Depending on where you live, you may also have legal rights to access, correct, export, restrict, or delete your personal data, and to object to certain processing. To exercise any of these, email us — we respond to verified requests within 30 days. You also have the right to complain to your local data-protection authority.

PAIDLANCE is not directed at children and may not be used by anyone under 16 (or the higher age of digital consent in your country). If we learn that a child's data has been collected, we will delete it.

We will update this policy as the service evolves and give notice of material changes on the site or by email. The date at the top reflects the current version.

Privacy questions and requests: [email protected].