Privacy Policy
This policy explains what personal data Raise Sonar collects, why we collect it, who receives it and what rights you have. It covers raisesonar.com, the Raise Sonar dashboard and the emails we send.
1. Who is responsible for your data
Raise Sonar (“we”, “us”) is registered in Bulgaria. We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy.
For any privacy question or request, write to privacy@raisesonar.com. We have not appointed a data protection officer because the law does not require us to.
2. The short version
- We collect what we need to run the service: your email address, your account, your alert settings, your watchlist and the status of your subscription.
- We do not sell your personal data, show you adverts or use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
- Paid plans are sold by Link, a Stripe service. Your card details go to Link and never reach us.
- Your watchlist, and any investment amounts you choose to record, are visible only to you and are used only to run your account.
- You can delete your account in Settings at any time. Deleting it removes your account, rules, watchlist and notes from our live systems at once and stops our emails. Section 9 lists the few records we keep for longer.
The rest of this policy gives the detail.
3. The data we collect
Most of what we hold comes from you. The rest is created as you use the service or reaches us from the providers that run sign-in and payment for us.
| Category | What it includes | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter sign-up | Email address, your browser’s time zone, and the dates you signed up, confirmed and unsubscribed | You, when you subscribe to the Weekly Radar |
| Account | Email address, name if you add one, sign-in method ([SIGN-IN METHODS]), account identifier | You, and our sign-in provider Clerk |
| Sign-in security | Sign-in times, IP address, browser and device details | Recorded by Clerk when you sign in |
| Profile and preferences | Country of residence, time zone, which emails you receive, email pauses, theme | You, in Settings. We suggest a country from your IP address; you can change it |
| Alert rules | Regions, sectors, maximum ticket size and currency, timing, quiet hours, channels, and the history of changes to each rule | You, in the dashboard or through links in our emails |
| Watchlist and investment notes | Raises you watch, raises you mark as invested, and the amount and currency if you choose to enter them | You |
| Subscription | Plan, billing period, price and currency, coupon, trial and renewal dates, subscription status, customer and subscription identifiers | Link and Stripe, when you start, change or cancel a plan |
| Emails we send you | Which emails we sent, when, which raises they covered, delivery status and any delivery error | Created by our systems and our email provider |
| Data and API enquiries | Name, company, email address, your message, the needs you select, time zone, the page you sent it from, the referring page and any campaign tags in the link you followed | You, through the Data and API form |
| Support messages | The content of emails you send us and our replies | You |
| Technical data | IP address, browser type, pages and files requested, date and time | Recorded in server logs when you use the site |
| Product usage events | Actions in the dashboard, such as opening an upgrade prompt or changing a setting | Recorded without your name, email address or account identifier |
We never receive your full card number or its security code. We do not ask for identity documents, and we do not ask for special categories of data such as health, religion or political opinions. Please do not send them to us.
We do not use tracking pixels or click-tracking redirects in our emails. Links that act on your account, such as unsubscribing or removing a rule, are signed so that we know which account to apply them to.
If you sign in through a third-party account, that provider sends us the name and email address on that account. Your email address is the only item you must give us; without it we cannot send you anything. Everything else is optional, although alerts cannot be tailored without a rule to tailor them to.
4. How we use your data, and on what legal basis
We use personal data only for the purposes below. Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, the last column gives the legal basis.
| Purpose | Data used | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Run your account and the dashboard, and send the alerts and reminders your rules and watchlist ask for | Account, profile, alert rules, watchlist, emails sent | Performance of our contract with you |
| Send the Weekly Radar newsletter | Newsletter sign-up | Your consent, given by confirming your address. You can withdraw it with the unsubscribe link in every issue |
| Apply the right plan to your account and keep it in step with your subscription | Subscription | Performance of our contract with you |
| Tell you about changes to the service, these documents or your plan | Account, subscription | Performance of our contract, and legal obligation where a law requires the notice |
| Remember that you unsubscribed, so that we do not email you again | Newsletter sign-up | Our legal obligation to respect your choice, and our legitimate interest in doing so |
| Answer enquiries and support requests | Data and API enquiries, support messages | Steps taken at your request before a contract, and our legitimate interest in answering you |
| Keep the service secure, limit abuse, and find and fix faults | Technical data, sign-in security | Our legitimate interest in a secure and working service |
| Understand in aggregate which features are used, to improve the product | Product usage events | Our legitimate interest in improving the service |
| Keep records the law requires and respond to lawful requests from authorities | Subscription, correspondence | Legal obligation |
| Establish, exercise or defend legal claims | Any of the above that is relevant | Our legitimate interest in protecting our legal position |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, you can object at any time (section 11).
We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not build profiles of you for third parties. Alerts are matched to you automatically, but only by the filters you set yourself. We make no decision about you by automated means that has a legal or similarly significant effect.
5. Cookies and similar storage
We use only the cookies and browser storage needed to run the site. We use no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics, which is why you see no cookie banner.
| What | Set by | Purpose | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
Sign-in cookies (__session, __client, __client_uat) |
Clerk, our sign-in provider | Keep you signed in and protect the sign-in form against automated abuse | From the length of a session up to one year |
rr.theme in local storage |
Raise Sonar | Remembers whether you chose the light or dark theme | Until you clear it |
rr.onboarding and rr.alertsTemplate in local storage |
Raise Sonar | Keep your answers in the get-started guide and the alert template you picked, so they survive a change of page | Until used or cleared |
rs_last_auth and rs_last_email in local storage |
Raise Sonar | Remember how you last signed in, and your email address if that was by email, so the sign-in page can point you back to it | Until you clear it; the address goes once you sign in another way |
Entries starting rs. in session storage |
Raise Sonar | Hold an action you started before checkout so it can finish when you come back | Until you close the tab |
Local and session storage stay in your browser and are not sent to us. You can clear cookies and storage in your browser settings; if you block the sign-in cookies you will not be able to sign in.
When you go to checkout or the billing portal you leave our site for pages run by Stripe and Link, which set their own cookies under their own policies.
Our pages load their fonts from Google Fonts. When they do, your browser connects to Google’s servers and Google receives your IP address and browser details. Google Fonts sets no cookies. We rely on our legitimate interest in showing the site as designed.
6. Who receives your data
We do not sell or rent your personal data, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing or advertising. We share it only with the providers that help us run the service, and in the limited cases listed below the table.
| Recipient | What they do for us | Data they handle | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Railway Corporation | Hosts the application and its database | All data held in the service | Servers in the Netherlands; company in the USA |
| Clerk, Inc. | Sign-in and account management | Account and sign-in security data | USA |
| Resend (Plus Five Five, Inc.) | Delivers our emails | Email address, the content of each email, delivery status | Sent from Ireland; company in the USA |
| Stripe Payments Europe, Limited and its affiliates, including Sold through Link, LLC | Sell paid plans as merchant of record and take payment (section 7) | Subscription data, and the payment data you give them directly | Ireland and the USA |
| Namecheap, Inc. | Domain name, and forwarding of email sent to our addresses | Emails you send us | USA |
| [MAILBOX PROVIDER] | The inbox where we read and answer your emails | Support messages and enquiries | [LOCATION] |
| Google Ireland Limited | Serves the fonts our pages use | IP address and browser details | Ireland and the USA |
These providers act on our instructions under data processing agreements, except Link and Stripe for payment data (section 7), and Google for fonts, which act as controllers in their own right.
We may also disclose personal data:
- to our professional advisers, such as lawyers, accountants and insurers, under a duty of confidentiality;
- to courts, regulators, tax authorities or law-enforcement bodies where the law requires it or where it is needed to protect our rights;
- to a buyer or successor if the business or its assets are sold or reorganised. We will tell you before your data passes to a new controller.
When you follow a link to a crowdfunding platform you leave Raise Sonar. We do not send the platform your name, your email address or anything else about your account. Where a link carries a referral code, the code identifies Raise Sonar and not you.
7. Payments
Paid plans are sold by Link, Stripe’s merchant-of-record service. Link is the seller on your receipt and collects your payment details, billing address and tax information as a controller in its own right, under the Link privacy policy.
Link and Stripe tell us what we need to run your plan: its status, price, currency, coupon and dates, and the identifiers that tie the subscription to your account. We never receive your full card number or its security code.
You can ask Link to delete the data it holds about your purchases. Link treats that as a request to cancel any subscription bought through it.
8. Transfers outside the EEA and the UK
We are based in the European Union and our database is stored in the European Union. Some of our providers are US companies, so personal data can be processed in, or accessed from, the United States.
Where a provider is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension, we rely on that certification. In every other case we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, with the UK Addendum for UK data. You can ask us at privacy@raisesonar.com for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a transfer.
9. How long we keep your data
We keep personal data only for as long as the purpose needs it.
| Data | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
| Account, profile, alert rules, watchlist, investment notes and the record of emails sent | Until you delete your account. Deletion removes them from our live systems immediately and cannot be undone |
| Alert rules you remove | 30 days, so you can restore them, then deleted for good |
| Newsletter sign-up you never confirm | 30 days |
| Newsletter subscription | Until you unsubscribe. We then keep your address marked as unsubscribed, so that we do not email you again, until you ask us to erase it |
| Subscription details held by us | Until you delete your account. Link and Stripe keep their own transaction records for as long as tax and financial law requires |
| Data and API enquiries | 24 months after our last contact with you |
| Support messages | 24 months after the matter is closed |
| Server logs | Up to [LOG RETENTION, e.g. 30 days] |
| Backups | Up to [BACKUP RETENTION, e.g. 30 days] after the data is deleted from live systems |
We may keep specific records for longer where the law requires it, for example accounting records, or where we need them for a legal claim, until the limitation period for that claim has passed (generally five years in Bulgaria).
If you sent a Data and API enquiry and later delete your account, the enquiry stays for the period above but is no longer linked to an account.
10. Security
We protect personal data with measures that fit the size of the service and the kind of data we hold. They include encryption in transit, a specialist provider for sign-in so that we never store passwords, payment handled entirely by Link, signed links in our emails, and access to production systems limited to the people who need it.
No online service can promise perfect security. If a breach is likely to put your rights at risk, we will tell you and the supervisory authority as the law requires.
You can help by using a strong, unique sign-in for your account and by telling us at once if you think someone else has used it.
11. Your rights
If the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, you have the right to:
- access the personal data we hold about you and receive a copy;
- correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete;
- erase your data. Deleting your account in Settings removes most of it at once (section 9);
- restrict how we use your data in certain cases;
- receive the data you gave us in a portable format;
- object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and at any time to direct marketing;
- withdraw consent where we rely on it, without affecting what we did before you withdrew.
You can change most of your data in Settings. For anything else, write to privacy@raisesonar.com. We answer within one month; if a request is complex we may take up to two more months and will tell you why. We may ask for information to confirm your identity. Requests are free unless they are clearly unfounded or excessive.
We apply these rights to everyone who uses Raise Sonar, wherever they live, as far as we reasonably can.
You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Ours is the Bulgarian Commission for Personal Data Protection, 2 Prof. Tsvetan Lazarov Blvd., Sofia 1592, Bulgaria, kzld@cpdp.bg, www.cpdp.bg. You can instead complain to the authority where you live or work; in the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner’s Office, ico.org.uk. We would welcome the chance to put things right first.
12. Residents of the United States
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising or use it for targeted advertising. We do not knowingly collect sensitive personal information.
Depending on your state, you may have the right to know what personal information we hold, to correct it, to delete it, and to appeal a refusal. Write to privacy@raisesonar.com to use any of them. We will not treat you differently for doing so.
13. Children
Raise Sonar is for adults. You must be 18 or over to use it, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to privacy@raisesonar.com and we will delete it.
14. People named in raise listings
The raises we list come from public sources: regulatory filings, such as those on the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system, and the public pages of crowdfunding platforms. This information is about companies, but it can include the name of a person, for example where a business trades under its founder’s name. Listings, including any such name, are shown to our subscribers and may be supplied to customers of our Data and API service.
We process such names on the basis of our legitimate interest in reporting publicly available information about securities offerings. We keep them for as long as the listing stays in our records. If you are named in a listing, you have the rights in section 11, and you can ask us to correct or remove information at privacy@raisesonar.com.
15. Other websites
Our pages and emails link to crowdfunding platforms and other sites we do not run. Their privacy practices are their own, so read their policies before you give them personal data.
16. Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when the service or the law changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we will email account holders and newsletter subscribers at least 14 days before it takes effect.
17. Contact
- Privacy questions and requests: privacy@raisesonar.com
- Everything else: support@raisesonar.com