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LaunchIndex

Privacy notice

Effective 21 August 2026. This notice explains how personal information is handled when you visit LaunchIndex, create an account, contribute to the directory, or contact us.

1. Who we are

Liberateweb Ltd owns and operates LaunchIndex and is the controller of personal information described in this notice for the purposes of the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, and other applicable data-protection laws. Liberateweb Ltd is registered in England and Wales under company number 16127879. Its registered office is 3rd Floor, 86–90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom.

For privacy questions or to exercise your rights, email [email protected]. For general service support, email [email protected].

2. Scope of this notice

This notice covers LaunchIndex websites and member features. It does not cover a third-party website merely because LaunchIndex lists or links to it. Those websites have their own privacy practices.

3. Information we collect

Account and Google sign-in information. If you continue with Google, Google authenticates you and provides us with a Google account identifier, verified email address, and basic profile information such as your name. We use the openid, email, and profile scopes only. We do not request access to Gmail, Google Drive, your contacts, or other Google services, and we do not store Google access or refresh tokens. We use the name provided by Google to initialise your LaunchIndex display name, which you can later change.

Member activity and content. We store site submissions and pitches, votes, comments, listing reports, moderation records, account settings, and related timestamps. Your display name and visible comments are public. Vote totals are public, but we do not publicly identify how an individual member voted. Site submission pitches and contact details are not public unless you separately publish them.

Technical, session, and security information. We receive information normally sent when a browser connects to a website, which may include IP address, user-agent and browser details, device or operating-system information, requested URL, referrer, and date and time. When you sign in, we create a strictly necessary signed session cookie and store the session's IP address and user agent. We may also create security, error, and audit logs to operate the service, enforce rate limits, detect abuse, and investigate incidents.

Communications. If you contact us, we collect your contact details, the contents of the communication, attachments you choose to send, and our response history.

Public website observations. LaunchIndex obtains data from publicly accessible websites and internet infrastructure. This may include domain names, URLs, public DNS and RDAP data, HTTP responses and headers, titles, descriptions, visible page content, linked public resources, technology signals, screenshots, and observation dates. It may occasionally include personal information that a website operator or another person has made public. We do not intentionally access private areas behind authentication or attempt to defeat access controls.

Free Launch Check information. Before sign-in, we store the requested URL, bounded DNS and HTTP reachability information, timing, and a one-way hash derived from your IP address for rate limiting. We run the full analysis only after the check is linked to an account; that analysis stores extracted technical evidence, findings, measurements, and screenshots. We discard fetched HTML after analysis. If you choose report delivery, we also store whether you separately consented to product updates. Detailed reports require the requesting account and are excluded from search indexing.

We obtain information directly from you, from your browser or device, from Google when you choose Google sign-in, from publicly accessible internet sources, from service providers, and from our own observations and moderation systems.

4. How and why we use information

We use personal information for the following purposes and lawful bases:

  • To provide the service and manage accounts, including authentication, submissions, votes, comments, reports, and support. The lawful basis is performance of our contract with you or taking steps at your request before entering that contract.
  • To build and maintain the public directory, record website launch evidence, categorise sites, publish useful historical observations, and respond to correction or removal requests. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in operating an accurate, useful public index of the open web.
  • To keep LaunchIndex safe and trustworthy, including preventing spam, scams, manipulation, malicious submissions, security attacks, ban evasion, and other breaches of our Terms. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in protecting our service, users, systems, reputation, and legal rights.
  • To understand and improve the service, troubleshoot faults, measure aggregate usage, and develop features. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in operating and improving LaunchIndex efficiently.
  • To comply with law and protect legal rights, including responding to valid legal process, enforcing our agreements, and establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims. The lawful basis is compliance with a legal obligation or our legitimate interests, depending on the circumstances.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we consider the nature and source of the information, the reasonable expectations of the people concerned, the public value of the directory, and the potential effect on individual rights. We use safeguards such as collecting from public sources, limiting what is displayed, providing reporting channels, and applying security and moderation controls.

5. Plausible Analytics and cookies

We use Plausible Analytics to understand aggregate traffic, including visited pages, referrers, browser and operating-system type, device type, visit duration, and approximate location. Plausible does not use cookies, browser storage, or persistent identifiers and does not track visitors across websites or days. An IP address and user agent are processed transiently to generate a daily, rotating identifier; the raw IP address and full user agent are not stored by Plausible. Learn more in Plausible's data policy.

LaunchIndex does not use advertising cookies. The signed session cookie used for member access is strictly necessary to keep you signed in and protect your account. It is not used for advertising or cross-site tracking. It remains until it expires, you sign out, delete it through your browser, or your session is invalidated.

Plausible Analytics is not loaded on preliminary or account Free Launch Check pages, so private check identifiers and detailed findings are not sent to our analytics provider.

6. Google sign-in

Google processes information when you use Google sign-in, including information about the device and request, under Google's Privacy Policy. Google acts independently for its own processing. LaunchIndex uses the basic identity information Google returns only to authenticate you, create or link your account, prevent account conflicts, and secure member features. You may manage LaunchIndex's connection in your Google Account, but disconnecting it at Google does not by itself delete your LaunchIndex account or public comments.

Creating an account is optional. If you choose to create one, the Google account identifier, verified email address, and display name are required to provide and secure it; without those details, we cannot create a member account.

7. Automated tools

We use automated systems to detect website launch signals, classify and moderate website material, prioritise review, detect spam or abuse, and decide whether a site is suitable for publication. These systems may use third-party content-classification or safety providers. Their output may affect whether a listing is published, ranked, restricted, or sent for review, but we do not use solely automated processing to make decisions about people that produce legal or similarly significant effects. You can ask for a listing or moderation decision to be reviewed by contacting us.

8. How we share information

We may disclose information:

  • to hosting, storage, database, security, monitoring, analytics, authentication, and content-classification providers that help us operate LaunchIndex under contractual and confidentiality controls;
  • to Google when you initiate Google sign-in and to Plausible for aggregate analytics as described above;
  • publicly, where you post a visible comment or where information forms part of a public website listing;
  • to professional advisers, insurers, auditors, and potential purchasers or successors where reasonably necessary and subject to appropriate safeguards; and
  • to courts, regulators, law-enforcement bodies, or other parties where required by law or reasonably necessary to protect users, the public, our rights, or the security and integrity of the service.

We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

9. International transfers

We are based in the United Kingdom, and some providers may process information in the European Economic Area, the United States, or other countries. Where UK data-protection law treats a transfer as restricted, we use a lawful transfer mechanism where required, such as UK adequacy regulations or approved contractual safeguards, and assess whether additional protections are appropriate. Contact us if you would like more information about the safeguards relevant to your information.

10. How long we keep information

We retain information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described above. The period depends on the nature of the information, whether your account or a listing remains active, security and moderation needs, legal obligations, and limitation periods:

  • account data and member content are generally kept while your account is active;
  • when you delete your account, your account, Google identity, sessions, submissions, votes, and comments are deleted from the live database; listing reports may be retained without the link to your user account so that we preserve the integrity of moderation records;
  • deleting an account does not automatically remove independent observations or a public listing of a website, because those records are not account data and may have been obtained from public sources;
  • public website observations and selected launch screenshots may be retained as part of the directory's historical record while they remain relevant, accurate, and lawful; temporary crawl and screenshot artefacts are removed on shorter operational schedules unless selected for a listing, security investigation, or legal purpose;
  • an unclaimed preliminary Free Launch Check is normally available for 7 days, and a full report linked to an account is normally available for 90 days; privacy-safe aggregate metrics may be retained longer;
  • security, support, moderation, and legal records are retained for the period reasonably needed to resolve the matter, prevent repeated abuse, meet legal obligations, or establish, exercise, or defend claims; and
  • deletion from encrypted backups and provider systems may take additional time under their normal backup cycles, during which the information is isolated from ordinary use.

11. Your rights

Depending on where you live and the circumstances, you may have rights to access, correct, erase, restrict, or receive a portable copy of your personal information, and to complain to a regulator. You may also have the right to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent. These rights are not absolute, and lawful exemptions may apply.

Your right to object: where we process your personal information on the basis of legitimate interests, you may object to that processing. Tell us about your particular situation at [email protected]. We will stop unless we demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds to continue or the processing is needed for legal claims. You may object to direct marketing at any time; we do not currently send marketing emails.

You can change your display name or delete your account from the account page. For other requests, email us using the address above. We may need to verify your identity before acting. UK users can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office; users elsewhere may also contact their local data-protection authority. We would appreciate the opportunity to address your concern first.

12. Security

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures designed to protect information, including access controls, signed session cookies, rate limits, and provider safeguards. No internet service is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please contact [email protected] promptly if you believe your account or the service has been compromised.

13. Children

LaunchIndex member accounts are not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect account information from children. If you believe a child has created an account or submitted personal information, contact us so we can investigate and take appropriate action.

14. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice to reflect changes to the service, providers, or law. We will post the revised notice here, update the effective date, and provide additional notice where a change materially affects how we use personal information.