Privacy policy

1.Who we are

TrackFame (“we”, “us”) is operated by TrackFame. We are responsible for (the “data controller” or “data fiduciary” of) the personal data described in this policy.

For anything about your personal data, write to support@trackfame.com or use the contact form and choose “My personal data”. This address also serves as our grievance contact under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

2.What this policy covers

This policy covers the TrackFame website, your account, the emails we send you and our public API. It explains what we collect when you browse, sign up, follow people, comment, suggest a famous person or contact us.

The profiles on TrackFame are about public figures. How we handle information about the people we write about is covered in section 11 and in our editorial policy.

3.Information we collect

Information you give us

• Account details — your name, username, email address and password. We never store your password itself, only a one-way bcrypt hash of it.
• Optional profile details — a short bio, location, website and profile photo. Photos are re-encoded on our server, which strips hidden metadata such as camera details and GPS location.
• Suggestions — everything you enter in the “Suggest a person” form: the person’s details, sources, links and any photo you upload, plus messages exchanged with our research team about it.
• Community activity — comments and replies, the people and members you follow, and reports you file about profiles or comments.
• Messages — when you use the contact form we store your name, email address, subject and message.

Information collected automatically

• Sign-in and security data — the time and IP address of your most recent login, a count of failed login attempts (so we can temporarily lock an account under attack), and the IP address attached to contact-form messages to fight spam. Rate limits are enforced using a one-way hash of your IP address and the action, not the address itself.
• Usage statistics — our own, cookie-free analytics record which pages are viewed, for how long the page was actually visible and in use, how far it was scrolled, the referring website (domain and path only), campaign tags in the link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign), device type, browser and operating-system family, browser language, screen width and, where our hosting network supplies it, the country. To count unique visitors we compute a short code from your IP address, browser user-agent and a random value that changes every day; we keep only that code, never your IP address, and the code cannot be linked across days. A random session number is kept in your browser tab for 30 minutes of inactivity. If you are signed in, page views are linked to your account so we can show you and our team accurate activity. We also count actions such as searches (the search words and number of results), shares, citation copies and clicks on external links.
• Server logs — our server records errors and security events, which can include an IP address, the page requested and a timestamp.

We do not track you across other websites, use advertising or social-media pixels, build advertising profiles, collect payment details, or ask for precise location, contacts or sensitive information such as health, religion or political opinions.

If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, our analytics script does not run at all. Staff pages and known bots are never counted.

4.How and why we use it

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and kept the data to the minimum needed. You can object at any time (see your rights). We do not use your data for automated decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on you.

5.What other people can see

TrackFame is a social site, so some of what you share is visible to everyone, including people who are not signed in and search engines:

• your name, username, profile photo, bio, location, website and the date you joined;
• your comments, contribution points and the profiles you helped publish;
• the members who follow you and the members you follow, and recent activity such as follows and comments;
• a “Suggested by” credit on profiles created from your suggestion. You can switch this credit off at any time in Settings.

Your email address, password, login history, IP addresses, reports, messages and unpublished suggestions are never shown publicly.

6.Who we share it with

We do not sell or rent your personal data, and we do not share it for advertising. We share it only as follows:

• Our team — researchers, editors and administrators see what they need for their role. Staff actions in the admin panel are recorded in an audit log.
• Hosting and email — our web host stores the site and database and delivers our emails on our behalf, under confidentiality and security obligations.
• Content delivery networks — to load quickly, our pages fetch fonts from Google Fonts and code libraries from jsDelivr and the Tailwind CSS CDN. Your browser connects to these services directly, so they receive your IP address and browser details, as with any website. We do not send them any account information.
• Bot protection — if enabled on our forms, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a real person is submitting the form. It processes technical information from your browser for that purpose only.
• Legal reasons — when the law requires it, or when it is necessary to protect the rights, safety or property of our users, the public or TrackFame.
• Business changes — if TrackFame is merged, sold or reorganised, your data may transfer to the new operator, who must keep honouring this policy. We will tell you beforehand.

Our public API only returns information that is already public on the site.

7.International transfers

TrackFame is used worldwide. Your data is stored where our hosting provider runs our servers and may be processed in other countries by the services listed above. When we transfer personal data from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another country with transfer rules, we rely on adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses, or another lawful transfer mechanism.

8.How long we keep it

When you delete your account we immediately delete your account details, profile photo, suggestions, comments, follows, notifications and activity. Statistics about your visits stay only in anonymous form (no longer linked to you). Reports and messages you sent are kept without a link to your account where we need them to finish handling them. We send one final email to confirm the deletion. Any copies in backups are overwritten in the normal backup cycle.

9.Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live (for example under the EU and UK GDPR, India’s DPDP Act, Brazil’s LGPD, or California’s CCPA/CPRA) you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you and get a copy in a portable format;
• correct inaccurate or incomplete data — most of it you can edit yourself in Settings;
• delete your data — you can delete your account yourself at any time in Settings;
• object to, or ask us to restrict, processing based on legitimate interests, including analytics;
• withdraw consent where we rely on it, without affecting earlier processing;
• nominate someone to exercise your rights if you die or become unable to (India);
• complain to your local data-protection authority, or in India to the Data Protection Board of India. We would appreciate the chance to resolve it first.

Send requests to support@trackfame.com. We may need to confirm your identity, usually by asking you to write from the email address on your account. We answer within one month (or sooner where the law requires) and never charge for a reasonable request. We will not treat you differently for using your rights. We do not “sell” or “share” personal information as those terms are defined in California law.

10.Children

TrackFame is not meant for children. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. Where the law of your country sets a higher age for agreeing to data processing yourself (for example 16 in some EU countries, or 18 in India), you need the permission of a parent or legal guardian to sign up. Reading the site does not require an account.

If you believe a child has given us personal data without proper permission, contact us and we will delete it.

11.Information about the people we profile

Our profiles describe people because of their public role or work — artists, athletes, scientists, business leaders, politicians and others. We use information that is already public and verifiable from reliable sources, in the public interest of keeping a free, accurate reference available. This is our legitimate interest, and in many countries it is also protected as journalistic, academic or artistic expression.

We do not publish home addresses, private contact details, identity numbers, financial details, or information about family members who are not public figures, and we treat health and other sensitive topics only where the person has made them public and they are relevant to their public life.

If you are the subject of a profile, you can ask us to correct or remove information, or object to the profile altogether. See Corrections & removals for how we handle these requests.

12.How we protect your data

We protect data with measures appropriate to the risk, including encrypted connections (HTTPS), hashed passwords and sign-in tokens, strict content-security and cross-site-request-forgery protection, rate limiting and temporary lockouts against password guessing, image re-encoding, role-based staff access and an audit log of staff actions. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your personal data we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

13.Cookies

We use only a few strictly necessary cookies and browser-storage items, and no advertising or tracking cookies. The full list is in our cookie notice.

14.Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when our practices change. The date at the top always shows the latest version. If a change materially affects how we use your personal data, we will tell signed-in members by email or a notice on the site before it takes effect.