Privacy Policy

Summary

• The email address you enter in our free breach check is used only to run that check. We do not store it, sell it or use it to contact you.
• We use Google Analytics to count visits. In the UK and EU it only runs if you agree.
• If you use our contact form, we use your details only to reply.
• We do not sell personal information and we do not show ads.

Who is responsible

Digital Footprint Scan (digitalfootprintscan.com) is run by Siddharth Shankar, who is responsible for how personal information is handled on this site. You can reach us through our contact form.

The free breach check

When you enter an email address and run the check, your browser sends it over an encrypted connection to our check service, which runs on Google Cloud in India. That service asks Have I Been Pwned which known data breaches include the address, and passes the result back to your browser.

• What we keep: nothing. The email address is not written to a database, a file or our logs.
• Abuse protection: to stop automated misuse, the service briefly remembers your IP address in memory, for about a minute, and then forgets it.
• Hosting logs: like any web host, Google Cloud keeps standard request logs, such as IP address, time and browser type, for up to 30 days. These logs do not contain the email address you checked.
• Have I Been Pwned receives the email address to answer the query, under its own privacy policy.
• Why we process it: because you asked us to run the check (UK/EU GDPR Article 6(1)(b), and our legitimate interest in preventing abuse under Article 6(1)(f)).

Analytics and cookies

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are useful, which links people click, and whether the breach check works. It uses cookies such as _ga and shows us aggregated information like pages viewed, approximate country and device type. Google Analytics does not store IP addresses. Google processes this data, including in the United States, under its own terms.

• UK, EU and EEA visitors: analytics cookies are off until you choose "Accept" in our cookie banner. If you decline, Google may receive cookieless signals that cannot identify you.
• Other visitors: analytics is on by default. You can block it with your browser settings or Google's opt-out add-on.
• We do not use advertising cookies.

Your cookie choice and, on our comparison page, the country picked from your time zone are stored only in your own browser. They are never sent to us.

Change cookie settings

Contact form

If you send us a message, the name, email address, topic and message you enter are passed through Make, an automation service in the EU, and delivered to our email inbox so we can reply. We keep messages for up to 12 months and then delete them, unless an ongoing conversation needs them longer. We process them because you asked us to respond (legitimate interest, Article 6(1)(f)).

Affiliate and other links

Some links are affiliate links. When you click one, the partner's site may set its own cookies to record that you came from us. We do not receive your name or payment details, only reports of completed sales. Once you leave our site, the other site's privacy policy applies. See our affiliate disclosure.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, including under UK and EU GDPR, Canadian PIPEDA and US state laws such as California's CCPA, you may have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, or to object to how we use it. Because we keep so little, the main data we could hold is a contact-form message. Use our contact form to make a request and we will respond within 30 days.

If you are in the UK or EU and unhappy with our response, you can complain to your data protection authority, such as the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK.

Children

This site is for a general adult audience and is not aimed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle information, we will update this page and the date at the top.