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Privacy Policy

Polecat Intelligence Ltd


Last updated: 21st September 2026

Polecat Intelligence Ltd (“Polecat”) is the data controller for the personal data described below. Our address is Newminster House, 27-29 Baldwin Street, Bristol BS1 1LT, United Kingdom. Our ICO registration number is Z1227157.

 

For anything in this notice, contact support@polecat.com.

We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer and have not appointed one. Responsibility for data protection sits with our Chief Technology Officer, reachable at the address above.


This notice covers three different groups of people, because we hold different data about each and for different reasons.

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  • Part A applies if you use our products, work for one of our customers, or have contacted us.

  • Part B applies if you are named in news or other media content we process, or if you post publicly on an account we collect from.

  • Part C applies if you visit our website.

 

Part A — People who use our services or contact us


What we hold. Your name, work email address, job title and employer; your account credentials and access records; the configuration and saved work you create in our systems; correspondence with us; and, for billing contacts, the information needed to invoice your organisation.


Why, and on what basis. To provide the service your employer has contracted for, and to administer that contract — our lawful basis is performance of a contract, or our legitimate interests in operating and securing the service. We also keep records we are required by law to keep, such as accounting records.


How long. User accounts and the content you create are deleted within 30 days of your organisation’s contract ending, or within 30 days of your organisation’s administrator removing your account. Contracts and billing records are kept for six years. Full detail is in our Data Retention Policy, available on request.


Who we share it with. Service providers who host and support our systems, under contracts that restrict them to acting on our instructions. We do not sell personal data.


Marketing. If you have asked to hear from us, or we contact you about services relevant to your professional role, you can opt out at any time using the link in any message or by contacting us. We keep a record of your opt-out so that we do not contact you again.


Do you have to give us this data? If you use the product, we need your name, work email and account credentials in order to give you access — without them we cannot provide an account. Everything else is optional.


Part B — People named in media content, and people whose public posts we collect


What we do. Polecat provides media monitoring and reputation analysis about organisations to business customers. To do this we license news and other published content from third-party suppliers, and we collect posts from a defined set of public social media accounts. We process both at scale.


What we hold about you. There are two ways your personal data may be in what we hold:

  • You are named or described in an article. We hold that article. We did not collect information about you specifically; you appear because a publisher named you.

  • You post publicly on an account we collect from. We hold those posts. We collect from the public accounts of organisations, of public figures such as politicians, regulators and senior executives, and of recognised commentators and subject-matter experts who post publicly on the topics we cover.

 

Where it comes from. Licensed feeds from commercial content suppliers, other published sources, and public social media accounts. We do not obtain any of it from you directly.

 

Why, and on what basis. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: analysing published material to tell our business customers how their organisation, their competitors and their markets are being reported on and discussed. It operates on material that has already been published, and the assessment of individuals is not part of it.


Sensitive information. Some of what we collect — particularly posts by politicians and commentators — may reveal political opinions or other information the law treats as sensitive. Where it does, we rely on the condition that the information was manifestly made public by the person who posted it. We do not seek out sensitive information, extract it, or use it to characterise anyone.


What we do not do. These limits are deliberate and we state them so you can judge the effect on you:

  • We do not build profiles of individuals.

  • We do not score, rate or rank individuals. Where we measure sentiment, it is a property of a piece of content and of what that content says about an organisation or topic. It is never aggregated into a view of the person who wrote or is named in it.

  • We do not make automated decisions about individuals.

  • We select some sources by account, but content is organised and retrieved by organisation and topic. You cannot be looked up as a person in our systems, and we cannot produce a record of everything you have said or everything published about you.

  • We do not use any of this content for advertising or marketing to individuals.

 

How long. Content is retained for as long as our licence or agreement with the source permits, and is deleted or returned when that ends.


Why we have not contacted you. The UK GDPR ordinarily requires us to tell you directly when we obtain your data from someone other than you. We do not do so for the individuals named in licensed content, because we hold no contact details for them and no means of identifying who they are across the content we hold, and the law allows this where notification is impossible or would involve disproportionate effort. For the accounts we collect from, this notice and our public description of the service are how we provide that information. If you post publicly on one of those accounts and want to know whether we hold your posts, contact us at the address above.


Part C — People who visit our website


What we collect. When you visit polecat.com we record how the site is used: the pages you view, the site you arrived from, your approximate location derived from your IP address, and your browser and device type.


Cookies and similar technologies. Some storage on your device is essential for the site to work, and we use it without asking, because the site cannot function otherwise. Everything else is set only if you agree. At present that means two analytics tools, Google Analytics and PostHog, which we use to understand how the site is used so we can improve it. We ask when you first visit, and you can change or withdraw your choice at any time through the cookie settings on the site.


What we do not do. We do not use website analytics to identify individual visitors, to build advertising profiles, or for retargeting, and we do not run visitor identification or de-anonymisation tools.


Who we share it with. Google, for Google Analytics. PostHog, whose service we use on its European infrastructure.

 

How long. Google Analytics data is deleted after 2 months and PostHog data after 3 months. Aggregated reports that do not identify anyone may be kept for longer.


Your choice. Declining analytics cookies does not affect your use of the site.


International transfers


Personal data about our customers, their users and our business contacts is hosted in the UK and the European Union.


Two things are processed outside that area:

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  • Licensed content, which may name individuals, is processed by service providers in the United States. Each of those transfers is covered by a safeguard recognised under UK data protection law: either the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, where the provider holds current certification under it, or the International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

  • Website analytics data, where you have agreed to analytics cookies, is processed by Google in the United States under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Our other analytics provider processes this data on European infrastructure.

 

We check that the relevant safeguard remains in place for each provider.

 

A current list of the providers we use to process personal data is available to customers on request.

 

Your rights


You have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal data, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have data erased, to restrict or object to our processing, and, where processing is based on consent or contract and carried out by automated means, to receive your data in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time, and doing so does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew it.


We do not make decisions about anyone by automated means alone.


Two points specific to Part B:

  • We will consider any request on its merits. Some rights are qualified rather than absolute, and we may decline a request where the law permits — for example where the material is journalistic content already in the public domain. If we decline, we will tell you why.

  • Because our systems do not index people, we locate material about an individual by searching their name in the text. We will make a reasonable and proportionate search, which is what the law requires, but we cannot guarantee that a name search finds every mention.

 

We respond within one month. If a request is complex we may extend that by a further two months, and we will tell you within the first month if we do.

 

Complaints


If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, contact us at support@polecat.com. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and respond without undue delay.


You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or by calling 0303 123 1113. You do not have to complain to us first.

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Changes


We will update this notice when our processing changes. The date at the top shows when it was last revised.

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