Contributor privacy notice

COAB is operated by LJMUK LTD, which is the data controller responsible for your information.

Registered in: England and Wales.

Company number: 15866416.

Registered office: 67 Greenacre Park, Rawdon, Leeds, England, LS19 6AP.

Contact for anything about your information: [email protected].

Postal address in Spain: [To be confirmed: Spanish postal address (if required)].

Spanish tax identification number (NIF/NIE): [To be confirmed: Spanish tax identification number (NIF/NIE), if required].

Representative in the European Union: [To be confirmed: EU representative (if required)].

Only what you enter on the contributor form:

• your full name and email address;
• your location or time zone, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link, if you give them;
• your skills, and any other skills you describe;
• how many hours a week you could offer and when you could start;
• what kind of venture you would like to work on, if you tell us;
• the date and time you submitted the form;
• whether you ticked the optional box to receive COAB updates and, if you did, when, which version of its wording you saw, and that you gave it on the contributor form (see “Optional COAB updates”).

We don't ask for sensitive information (such as health details). Please don't include it in your answers.

We don't store your IP address. To protect the form from abuse, your network address is held in the server's memory for no more than 16 minutes after your last submission and then discarded; COAB never stores or logs it. Our hosting provider may record it in its own access logs ([To be confirmed: how long the hosting provider keeps its access logs]).

The site sets no advertising or analytics cookies and uses no tracking. Its fonts are served from COAB's own site, not a third party.

• To review your skills and availability, and to contact you about possible COAB ventures that match them.
• To protect the form from automated and abusive submissions.

Registering interest is not a job application and creates no offer, commitment, employment or entitlement to ownership, equity or payment. We don't make automated decisions about you, sell your information or use it for advertising.

The form has a separate, optional box, unticked unless you tick it, for occasional emails about COAB updates and new venture opportunities. You can register without it, and leaving it unticked changes nothing else about your registration.

If you tick it, we keep a record of your choice: when you gave it, which version of the wording you saw, and that you gave it on the contributor form.

We are not sending these emails yet. We will only start once our review of the UK and Spanish rules on electronic marketing is complete, and we will update this notice first. Every such email will tell you how to stop receiving them.

You can withdraw your permission at any time by emailing [email protected]. Withdrawing it does not affect your registration, or anything we did before you withdrew it.

Under legal review. The lawful basis for this processing has not yet been confirmed.

The basis proposed for review is legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR): finding skilled people for early-stage ventures, which you have asked to hear about, balanced against your interests and rights. If the review concludes that another basis applies, such as your consent, this notice and the form will be changed before your details are used on that basis.

For the optional COAB updates, the proposed basis is your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), given by ticking the box, as also required by the UK and Spanish electronic marketing rules (PECR and LSSI-CE). This is part of the same review.

No, registering is voluntary. We need your name, email address, skills and availability to be able to contact you; everything else is optional, including the box for COAB updates.

Registration is open to adults anywhere in the world, and to adults only. The form asks you to confirm that you are 18 or over; we don't ask for your date of birth, and we don't keep the confirmation separately (every registration we hold has given it).

Only the people COAB authorises to review contributor submissions, who must sign in to do so. We won't share your details with a founder, another contributor or anyone else without asking you first.

Service providers who store or carry it for us, under contract and only on our instructions:

• Railway, which hosts the COAB website and database (Amsterdam, Netherlands (Railway region europe-west4));
• [To be confirmed: email provider], for email we exchange with you.

Your information is not sent to artificial intelligence (AI) services, advertisers or analytics providers.

Registration is open worldwide. If you live outside the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA), registering sends your details to the UK, where LJMUK LTD is registered, and to the Netherlands, where Railway hosts our database.

Railway is a United States company that runs its service largely from the United States, so your information may also be accessed from there. Safeguards: [To be confirmed: safeguards for transfers outside the UK and EEA].

We delete your details automatically 90 days after you submit the form. The deletion runs daily, so it happens within a day of that date. If you're still interested after that, you're welcome to register again.

Your choice about COAB updates, and any withdrawal of it, is kept with your registration and deleted with it.

Emails we exchange with you are deleted 90 days after our last contact, unless we are still discussing a specific venture with you or the law requires us to keep them longer. We review our mailbox once a month and delete the emails that are due.

Deleted details can remain in database backups until those expire ([To be confirmed: how long backups are kept]). They are not used, and if a backup is ever restored we delete them again before using it.

You can ask us to:

• give you a copy of your information;
• correct it (please email us: submitting the form again does not change an existing registration);
• delete it;
• restrict how we use it;
• stop using it, by objecting to its use, or by withdrawing your consent if consent is the basis we rely on;
• withdraw your permission for COAB updates at any time, without affecting your registration;
• give it to you in a portable format, where that right applies;
• deal with a complaint about how we use your information (see “Complaints”).

Email [email protected]. We may ask you to confirm the request from the email address you registered with, and we reply within one month.

You have the right to complain to us about how we use your information. Email [email protected] and say that it is a complaint. We acknowledge every complaint within 30 days of receiving it, look into it, and tell you what we found and what we have done.

You can also complain to a data protection authority, in particular in the country where you live or work:

• in the United Kingdom, the Information Commission (which replaced the Information Commissioner's Office): ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113;
• in Spain, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD): www.aepd.es;
• elsewhere in the European Union, the data protection authority of the country where you live or work.

If we change how we use your information, we will update this notice and its version before the change takes effect.