The short version: we collect what we need to run your account and research your competitors — your email, your business details, the cities you choose, and public data about your business and its competitors. Cards go to Stripe, not us. We don't sell your information, and we don't use advertising trackers. You can see, change, or delete your data from the app or by emailing us.
1. Who is responsible
infused Ideas LLC operates Market Scout and is the controller of the personal information described here. Contact: support@marketscoutlocal.com.
2. What we collect
Account information. Username, email address, and a one-way hash of your password (we never store the password itself). Changing your email requires confirming the new address.
Business profile. What you tell us about each business: name, description, business vertical, the city it is in and the cities you want researched, and — optionally — the link to its Facebook business page.
Your Google listing and reviews. With your confirmation, we match your business to its Google listing and retrieve its public rating and reviews through Google's Places API so we can flag negative reviews and draft replies. Reviews are public content written by your customers; we store the reviews we retrieve, their sentiment, and the reply drafts you create or approve.
Competitor data. Public information about other businesses in your cities — names, listings, websites, prices, promotions, ratings — collected by automated research and stored as the history behind your reports.
Notification contacts. On plans that allow it, you may add other people's email addresses to receive report and review notices for a business. You must have their permission; each address receives a confirmation email first and every notice carries an unsubscribe link. We store the address, when it was confirmed, and nothing else about that person.
Payment information. Payments are handled by Stripe. We receive and store your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, plan, billing status, and renewal date. We also store a fingerprint of your card — an identifier Stripe derives from the card, not the card number — solely to prevent the free first report from being claimed repeatedly.
Messages you send us. The lead form and the in-app support form are delivered by Formspree and include what you type, your email, and (for the lead form) your phone number if you provide it.
Technical logs. Our servers keep operational logs of events such as logins, report runs, and email delivery. Log entries identify your account by its internal number, not your email address, and never contain report contents or message bodies. Our hosting provider records standard web-server data such as IP address and browser type.
Cookies. Market Scout sets two cookies, both strictly necessary: one that keeps you logged in and one that remembers which business you are viewing. We do not use advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies, and our emails contain no open or click tracking.
3. How we use it
- To provide the Service: generate your reports, monitor reviews, draft replies, build the Competitor Moves timeline, and send you the notices you have enabled.
- To run your account: sign-in, password resets, billing, trial and renewal reminders, and support.
- To keep the Service secure and fair, including enforcing usage limits and the free-period limit.
- To improve the Service — for example, reviewing where competitor matching goes wrong. We do not use your data to train AI models.
We send transactional email only (account, billing, reports, reviews). We do not send marketing email unless you ask for it, and you can withdraw that at any time.
4. Who we share it with
We share personal information only with the service providers that help us run Market Scout, each limited to what its job requires:
- Stripe — payments, subscriptions, and card storage (Stripe's privacy policy governs the card details you enter on its checkout page).
- Google (Places API) — to look up your listing, reviews, and competitor listings. We send business names and cities, not your account details.
- AI model provider — your business description, cities, and the public competitor and review data we have collected are sent to a commercial AI API to research competitors and write reports and reply drafts. We use the provider's business API, whose terms prohibit using submitted content to train its models.
- Resend — delivers our email.
- Formspree — delivers lead and support form submissions.
- Render — hosts the application and its database in the United States.
We may also disclose information when required by law or to protect the rights, safety, or property of our customers or ourselves, and as part of a merger or sale of the business (in which case this policy continues to apply to your data). We do not sell personal information and we do not share it with advertisers.
If you create a share link for a report, the report — including your business name — is readable by anyone with the link until it expires or you revoke it.
5. How long we keep it
- Account and business data: for as long as your account exists. Deleting a business profile deletes its reports, reviews, drafts, competitor history, and notification contacts.
- When you close your account, we delete it and its data within 30 days, except billing records we must keep for tax and accounting purposes (retained for up to 7 years) and the card fingerprint used for free-period enforcement (retained for 90 days).
- Operational logs and database backups are kept for up to 30 days.
6. Security
All traffic to Market Scout is encrypted (HTTPS). Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes. Card data is entered on Stripe's PCI-compliant pages and never touches our servers. Access to production systems is limited to the people who operate the Service. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will notify you as required by law.
7. Your choices and rights
- See and update your account and business information at any time from the Account and Business & Locations pages.
- Delete a business profile from the dashboard, or your whole account by emailing us from the address on the account.
- Notification contacts can remove themselves with the unsubscribe link in any notice, and you can remove them from Business & Locations.
- Export: reports can be downloaded as PDF or Markdown from the dashboard; email us for a copy of the rest of your data.
Depending on where you live you may have additional rights — for example to access, correct, delete, or port your personal information, or to object to certain processing — under laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act or the EU/UK GDPR. We honor these requests for everyone, wherever they are. Email support@marketscoutlocal.com; we will verify the request against the account email and respond within 30 days. We will never discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right.
8. Information about other people
Reports contain information about other businesses, and reviews are written by your customers. We collect this from public sources for your competitive research and reputation management. If you are a business owner or reviewer who believes information about you in Market Scout is inaccurate, contact us and we will look into it.
9. Children
Market Scout is a business service and is not directed to anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.
10. Changes
We will post any changes to this policy here and update the date at the top. For material changes we will also email the address on your account before they take effect.
11. Contact
infused Ideas LLC · support@marketscoutlocal.com. See also our Terms of Service and Refund Policy.