Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Curious Crew Media Ltd ("we", "us") runs pickoracuriouscrew.forum. We're the data controller for the personal data described here.

Registered office: Unit 7, The Kiln Works, 42 Barrowfield Street, Sheffield S1 4RG, United Kingdom
Company number: 14872306, registered in England & Wales
Data protection contact: [email protected]

2. What we collect, and why

What	When we get it	Why we need it	Legal basis
Name or handle, email address	When you request posting access or use the contact form	To create your account and reply to you	Contract / legitimate interests
Password (hashed)	When you set one	To keep your account yours	Contract
Your posts, replies and drafts	When you write them	To run a forum, which is the point of the site	Contract
Message content from the contact form	When you send it	To answer your question and keep a record of what we promised	Legitimate interests
Anonymous page counts	Only if you accept analytics cookies	To know which guides are worth updating	Consent
Server logs (IP, browser, timestamp)	Automatically, on every request	Security, abuse prevention, and working out why something broke	Legitimate interests

We do not buy data, we do not sell data, and we have never run an advertising pixel on this site. There's no affiliate tracking on any teardown, which we mention on the teardowns page too, because it's the question we get asked most.

3. What we deliberately don't collect

No special category data. Please don't post health, political, religious or biometric information about yourself or anyone else.
No client data. If you're describing a project, redact your customers. We remove anything that looks identifying when we spot it.
No behavioural profiles. We don't build a picture of you across sessions, and we don't do automated decision-making that has legal or similarly significant effects.

4. Who else touches your data

We keep the list of processors deliberately short. As of the date at the top of this page:

Processor	What they do for us	Where
Our hosting provider	Serves the site and stores the forum database	EU / UK region
Our transactional email provider	Sends login links and replies	EU / UK region
Our privacy-focused analytics provider	Aggregated page counts, only with your consent	EU region
Our backup storage provider	Encrypted nightly database backups	UK region

Each of them acts on our written instructions under a data processing agreement. If we ever add a processor outside the UK or EEA, we'll use UK International Data Transfer Agreements or equivalent safeguards, and we'll update this page.

5. How long we keep things

Account details: for as long as your account exists, then 30 days in backups.
Posts and replies: indefinitely, because a forum thread with holes in it helps nobody. If you close your account we'll anonymise your handle on request and leave the content in place.
Contact form messages: 24 months.
Server logs: 90 days.
Analytics: aggregated only, 14 months.

6. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:

tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy;
correct anything that's wrong;
delete your data, where we don't have a good reason to keep it;
restrict or object to how we're using it;
port it somewhere else in a machine-readable format;
withdraw consent (for analytics or functional cookies) at any time, without it affecting anything that happened before.

Email [email protected] and we'll respond within one month, usually within a week. We won't charge you and we won't make it awkward.

If you think we've handled things badly, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We'd appreciate the chance to fix it first, but it's your call.

7. Security

Passwords are hashed, traffic is encrypted in transit, backups are encrypted at rest, and access to the production database is limited to two people. We run software updates monthly. We're a small team, not a bank — but we take the boring parts seriously, and if there's ever a breach that risks your rights, we'll tell the ICO within 72 hours and tell you as soon as we reasonably can.

8. Children

This site is for people doing business AI work. It isn't aimed at under-16s and we don't knowingly create accounts for them.

9. Links to other sites

Our teardowns link out to vendor documentation, pricing pages and research papers. Once you follow one of those links you're on someone else's site under someone else's privacy policy. We check links work; we can't vouch for what they do with your data.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change anything meaningful we'll update the date at the top and post a note in the forum. We won't quietly reduce your rights and hope nobody notices — that would be an odd way to run a site built on not doing that sort of thing.