Privacy policy

Last modified

Last modified July 2026

We at Meedan Inc. build tools and services in order to help create a more credible and inclusive web. To do this well, we need to collect some personal information and data from and about our users. This privacy policy clarifies the kinds of personal information we collect, what we use it for, how long we keep it, the legal bases on which we process it, and how you can exercise your rights and otherwise manage our use of your personal information when using our services. This policy applies to our website and our technical tools, which include but are not limited to Suwali and Check (collectively, the "Services").

Who We Are

The data controller responsible for personal information collected under this policy is:

Meedan Inc. 365 Toni Stone Crossing, 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94158 United States of America. Email: privacy@meedan.org

Our role as controller and processor. For personal information relating to your account, billing, our website, and our own operations (such as log data), Meedan acts as the data controller. Where an organization uses Suwali or Check to process content and personal information belonging to its own audiences or contributors, that organization determines the purposes of that processing and acts as the data controller, while Meedan processes that information on the organization's behalf as a data processor, subject to our agreements with that organization. If you interact with a Meedan customer's instance of the Services, that customer's own privacy policy will also apply to you, and you may need to direct certain privacy requests to that organization.

Are You Under 18?

We are glad that you are interested in our work. Unfortunately, you may not use our Services, create an account, or share personal information with us if you are under 18. If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 18 who you believe has submitted personal information to one of our Services, please contact us immediately at privacy@meedan.org so we can remove the content and delete the account.

Global Networks Mean Global Laws

We store data on servers around the world, with Suwali and Check data stored exclusively in Ireland. Your information might reside on a server in a country other than the one you access the Services from, and that country might have laws that provide for different levels of data protection than where you live. Where applicable law, such as the EU's GDPR, restricts the international transfer of personal data, our practice is to only transfer covered personal data where we have met legal standards for safeguarding the transferred data, such as under an adequacy decision or through use of Standard Contractual Clauses.

Our Representative in the EU and the UK (Article 27 GDPR)

Meedan Inc. is established outside the European Union and the United Kingdom. Pursuant to Article 27 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Article 27 of the UK GDPR, we have appointed data protection representatives in the EU and the UK. If you are located in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you may contact the relevant representative regarding any matter related to the processing of your personal data, in addition to or instead of contacting us directly:

EU Representative Instant EU GDPR Representative Ltd. Office 2, 12A Lower Main Street Lucan, Co. Dublin, K78 X5P8 Ireland. Email: contact@gdprlocal.com Tel: +353 1 554 9700

UK Representative GDPR Local Ltd. (Adam Brogden) 1st Floor Front Suite 27–29 North Street, Brighton England, BN1 1EB United Kingdom. Email: contact@gdprlocal.com Tel: +44 1772 217800

Information You Provide to Us

We collect information from and about users of our Services directly from you when you provide it to us, as well as automatically when you use the Services.

When you download, register with, or use our Services, we may ask you to provide information that can identify you individually. This includes your name (whether actual or pseudonymous), email address, telephone number, and other personal or professional details which you may provide through our form fields, uploaded files, any free-form text in your profile description, and any other identifier by which you may be contacted online or offline.

This user-submitted information also includes:

Information that you provide by filling in forms within the Services. This could be material you provide when you register, information you post, and even information you provide when reporting problems with our Services.
Records and copies of anything you send to us, if you contact us directly, including your identifying information.
Records and copies of your interactions with other users.

One of the most important parts of the Meedan Services is the collective production of knowledge. When you use Meedan's Services, information that you share (excluding personally identifiable information unless consent is obtained) may be reviewed by the Meedan customer whose instance of the Services you are using and, where appropriate, incorporated into a shared knowledge base. Interactions with the Services may be visible to the relevant Meedan customer and information you provide may continue to be used (in a de-identified form) even if you delete your account or request deletion of your personal information.

We may also gather annotation and communications content, including but not limited to text, images, videos, or audio you create on the Services. This includes the metadata that describes when this content was submitted, people you may have collaborated with on the content, and various other types of data that help us contextualize this content. We will also gather information about the clients, projects, channels, topics, languages, or people whose content you choose to annotate.

We do not intentionally collect sensitive data such as personal information specifying medical or health conditions, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership or information specifying sexual preferences or practices.

Automatic Information Collection and Tracking

When you download, access, and use the Meedan Services, you are constantly sending information about your use to our servers, called "log data." This data includes, but is not limited to:

IP (Internet Protocol) addresses
Coarse location information provided by your IP address
Information about web pages you have navigated from or to
Cookie data
Browser type and settings
Timestamps
Operating system data
Device information (including device and application IDs)
Browser preferences and settings

We collect this information to monitor, secure, and improve our Services.

Why Do We Collect Personal Information, and on What Legal Basis?

We collect personally identifying data and information for a few reasons. First and foremost, we collect data to provide you with Services. We also may use this data to improve the quality, security, and reliability of our Services, respond to your questions and communicate with you about our Services, and prevent misuse of our Services.

Personal information like your name and credentials can help establish the validity and reliability of your verifications on Suwali and Check. We collect your name and login credentials to verify your identity and validate your Suwali and Check account. We also collect technical data from your device (such as operating system and browser type) to ensure our apps work properly and to guide our platform compatibility decisions.

Where the EU or UK GDPR (or similar law) applies, we rely on the following lawful bases under Article 6 GDPR for processing your personal information:

Purpose of processing	Examples of data used	Lawful basis (Art. 6(1) GDPR)
Providing the Services, creating and managing your account, authenticating you	Name, email address, login credentials, profile information, content you submit	Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) — processing necessary to perform our agreement with you
Processing payments and maintaining billing records	Organization name, billing contact details, payment and transaction records	Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) and Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) — e.g., tax and accounting laws
Securing the Services, preventing fraud and abuse, and maintaining logs	Log data, IP addresses, device and browser information, timestamps	Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — keeping our Services and users safe and secure
Improving, debugging, and developing the Services	Log data, technical and usage data, de-identified content	Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — understanding and improving how our Services work
Responding to your questions and providing support	Contact details, correspondence, account information	Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) or Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f))
Sending marketing communications about our products and services (such as Suwali)	Name, email address	Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), where required by law; you can withdraw consent or opt out at any time
Optional cookies and similar technologies	Cookie data, identifiers	Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), managed through our cookie consent tool
Strictly necessary cookies	Cookie data, identifiers	Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — making our website and Services function
Complying with legal obligations and responding to lawful requests	Any of the above, as relevant	Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c))

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we balance those interests against your rights and freedoms, and we do not process your personal information where your interests override ours. You have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, as described in "Your Privacy Rights" below.

Marketing Communications

We may occasionally send you emails about Meedan products and services, such as announcements about Suwali. We only send marketing communications with your consent where the law requires it, and every marketing email we send contains a link allowing you to unsubscribe. You can also opt out at any time by contacting us at privacy@meedan.org. Opting out of marketing communications does not affect service-related communications we need to send you (such as security notices or changes to our terms).

How Long Do We Keep Your Data? (Data Retention)

We retain personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, including to provide the Services, satisfy legal, accounting, or reporting requirements, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Our standard retention periods are:

Account and profile data: retained for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, or when we receive and verify a deletion request, we delete your account and profile data within 90 days.
Log data: retained for up to 12 months from collection for security, debugging, and operational purposes, after which it is deleted or anonymized.
Backups: our encrypted backups are retained on a rolling basis for up to 30 days. Data deleted from our live systems may therefore persist in backups for up to 30 days before being permanently removed.
Billing and transaction records: retained for up to 7 years, as required by applicable tax, accounting, and financial regulations.
Customer organization content (Suwali and Check): content processed on behalf of a Meedan customer is retained for the duration of our agreement with that customer and handled according to their instructions. When a Suwali hub is deleted, the data in that hub is deleted.
Support correspondence: retained for as long as needed to resolve your request and for a reasonable period afterward to maintain continuity of support.

Where no fixed period is listed above, we determine the appropriate retention period based on the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure, the purposes for which we process it and whether those purposes can be achieved by other means, and applicable legal requirements.

Please note that, because the co-creation of public knowledge is a core element of our Services, public-facing contributions you make (such as translations or verifications) may remain on the Services in de-identified form after your account or personal information is deleted, as described in "Your Privacy Rights" below.

Third-Party Information Collection

The Meedan Services couldn't operate without interacting with services and products offered by third-party companies, such as Google. We may ask you for your permission to retrieve some information (such as email address, profile photo, or social graph) from a third party if you integrate with and/or authenticate through another service. When you authenticate through another service, we will never receive or store your passwords.

If you use such a service, that service will have its own terms and privacy policies, and that service will not be covered by our policies. Additionally, these third parties may use tracking technologies to collect information about you when you use these or any other Meedan Services. The information they collect may be associated with your personal information or they may collect information, including personal information, about your online activities over time and across different websites, apps, and other online services. While we will never use your information to target content or advertisements, these third parties may use this information to target content toward you. Unfortunately, we do not control these third parties' tracking technologies or how they may be used.

Data Subprocessors

We use certain third-party service providers (data subprocessors) to help us deliver the Services. Here are lists of our current Check and Suwali data subprocessors.

Artificial Intelligence Features

Some of our Services include features powered by artificial intelligence, such as summarization, classification, similarity matching, and natural-language question answering. These features are provided using large language models and other AI systems operated by our data subprocessors.

When your information is processed through these features, it is used solely to generate the requested output - for example, to formulate a natural-language answer drawn from a customer organization's own content. We do not use your personal information to train or improve AI models. Our subprocessors process data in accordance with their own terms and data retention policies.

Where AI features process content on behalf of a customer organization, Meedan acts as a data processor, as described in "Who We Are" above.

Will We Disclose Your Data or Information?

We are committed to sharply limiting the disclosure of personal information, and are responsible for ensuring that the onward transfer of your personal information to third parties is consistent with legal requirements. We do not share personal information with advertisers, and we do not sell personal information in any circumstances. However, there may be instances when we disclose your data. These include:

When you give us permission to share it.
When we use third-party service providers to deliver our Services, such as those we use for hosting, content delivery, security, analytics, cloud storage, and data processing.
When we have a legitimate legal obligation to disclose information. Unless we are not legally allowed to do so, we will make an effort to notify you of any requests involving your account.
When we believe it is necessary to prevent harm.
If our corporate structure or status changes (such as if we undergo a restructuring, are acquired, or go bankrupt), in which case we may pass your information to a successor or affiliate. In the event that our corporate structure or status changes, we will attempt to notify you of those changes.

When we transfer your information to third parties, such as our service providers, we use contracts that limit the use of your personal information and provide us rights to take steps to remediate unauthorized use of personal information.

Cookies, Web Beacons, and Similar Technologies

We and our service providers may use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies for the purpose of gathering information and analytics on the use of our Services, securing our Services, improving the usability of our Services, and other legitimate business interests. Cookies are small text files sent by a server to your app or web browser and stored locally on your device, which allow the server to uniquely identify you.

While some cookies that we use are necessary for our Services and website to function, others are optional and are only placed with your consent. You can use the cookie consent management tool on our website to view all the cookies that we place and manage your cookie preferences at any time. You can also set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent. If you disable or refuse cookies or block the use of other tracking technologies, some parts of the Services may then be inaccessible or not function properly.

Your browser may offer you a "Do Not Track" option, which allows you to signal to operators of websites and web applications and services (including behavioral advertising services) that you do not wish such operators to track certain of your online activities over time and across different websites.

Your Privacy Rights

You may have certain rights to your personal information provided by law, such as those provided by the EU's GDPR. Even if local law does not sufficiently protect your privacy rights, we provide the following privacy rights to anyone whose personal information we have collected:

the right to access the personal information we collect about you;
the right to know how we disclose the information we collect about you;
the right to delete the personal information we have collected about you;
the right to correct inaccurate information about you;
the right not to receive discriminatory treatment for the exercise of your rights;
the right to data portability;
the right to object to certain processing of your information, including direct marketing;
the right to restrict the processing of your personal data;
the right to withdraw your consent at any time, where processing is based on consent, without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal;
the right to lodge a complaint directly with us about our use of your personal information - contact us at privacy@meedan.org and we will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and keep you informed of its progress and outcome; and
the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority in your country of residence, place of work, or where an alleged infringement occurred.

You can review and change your personal information by logging into the Meedan Services and visiting your account profile page. For other privacy requests, please email us at privacy@meedan.org, write to us at Meedan Inc., 365 Toni Stone Crossing, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA, or contact our EU/UK data protection representatives at the addresses listed above. We will respond to your request within the timeframes required by applicable law.

Please note that we provide the rights above subject to certain exceptions as provided by law or our own policies. If we're unable to process a privacy request because of one of these exceptions, we will let you know in our response to your request. Please note, in particular, that the co-creation of public knowledge is a core element of our Services. Because of that, your public-facing inputs into the Meedan Services, such as any contributions, translations or verifications you provide, will generally remain on the site despite any deletion request. These public-facing inputs may also have been copied or stored by other Meedan users or the general public. If you believe that you are endangered by a contribution you have made to our site, you should contact us immediately, and we will evaluate the situation to determine if takedown is necessary.

How Secure is your Data, Content, and Information?

We hope you can tell that we take your safety and security in using our products very seriously. We are committed to ensuring the integrity and security of your personal information that you share with us when using our Services, but we want to be realistic about the vastly complicated, hackable, and significantly flawed digital ecosystem of the internet at both a systems and governance level. We cannot make your data totally secure. However, we try to do our best to secure your data.

We've seen recently and throughout history occasions of sovereign governments, those whose laws and rules we must abide by, surveilling, persecuting, and imprisoning people simply for speaking the truth. If you do want to use our Services to speak truth to power, or even just use lots of Arabic and Chinese keywords that might land you on a government surveillance list, we cannot prevent your data from being collected by agencies of those governments. We hope you take this guidance seriously and educate yourself on the risks such speech may entail, but even then, total security is never possible.

Some of the security is also up to you – make sure you use a strong, secure password, and don't share it with others! Be careful posting personally identifying information in our Services, as well – data you share and post can become publicly viewable.

Though we cannot promise total security, we have put into place some mechanisms to maintain your data security, and to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. We employ robust security measures, and undergo regular third-party penetration testing and audits to ensure the protection of your data. We encrypt your account content when stored on our servers, and use OAuth for authentication and HTTPS to encrypt the data between you and our servers. Our log data is retained in accordance with the retention periods described in "How Long Do We Keep Your Data?" above, and we take appropriate security precautions to protect the data in those logs. In the event that we experience a data breach, we will follow proper procedures to notify the appropriate authorities, as well as reach out to you to clarify which data has been gathered and our own steps to address the breach.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

We may, from time to time, change our Privacy Policy. This page will always reflect the most recent version of our policy, and we'll include the date it was last revised. If we think the changes are substantial, we'll notify our users and provide conspicuous notice on our website.

Archived versions of this Privacy Policy are kept at: https://github.com/meedan/meedan.com.

Contact Information

If you have any questions or comments about this policy, we want to hear from you! We are grateful that you are using our tools to help us make a positive change in the world. You can contact us at: