The short version
- We collect the details you give us when you book a call, apply for a job or email us, plus a little technical data when you visit the site.
- We use it to reply to you, prepare for our call, run the site and keep it secure.
- We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t use advertising cookies or trackers.
- Our site analytics don’t use cookies and don’t identify you.
- You can ask us to see, correct or delete your data at any time by emailing trust@trustciao.com.
Who we are
This website, trustciao.com, is run by Lynq Tooling Technologies Inc. (“Ciao”, “we”, “us”), a Delaware corporation. We decide how the personal data in this policy is used, which makes us its “controller” under European and UK data protection law.
Our offices:
- 1417 15th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, United States
- 125 Kingsway, London WC2B 6NH, United Kingdom
- 13 Charlemont Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
For anything about your data, email trust@trustciao.com or write to any of our offices.
What this policy covers
This policy covers trustciao.com, the forms on it, the emails you exchange with us, and the business contacts we reach out to. It doesn’t cover the work we do inside a client’s own systems. That work is governed by our contract with the client: we handle that data on the client’s instructions, and the client is its controller.
What we collect
When you book a call. The booking form asks for your name, work email and company, and lets you add your role, your industry, your company’s revenue and the process that takes your team the most time. We also record your time zone, so we can suggest times that suit you, and the page you booked from. When you pick a time, Calendly collects your name, email and the time you chose.
When you apply for a job. The careers form opens your own email app with your answers filled in, so your application reaches us as an email, with any CV you attach.
When you email us or talk to us. Your messages, your contact details, anything you choose to tell us, and our notes from calls.
When you visit the site. Our host, Vercel, processes technical data such as your IP address, browser, device and the pages you request. It needs this to serve the site, keep it secure and count visits. See Cookies and analytics below.
Business contacts we reach out to. We sometimes email people at companies we think we can help. For that we use business contact details: name, job title, company, work email and public professional information, such as a LinkedIn profile. We find these on company websites and other public sources, or through business contact tools such as Hunter, and keep them in our CRM, Attio.
We don’t ask for sensitive data, such as health information. Please don’t send it to us.
How we use it, and why
Data protection law in the EU and UK asks us to name a legal basis for each use. Here’s ours:
| What we do | Why | Legal basis (EU and UK) |
|---|---|---|
| Reply to you and set up your call | You asked us to | Steps you asked for before a contract |
| Research your company before the call | So the call is useful to you | Our legitimate interests |
| Consider your job application | You applied | Steps you asked for before a contract |
| Run, secure and improve the site | So it works and stays safe | Our legitimate interests |
| Count visits and test page versions | To learn which pages help people | Our legitimate interests |
| Email business contacts about our work | To find companies we can help | Our legitimate interests |
| Keep records and meet legal duties | The law requires it | Legal obligation |
“Legitimate interests” means we have a genuine business reason, and we’ve weighed it against your rights and what you’d reasonably expect. You can object to any of these uses at any time (see Your rights).
Researching your company before a call
When you send the booking form, we use OpenAI’s API to research your company from public sources on the web, so we arrive at the call prepared. We send OpenAI your company name, the domain of your email (not the full address), your name and role, and what you told us in the form. It looks at public information about the company, such as its locations, leadership, ownership and news, and the result is emailed to us as a short report. OpenAI doesn’t use data sent through its API to train its models. We don’t use the report to make any automated decision about you.
After you send the form, we also email you a short note from Paul Sheridan, our founder, with a few times to talk. If you’ve already booked a time, we cancel that note.
Cookies and analytics
We keep this light:
- Analytics. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count visits and see which pages are read. It doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t follow you to other sites. It tells visits apart with an anonymous code made from your request, which is thrown away after 24 hours.
- Homepage tests. We sometimes show two versions of the homepage to learn which one explains our work better. To keep showing you the same version, we set one cookie, ab_home, which holds only the letter of your version and lasts 90 days. Right now we run tests only for visitors in the United States.
- Your place on the page. The site keeps your scroll position in your browser’s session storage, so the back button returns you to the same spot. It’s cleared when you close the tab.
- Calendly. When you open the calendar to book a call, Calendly loads inside our page and may set its own cookies. Calendly’s privacy notice explains them.
We don’t use advertising cookies, and we don’t let ad networks track you on our site.
Who we share it with
We don’t sell your personal information or share it for advertising. We share it only with the services that help us run Ciao, under contracts that limit what they can do with it:
| Service | What it does for us | Where it’s based |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosts the site and runs our analytics | United States |
| Calendly | Books calls | United States |
| OpenAI | Researches your company before a call | United States |
| Resend | Sends the emails from our booking form | United States |
| Google Workspace | Our email, calendar and documents | United States |
| Attio | Our CRM, where we keep contacts and notes | United Kingdom |
| Hunter | Finds business email addresses | France |
We may also share data when the law requires it, to protect our rights or someone’s safety, or with a buyer if Ciao is ever sold or merged. A buyer would have to keep using it as this policy describes.
Sending data abroad
We work from the United States, the UK and Ireland, and most of the services above are in the United States. When personal data moves from the EU or UK to a country the EU or UK hasn’t recognised as protecting it adequately, we use safeguards the law approves: the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK Extension) where a service is certified, or the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum. You can ask us for a copy.
How long we keep it
- Booking form details, emails and call notes: up to 2 years after our last contact, unless you become a client.
- Job applications: up to 12 months after we decide, unless you agree to let us keep yours longer.
- Business contacts we reached out to: up to 2 years after our last contact. If you ask us to stop, we keep only your email address on a do-not-contact list, so we never contact you again.
- Client records: for as long as our contract runs, then as long as tax and other laws require.
- Server logs: for a short time, set by Vercel.
Keeping it safe
Ciao is SOC 2 Type II audited: an independent auditor tested our security controls over a period of months, not on a single day. We monitor those controls continuously with Vanta. We limit who on our team can see personal data, encrypt it in transit, and use services that encrypt it at rest. No system is perfectly secure, but if a breach affects your data, we’ll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.
Your rights
Wherever you are, you can ask us to:
- tell you what personal data we hold about you, and give you a copy
- correct it
- delete it
- stop contacting you (just reply to any of our emails, or write to us)
In the EU and UK, you can also object to any use based on our legitimate interests (we’ll stop any marketing at once), ask us to restrict how we use your data, ask for it in a form you can take to another service, and withdraw any consent you’ve given. You can complain to a data protection authority: in Ireland, the Data Protection Commission (dataprotection.ie); in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk); or the authority where you live. We’d be glad of the chance to sort it out with you first.
In California and other US states with similar laws, you can ask to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose, and to delete or correct it. In the past 12 months we’ve collected identifiers (such as name, email and IP address), professional information (such as company and job title), internet activity (such as pages visited) and approximate location (country, from your IP address). We got it from you, from your device, and from public sources and business contact tools, and used it for the purposes above. We disclosed it for business purposes only, to the services listed above. We don’t sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we haven’t in the past 12 months. We don’t use sensitive personal information. We honor Global Privacy Control signals, and we won’t treat you differently for using your rights. An authorized agent can make a request for you with your written permission.
To use any of these rights, email trust@trustciao.com. We’ll reply within one month (45 days in California), and we may ask you to confirm who you are first.
Children
The site is for businesses. It isn’t meant for children, and we don’t knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.
Changes to this policy
When we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we’ll say so on the site, or email you if we have your address.
Contact us
Lynq Tooling Technologies Inc., 1417 15th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, United States. Email trust@trustciao.com.