Privacy policy

Who we are

Giving Radar (“we”, “us”) runs www.givingradar.com, the Giving Radar Daily email and the tools behind them. We follow nonprofits’ public emails, the news around them, their videos and their podcasts, and publish what we find about how the sector asks for money. Questions about this policy go to contact@givingradar.com.

If you visit the website

• Your cookie choice. When you choose “Only essential” or “Accept all”, the choice is kept in your browser’s storage so we don’t ask again. It is not sent to us.
• Google Analytics, only if you accept. With “Accept all”, Google Analytics sets cookies and tells us how the site is used: pages viewed, where visitors come from, the kind of device. With “Only essential”, no Google script runs and no cookie is set. You can change your mind at any time with “Cookie settings” at the bottom of every page.
• Server records. Like any website, our server sees your IP address, browser and the page you asked for. We use this to keep the site working and safe.

If you subscribe to Giving Radar Daily

We keep your name, your email address, the page you subscribed from, your IP address and the date. We use them to send you Giving Radar Daily and new blog posts, and we keep a record of each email we send you and whether it was delivered.

Every email has an unsubscribe link. After you unsubscribe we keep your address, marked as unsubscribed, only so we never email you again by mistake. To have it removed completely, write to us.

If you have an account

Accounts on our admin tool are created by us, by invitation. We keep your name, email address and role. Your password is stored only as a one-way hash, never as you typed it. We record failed sign-ins, with the IP address, to stop people guessing passwords, and we record changes made through the tool so they can be undone.

Google user data (Gmail)

Our app connects to Gmail through Google’s API, and only to inboxes that Giving Radar owns: the addresses we use to subscribe to nonprofits’ public mailing lists. It never connects to a visitor’s, subscriber’s or customer’s Gmail account.

• What we access. The messages those inboxes receive: sender, recipient, subject, date, the text and HTML of each message, and its Gmail labels. Sent mail and drafts are not read.
• What we change. We mark messages as read once they are saved. We do not send, delete or move mail.
• How we use it. To keep an archive of what nonprofits send, to count and label it (for example, which links ask for money), and to publish findings about the sector. The Giving Radar team reads these emails in our admin tool.
• Who else processes it. To label and summarize emails, their content is sent to the AI providers listed below, which process it for us under their API terms. The archive is stored in our database (MongoDB Atlas) and in our backups.
• What we never do. We do not sell this data, use it for advertising, or use it to develop, improve or train generalized AI or machine-learning models.
• Limited Use. Giving Radar’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

You can see and remove Giving Radar’s access at any time from the Google account that granted it, under Third-party apps with account access.

Public content we collect

We also collect content that anyone can see: news from public feeds, public YouTube videos and their transcripts, podcast episodes, and ads in Meta’s public Ad Library. These can name people who work at nonprofits, as the originals do. What we publish is about how organizations ask for money, not about individuals.

Who else handles data for us

We use these services to run Giving Radar. Each one gets only what it needs for its job.

• DigitalOcean: the server that runs the website and the app.
• MongoDB Atlas: our database.
• Google: Gmail (the inboxes above), Google Analytics (with your consent), Google Drive (a copy of our backups) and the YouTube API.
• Anthropic (Claude) and Eden AI, with the model providers it connects to: AI that labels and summarizes emails, news, videos and podcasts.
• Apify: video transcripts and public Meta ads.
• Hostinger: the mailbox that sends Giving Radar Daily.

We do not sell personal data, and we share it with no one else unless the law requires us to.

How long we keep it

• The email archive, news, videos and podcasts: for as long as Giving Radar runs, because the archive is the project.
• Subscribers: until you ask us to delete your address (see above).
• Accounts: until the account is closed.
• Records of our own jobs and server measurements: 30 to 90 days.
• Backups: overwritten by newer ones on a rolling basis.

Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, and ask us to correct it, delete it or stop using it. Write to contact@givingradar.com from the address concerned and we will answer within 30 days. Depending on where you live (for example in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Brazil or California), the law may give you further rights, and you can complain to your data protection authority.

Where data is kept, and how

Our servers and most of our providers are in the United States, so your data may be processed there. Access to our tools needs an account, connections are encrypted, and the credentials that reach Gmail and our AI providers stay on our server.

Children

Giving Radar is for people who work in or around nonprofits. It is not meant for children under 16, and we don’t knowingly collect their data.

Changes

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of this page. If a change affects how we use data you already gave us, we will tell subscribers by email first.