Legal

Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains what data SearchTalent handles, why it is needed, who processes it, and the rights you have over your information.

Last updated: October 12, 2026Legal hub

Who is responsible for your data

SearchTalent is operated by a sole proprietorship registered in Ukraine, which is the controller of the personal data described in this policy.

For any privacy question, or to exercise the rights described below, write to support.searchtalent@gmail.com. We will provide the registered name and postal address of the controller on request.

What data we collect

SearchTalent collects the data you provide when you create an account and build your public presence, together with the content and activity you generate while using the platform.

Account and authentication data: email address and login identifiers, including data from GitHub if you sign in or connect a repository through it.
Profile and contact details: name, username, headline, bio, location, avatar and cover image, and any contact details or links you add (email, phone, Telegram, website, GitHub, LinkedIn, and other social or portfolio links).
Professional information: skills, languages, work experience, education, certificates (including any files you upload), experience level, what you are open to (freelance, a job, an internship, collaboration, mentoring) and when you last confirmed it, preferred work formats, and salary expectations and an hourly rate if you choose to provide them.
Opening someone's contacts: when you are signed in and press “Contact” on another person's page, we record that your account opened that profile's contacts and when; if you opened them on behalf of a company, also which company.
Content and community activity: projects, articles, polls and your poll responses, comments, reactions, votes, follows, bookmarks, badges, notifications, and your position on the leaderboard.
Project details, if you add them: who the project was made for (yourself, a client, an employer, your studies, or open source), the client's or company's name or a note that it is under an NDA, and the budget.
Company pages: the organization's name, logo, website, description, size and location; who created the page; who is on its team and in what role; invitations to join it; which projects were added to the page, by whom, and who from the company confirmed them.
Vacancies: what a company's team publishes about a vacancy (title, description, type, format, place, level, skills, pay, language), who on the team posted it, and when it was published, closed, or ended.
Applications to vacancies: which vacancy you applied to and when, the projects you chose, your message, the moment you agreed to share your contacts, and where the application stands (viewed, shortlisted, rejected, hired, or withdrawn), with who on the company's team changed it and when.
Job alerts: the vacancy searches you follow (their filters and name) or that you follow vacancies fitting your profile, whether they come by email, and which vacancies each alert has already sent you, when, and whether by email.
Messages: the conversations you take part in — who wrote what and when, on whose behalf (yourself or a company), and whether a message was edited, deleted, or removed or carries a scam warning (an edited message keeps the text it was sent with for 60 days, for reports only); when you last read each conversation and whether you archived, muted, or deleted it for yourself; the files you send in messages (the file, its name, type and size; an image is re-encoded in your browser before upload, which drops its camera data, such as where a photo was taken); the people and companies you blocked; your message settings (who may write to you, read receipts); your email choices (message emails at once, once a day, or never; follower emails on or off); and which emails about unread messages were scheduled and when the last daily one went out. A report about someone in a conversation keeps the conversation's last 20 messages.
Feedback you send: the name, email, and message you submit through the feedback form.
Technical and usage data: information needed for security, reliability, and performance, and aggregate view counts on content.
Page view statistics for profiles, projects, articles, vacancies, and company pages: which page was viewed, whether the visitor came from another SearchTalent page, from another site (its domain only), or directly, and whether they were signed in. We do not store IP addresses or full referring links. A repeat view on the same day is recognized by a code computed from the IP address and browser details together with a random key that we delete the next day; after that, the code cannot be linked to anyone.
For registered users: the time of your last visit, updated at most once an hour.
Only if you allowed analytics cookies: where your first visit came from (the referring site's domain, UTM tags, and the page you landed on), saved to your account once when you sign up.

Why we use it

Your data is used to authenticate access, display the public pages and content you choose to publish, power search and discovery, calculate ratings, badges, and leaderboards, deliver notifications, and respond to feedback or reports.

Some technical data is also used to keep the service secure, reliable, and performant, and to moderate content for the safety of the platform and its users.

View statistics, last-visit times, and sign-up sources are used only in aggregate: to see how many people sign up, publish a first project, come back, and get views of their portfolio from outside the platform. They are not used to profile individual visitors or for advertising.

Authors see the view statistics of their own pages in My Space: how many views their profile and projects got each day over the last 30 days, where visitors came from (another site, a direct link, or SearchTalent), and the domains of the referring sites. Authors don't see who the visitors were — we don't have that either.

Records of who opened whose contacts are used for two things only: to show the owner how many people opened their contacts, and to limit how many profiles one account can open, so addresses cannot be harvested. The owner sees the number, never who — except when a member of a verified company opens them on the company's behalf: then the owner sees which company, but not who in its team.

When you verify a company page, we check that the address you use — the one you sign in with, or a work address you enter — is on the company website's domain. For a work address we send a one-time code to it. That address is not shown to anyone and not stored: we keep only its domain and a hash of the code until the code is used or expires 15 minutes later. The page records that it was verified, when, and by whom.

When you apply to a vacancy, we hand the company's team your public profile, the projects you chose, your message, and your contacts: the contact email from your profile (or, if there is none, the email you sign in with) and your phone, if you added one. The form shows which ones before you agree. The team gets an email about the new application, and you get notifications — and for a decision, an email — when the company answers.

Messages go to the other side of the conversation — the other person, or the whole current team of the company. While a messages page is open, they arrive at once through our database provider's live connection, which carries only which message is new, not its text. Emails about unread messages never contain the text. By default, if a message stays unread for 10 minutes, we email the recipient that someone wrote: one email per conversation until it is opened, at most 10 a day. Instead you can choose one email in the morning about the unread messages since the day before (only counts and names), or none; a muted conversation sends none. Read receipts show the other side that you read their message, only while both of you keep them on.

For job alerts, every morning we check new vacancies against the searches you follow and, for “Vacancies that fit me”, against what you are open to, your skills, and your work format. What matches comes as one notification and, if email is on, one email. Every email has a link that turns them off without signing in.

The legal bases we rely on

Where data protection law such as the GDPR applies to you, we process your data on the following bases.

Performance of a contract — creating and running your account, publishing the profile, content and company pages you choose to share, providing the community features described in the Terms of Service, delivering the messages you send and receive, and sending the job alerts you follow.
Your consent — optional analytics and the cookie categories you allow, the optional AI features, and handing an application with your contacts to the company you apply to. You can withdraw consent at any time, which does not affect processing that already happened; withdrawing an application takes your message, projects, and contacts away from the company.
Our legitimate interests — keeping the platform secure and reliable, preventing spam, abuse, rating manipulation, fake company pages, the harvesting of contact details, and scam messages, limiting messaging for people who misuse it, moderating content for the safety of users, and measuring in aggregate how the platform is used (view statistics, last-visit times, and the number of people who opened your contacts). The sign-up source is recorded only with your consent.
Legal obligations — where we are required to keep, provide, or remove data to comply with the law.

Public and private data

Much of what you add is intended to be public — your profile, projects, articles, polls, and comments — and you control which profile sections are visible through your profile visibility settings.

Other information, such as authentication data, your email, feedback submissions, and internal technical records, is used only to operate the service and is not made public.

The email and phone you add to your profile are never public: signed-in people see them only after pressing “Contact” on your page. Salary expectations and the hourly rate are visible only to you until you turn on showing them on your page, each with its own switch. What you are open to is public, as is the date you last confirmed it.

If you join a company's team, your profile appears on the company page. An invitation nobody has answered yet is seen only by the person invited and by the company's team. A published vacancy is public, also after it closes; a draft, and a vacancy waiting for a moderator, are seen only by the company's team. How many people viewed a vacancy is seen by the team only.

An application is seen only by you and by the team of the company you applied to. The team gets your contacts only while the vacancy and the company page are not hidden by moderation. After you withdraw an application, the team sees only that you applied and withdrew.

The searches you follow and what they sent you are seen only by you.

Your messages are seen only by the people in the conversation — on a company's side, by its current team; someone who leaves the team no longer sees them. Platform administrators cannot read conversations; a moderator sees only the snapshot a report takes. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: they are encrypted in transit and stored encrypted by our database provider. Files in messages are kept in private storage: they open only for the people in the conversation, through a link that works for a few minutes; a moderator opens a file only from a report that holds it, and every opening is recorded.

Who a project was made for and the client's name are shown on the project page; with the NDA note, only “Client under NDA” is shown. The budget is visible only to you until you turn on showing it. A project you add to a page of a company you are not in is seen only by you and that company's team until the company accepts it.

Service providers and where data goes

SearchTalent relies on trusted third-party providers to run the platform. Your data may be stored and processed by them, which can include servers located outside your country.

Supabase — database, authentication, file storage, and the live delivery of new messages.
Vercel — application hosting and, only after you allow analytics, usage and performance measurement.
Cloudflare R2 — storage and delivery of uploaded media and documents, and private storage of files sent in messages.
Email delivery — sending messages such as the code that confirms account deletion, the emails about applications, unread messages, and new followers, and job alerts, handled through our authentication and email infrastructure.
GitHub — optional sign-in and repository import, if you choose to use it.
Google (Gemini) — optional AI features, as described below.
Google Analytics, Ahrefs Web Analytics, and Plerdy — measurement of usage, traffic, and which parts of a page people interact with. These load only after you allow analytics cookies and are listed in the Cookie Policy.
GIPHY — the GIF search you can use in comments runs through our own server, but the GIF files themselves are delivered from GIPHY's network, which therefore receives your IP address and browser details as part of loading them.

Sending data abroad

The providers above operate globally, so your data may be processed outside Ukraine and outside the European Economic Area — most often in the United States.

Where that happens, the transfer relies on the safeguards those providers commit to, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and their own data processing terms. You can ask us which safeguard applies to a specific provider.

AI features

Some optional features use AI to help you draft or summarize content. When you use them, the text and context you provide — which may include profile or project information — is sent to Google's Gemini API to generate a response.

We use the Gemini API on a paid tier. Under Google's terms for paid use, the content sent and the output generated are not used to train or improve Google's models; Google may still retain them for a limited period to detect abuse.

These features are optional. Please avoid submitting information you do not want processed by a third-party AI provider.

Analytics and cookies

Usage and performance analytics run only after you allow the analytics category through the cookie consent banner; until then they stay off. The Cookie Policy names every measurement tool we use.

View counts on content are stored in an aggregate form and are not used to build a profile of individual visitors. SearchTalent's own view statistics use no cookies or browser storage and keep no IP addresses, as described above. See the Cookie Policy for details on cookies and similar storage.

Your rights

You can view and edit your account and profile data at any time from your profile settings, and export your profile as a PDF. Beyond what the settings already let you do, you have the following rights over your data.

Access — ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you. If you need it in a machine-readable format rather than the profile PDF, ask us by email and we will prepare one.
Correction — have inaccurate data fixed; most fields you can edit yourself.
Deletion — remove your account and data, as described in the next section.
Restriction and objection — ask us to pause certain processing, or object to processing we base on our legitimate interests.
Withdrawing consent — turn off analytics cookies, stop using the optional AI features, or withdraw an application in “My applications” at any time.
Job alert emails — turn them off with the link in any of them or on the job alerts page; the alerts themselves you can remove there at any time.
Messages — choose who may write to you and turn off read receipts in the message settings, edit your message within 15 minutes and delete it at any time, block anyone, and delete a conversation for yourself at any time.
Emails — on the email settings page choose whether message emails come at once, once a day, or never, and turn off the emails about new followers; each of these emails also has a link that turns it off.

Making a request or a complaint

Send requests to support.searchtalent@gmail.com. We answer within 30 days, and will tell you if a request needs longer or if we cannot verify that it comes from the account owner.

If you are unhappy with how we handled your data, you can complain to a data protection authority — in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights; in the European Economic Area, the supervisory authority of the country where you live.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from your profile settings. We email you a confirmation code, and you choose how deletion happens: full erasure removes your profile, projects, articles, comments, votes, and related data; or you can keep your articles and comments as anonymous content attributed to a deleted user while the rest of your account is removed. Either way the account disappears from the site at once and can no longer be signed in to.

For 60 days after deletion we keep a copy in a closed archive that only platform administrators can reach, so a mistaken deletion can be undone: write to us within that time and we will restore the account. After 60 days the account and its copy are erased for good, uploaded files included. Until then the files are no longer linked from the site, but someone who already has a direct link to a file may still open it.

Data retention

We keep your data while your account is active and remove or anonymize it when you delete your account as described above.

Anything you delete — a project, an article, a poll, a comment, a company page, a vacancy, a job alert — leaves the site at once and is kept in the same closed archive for 60 days, then erased for good, files included. Administrators see what was deleted and when, but not the contents of contact details, application messages, or private messages.

Limited records may persist for a short time where needed for security, backups, or legal obligations.

View statistics keep no data that identifies a visitor once the day's key is deleted. Statistics about views of your pages are deleted together with your account.

A record that one account opened another's contacts is deleted when either account is deleted. A record that a company opened your contacts is deleted with your account or the company page; if the team member who opened them deletes their account, the record stays without them.

A job alert is deleted when you remove it or delete your account. The record of which vacancies an alert sent is kept for 90 days.

Your place in a company's team is deleted when you leave the team or delete your account. A company page is deleted by its owner, or when the last person in its team deletes their account.

Projects you added stay on the company page after you leave the team; you or the company can take them off at any time. A project's budget and its links to company pages are deleted together with the project.

A conversation is deleted 24 months after its last message. Deleting it for yourself hides it only from you; when both people in a conversation delete it, it is deleted. When you delete your account, your messages are deleted with it; the other side keeps their own. Removed and deleted messages are kept in the closed archive for 60 days, and so is the text an edited message was sent with; both are seen only in a report's snapshot. A report's snapshot of a conversation is deleted 12 months after the report was answered, and records of scheduled message emails after 30 days. Files in messages go with their message: 60 days after it is deleted or removed — or, when a report holds them, once its snapshot is deleted. Files you upload but never send are deleted after a day.

Applications are deleted 12 months after their vacancy closes or its term ends, or earlier together with the vacancy, the company page, or your account. Until then a withdrawn application keeps only which vacancy you applied to and when. A deleted application is kept in the closed archive for another 60 days.

Contact and changes to this policy

If you have questions about privacy or want to exercise your rights, contact us at support.searchtalent@gmail.com or through the contacts page.

As the platform evolves, this Privacy Policy may be updated. Significant changes will be published on this page with a new date.