Legal
Privacy policy
This policy explains how Pandora Search processes personal data. It has two parts, because the service handles two kinds of personal data: the data of the people who use it (part A) and the data about other people that users find in open sources during their investigations (part B).
Part A. The users of Pandora Search
A1. Controller
The controller is the duly incorporated company that operates Pandora Search («we» in this policy). Its contact address is info@pandorasearch.com, where its identification details (company name, registration and tax details, and address) are provided on legitimate request; it is also the address for anything about your data.
A2. The data we process
- Account: your email address, the language you choose, the date you signed up, your acceptance of the terms (and when) and whether you agreed to receive product news.
- Sign-in: one-time links and codes (valid for 15 minutes, single use), the session cookie and, if you sign in with Google, the email address and the name on your Google profile that Google sends us.
- Payments: Freemius processes the payment. We receive the status of your subscription or purchase, the plan, the amounts, the country used for tax purposes and the identifiers that link them to your account. We never receive your card details.
- Use of the service: your cases and their content, the declared purpose of each case, the audit log of queries, the credit ledger (consumption per transform and source) and the API keys you add for the sources that require them, stored encrypted.
- Technical data: IP address, browser and request logs, for security and for operating the service.
- Communications: the emails we exchange with you. To sort the ones that reach info@pandorasearch.com, our system keeps a copy of their sender, subject and text (without the earlier messages they quote or the signatures).
- Affiliate program: if you join it, your affiliate code, the version of its terms you accepted, the PayPal email address you give us for payouts, the accounts your links bring and when, the commissions their payments generate and the payouts we make. If an affiliate's link brought you, your account keeps which affiliate it was, so that they can be paid; affiliates see totals, never who you are.
A3. Purposes and legal bases
| Purpose | Legal basis (GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Providing the service, your account and its credits | Performance of the contract (art. 6.1.b) |
| Sending sign-in links and codes and service emails, through Resend | Performance of the contract (art. 6.1.b) |
| Billing, and the related tax and accounting duties | Legal obligation (art. 6.1.c) and contract |
| Keeping the audit log and preventing misuse, fraud and abuse of the service | Legitimate interest in the security and lawful use of the service (art. 6.1.f) and, where applicable, legal obligation |
| Sending product news | Consent (art. 6.1.a), which you can withdraw at any time |
| Anonymous page-view counts (the page, the referring site, the country and the type of device; no cookies or identifiers) | Legitimate interest in knowing which pages work (art. 6.1.f) |
| Visit journeys and campaign tags (a random identifier kept in your browser for that visit only; if you create your account during that visit, the account keeps which visit, and so which campaign, brought it) | Consent, given in the cookie banner; without it they are not recorded |
A4. Who receives it
- Freemius, Inc., for payments, as merchant of record and independent controller of the payment data.
- Resend, for transactional email (sign-in links and codes, service notices), as processor.
- Namecheap, Inc., which hosts our mailbox info@pandorasearch.com (Private Email), as processor.
- OVH SAS, for the servers, in Roubaix (France), and Cloudflare, Inc., which sits in front of them as a content delivery network and security layer and handles your IP address and the requests you make; both as processors.
- Google, only if you choose to sign in with Google.
- PayPal, to pay affiliate commissions to the address the affiliate gives us, as independent controller.
- The data sources: when you run a transform, the data point you entered (for example an email address or a username) is sent to the source that answers it. Part B covers this processing.
- Competent authorities, when the law requires it.
We do not sell personal data.
A5. International transfers
Some providers (such as Freemius, Resend, Cloudflare, Google and Namecheap) are based in, or process data in, the United States or other countries outside the European Economic Area. Transfers to them rely on the safeguards the GDPR provides, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply.
A6. How long we keep it
- Account and cases: while your account exists. When you delete your account, your account and your cases are deleted immediately; the backups, which rotate within 14 days, may hold a copy until then.
- Sign-in links and codes: valid for 15 minutes, and deleted within the following two hours. Sessions: 30 days from the last use.
- Audit log and credit ledger: while your account exists, to prevent and investigate misuse; they are deleted with it.
- Billing records: as long as tax and commercial law requires (in Spain, up to six years).
- Consent to product news: until you withdraw it.
- Emails: in our mailbox for as long as we need them to deal with your request and its follow-up; the copy our system makes to sort them is deleted after 90 days (those still pending, once dealt with).
- Affiliate program: while you take part. If you close your account, your PayPal address is deleted and your affiliation ends; the commissions and payouts are kept as billing records.
- Server logs: up to 14 days.
- Visit journeys: 13 months. Anonymous page-view counts have no personal data and are kept as statistics.
A7. Cookies and local storage
| Name | Type | What it does | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
sid | Cookie, strictly necessary | Keeps your session open (HttpOnly, not readable by scripts) | 30 days, renewed with use |
amg | Cookie, strictly necessary | Ties a sign-in link to the browser that requested it | Until the link expires |
pandora_consent_v1 | Local storage, strictly necessary | Remembers your cookie choice | Until you change it |
pandora_v, pandora_utm | Session storage, analytics (only if you accept) | A random identifier for the visit and the campaign tags it arrived with, to see its path through the site | Until you close the tab |
pd_via | Cookie, analytics (only if you accept) | If you arrived through an affiliate's link: their code and when you clicked it, so that the account you create (or sign in to, if it has never paid) is credited to them under the affiliate program | 30 days |
pandora_lang, pandora_currency | Local storage, preferences | Remember the language and the currency you chose; they never leave your browser | Until you clear them |
We count page views anonymously, without cookies or identifiers. Nothing else (visit journeys, advertising) runs unless you accept it in the cookie banner. You can change your choice at any time with «Cookie settings» at the foot of every page.
A8. Your rights
You can access, rectify or erase your data, restrict or object to its processing, ask for its portability and withdraw your consent at any time by writing to info@pandorasearch.com. You can delete your account and all your cases yourself from your account page. If you believe your rights have not been respected, you can complain to the Spanish Data Protection Agency (www.aepd.es) or to the authority of your country.
A9. Security
We apply technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk, including encrypted connections, session cookies that scripts cannot read, encryption of the API keys you add and restricted access to production systems.
Part B. People investigated with Pandora Search
B1. What data
Users investigate data points such as email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, domains, IP addresses, names and photos. Pandora Search queries publicly available sources about them (public APIs, open data, official registries, open-source tools) and stores the results in the user's case.
B2. Who decides
The user who runs an investigation decides its purpose and means: the user is the controller of that processing, must have a lawful basis for it (for example, a legitimate interest assessed case by case, or a legal obligation) and must meet the duties of a controller, including informing the people concerned where the law requires it. Pandora Search processes that data on the user's behalf and on the user's instructions, as a processor (article 28 GDPR), under the data processing terms that form part of the terms of service.
B3. Limits built into the service
To keep this processing proportionate, the service:
- only queries publicly available sources and does not get around access controls or anti-bot protections;
- does not query sites in the special categories of personal data (adult content, dating, health, religion, politics);
- does not use face recognition or any biometric data: photos are compared by a perceptual hash of the image;
- shows breach exposure (name, date and data types) and never passwords, hashes or other leaked values;
- collects passively, without notifying the person investigated;
- requires a declared purpose for each case, recorded with every query in the audit log.
B4. How long it is kept
Results stay in the user's case until the user deletes the case or the account. Responses from sources may be cached for up to 24 hours so the same query is not repeated.
B5. If you are the person investigated
The controller of an investigation is the user who carried it out. You can also write to info@pandorasearch.com: where we can identify the user concerned we will forward your request and help them answer it, as a processor must. If we detect a use contrary to the acceptable use policy, we will act as that policy provides.
Changes to this policy
We will publish any change on this page with its date and, if it is material, tell users by email.