Privacy Policy

What this policy covers #

This policy covers lendingfounder.com and nothing else. Where this site links out to a lender, insurer or other provider, that company's own policy governs what happens on its site, and it will differ from this one.

LendingFounder is a comparison service. It is not a lender, a broker of record, an insurer or a credit repair organisation, and it makes no credit decisions.

What we collect, field by field #

Only what a form asks for. There is no hidden field and no data purchased about you from anywhere else. Three forms exist:

• Comparison request: the category you are interested in, an approximate amount as a range, a timeline, your name, your email address, and then four optional answers -- a phone number, your city and state, how you would rather be contacted, and anything you type in the notes field. The four are genuinely optional: the form sends without them.
• Contact message: your name, your email address, the reason you selected, and your message.
• Partner enquiry: your company, your name, your work email, a phone number if you give one, and what you wrote about what you underwrite.

City and state are asked because lending is licensed state by state, so where you are decides which partners can help you at all. Leaving them blank costs you nothing except that we may have to ask later.

What we never ask for #

No form on this site has a field for a Social Security number, a bank account or routing number, card details, a full date of birth, or an exact income figure. We do not ask, so we cannot hold them.

This is deliberate and it is the most useful thing on this page. A comparison can be prepared from a category, a range and a timeline. Collecting anything more sensitive would be taking on the exact risk an attacker is interested in, for no gain to you.

If a page anywhere on this site ever asks you for one of those, it is not us. Do not fill it in.

What is recorded alongside your answers #

When you submit a form we also store the following, in the same record:

• The exact wording of the agreement you ticked, and the time you ticked it. We keep the wording rather than a yes-or-no flag, because a record that says only "agreed" proves nothing once the wording changes.
• The page you first arrived on, the page you submitted from, how many pages you looked at in between, and which button opened the form. This tells us which parts of the site are useful and which are not.
• Any campaign parameters in the link you arrived by, and the referring page if your browser sent one. If you arrived from an advertisement, the identifier the advertising network attached to that click is kept with it -- see below.
• Your IP address and your browser's user-agent string, which are used to filter automated submissions and to enforce a limit on how many can be sent from one address in an hour. From the user-agent we also record whether you were on a phone, a tablet or a desktop, and roughly which browser -- that is a description of the device, not of you.
• If you did not tell us where you are, we may work out an approximate city from your IP address. That is done by reading a database file on our own server. Your address is not sent anywhere to do it, and the record shows which of the two it was, so nobody later mistakes a guess for something you said.

The advertising identifier is worth being specific about, because it is the one item here that sounds worse than it is. When you click an advertisement, the network that showed it adds a code to the link. We store that code so we can tell which campaigns bring real enquiries and which waste money. Storing it is not the same as sending anything back: no advertising network receives your enquiry, your details, or the fact that you submitted one, and there is no tracking pixel, conversion tag or advertising script anywhere on this site. The code is only meaningful to whoever already runs the ad account, and it is deleted with the rest of the record.

Why we hold it #

To prepare the comparison you asked for and to reply to you about it. That is the whole purpose, and it is the purpose you agreed to when you submitted the form.

We also use the same records in aggregate to understand which pages and which questions work, and to keep automated submissions out. We do not use them to build a profile of you for advertising, and we do not enrich them with data from other sources.

Your answers are ranked automatically #

You should know this because it is automated and because it affects how quickly you hear back. When you submit a comparison request, the amount range and the timeline you chose produce a score, and the score sorts your enquiry into one of three queues. Nothing else feeds it: not your name, not your email address, not your IP address, and not anything you typed in the notes.

The score decides reading order and nothing more. It does not decide whether you are eligible for anything, it is not shared with providers as a rating of you, and it is not a credit score or anything resembling one. No decision with a legal or financial effect on you is made by it.

You can ask us what your score was and how it was calculated, and we will tell you.

Who sees it #

The people who operate this site, and -- for a comparison request -- the lending partner who takes it on. Nothing is forwarded automatically, there is no lead marketplace, and no third-party analytics or advertising service receives anything you submit.

How a partner sees an enquiry is worth setting out exactly, because it is the part that involves somebody outside this company. A partner covers particular categories and sees only enquiries in those. What they see first is the category, the amount range, the timeline, your city and state, and anything you typed -- not your name, not your email address, not your phone number and not your IP address. Those appear only when the partner takes the enquiry on, which assigns it to them by name and is recorded with the time it happened. If nobody takes it, nobody outside LendingFounder ever learns who you are.

City and state are in that first list on purpose rather than by oversight. Lending is licensed state by state, so a partner who cannot operate where you are should be able to see that and leave the enquiry alone, instead of taking it -- and your name and number with it -- only to discover they cannot help.

We keep that record rather than merely promising it. Every reveal, every change of status and every note is logged against the person who did it, which is what lets us answer “who has seen my details” with a fact rather than an assurance. Ask us and we will tell you.

What will not happen, in any version of this: we do not sell personal information to data brokers, we do not trade it with unrelated third parties, and we do not add you to a marketing list belonging to someone else.

If your message is filtered by mistake #

Submissions are screened for automated abuse using three signals: a field invisible to people that a bot tends to fill, how long the form was open before it was sent, and whether the notes contain a link.

A message caught by any of those is filed rather than discarded, precisely so a mistake can be undone. If you have written to us and heard nothing, a link in your message is the most likely reason. Send it again without the link and it will come straight through.

Cookies, in full #

There are two, both strictly necessary, and neither is used to track you:

• csrftoken, set when a page containing a form is served. It lets the server confirm a submission came from our own form and not from another site acting in your name. Without it no form on this site can be submitted safely.
• sessionid, set only if you sign in to the staff area. If you are a visitor, this is never set.

One more thing is stored in your browser, and it is not a cookie: if you arrive by a campaign link, the campaign details are held in session storage so that they are still there if you read a page or two before filling in the form. Session storage is emptied by your browser the moment you close the tab, it is never sent to another site, and it holds nothing about you -- only which link you came in by. It is deliberately not a cookie: a cookie would outlive the visit, and nothing here needs to.

No tracking, and no cookie wall #

There is no advertising pixel, no analytics tag, no session recorder, no heatmap, no chat widget and no social embed on this site. Every script and font it loads is served from this domain, so loading a page does not tell any other company that you did.

That is why there is no consent banner. A banner exists to collect permission for tracking, and there is no tracking here to permit. If that ever changes, the banner arrives at the same time as the tracking, not before it and not after it.

Where it is stored #

On a virtual private server located in the United States, in Massachusetts. Traffic to and from this site is encrypted in transit.

If you are writing to us from outside the United States, including from the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your details are transferred to and stored in the United States. We state this plainly because it is a transfer you should be able to decide about before you submit a form, not after.

How long we keep it #

Comparison requests and contact messages are kept for twenty-four months from the date you sent them, then deleted. Partner enquiries are kept for as long as the commercial relationship they concern is live, and for twenty-four months after it ends.

Submissions filtered as automated abuse are kept for six months, which is long enough to correct a mistake and to recognise a pattern.

One thing outlives the rest: where we deleted your details because you asked us to, we keep a minimal record that the request was made and actioned. Deleting the evidence of a deletion request would leave us unable to show we honoured it.

How it is protected #

The site is served over HTTPS only, with HTTP requests redirected and strict transport security set, so a browser that has visited once will not fall back to an unencrypted connection.

The database is not reachable from the internet; only the application process can open it. The staff area is behind an authenticated login on a non-obvious path, and its pages are excluded from search engines. Application errors are not shown to visitors.

Inside the staff area, access is divided rather than shared. Raw database access belongs to one role and is refused to every other, including to the people who run the lead desk day to day; the ability to export a file of contact details is separate again; and a lending partner is confined to their own categories. Each of those is enforced by the server, not by hiding a button.

No system is beyond compromise, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. What limits the damage here is the decision described further up this page: the most sensitive financial data is not collected at all, so a breach of this site cannot expose your bank details, your card or your Social Security number, because we never had them.

Your rights #

Wherever you are writing from, we will act on all of the following. We are not distinguishing between visitors by country, because a right worth having is not worth withholding from someone who happens to live elsewhere.

• Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy of it.
• Have anything inaccurate corrected.
• Have it deleted.
• Withdraw the agreement you gave, at any time, which stops us using your details to contact you further.
• Object to what we are doing with it, or ask us to restrict it while a dispute is resolved.
• Ask how the automated ranking described above reached its result for your enquiry.
• Be told, without being charged and without having to justify the request, and never be treated worse for having asked.

How to make one of those requests #

Use the contact form and select "A privacy or data request" as the reason. It arrives marked as one, so it is not read as a general enquiry and does not sit in a queue behind them.

Give us the email address you used when you first wrote to us, since that is how we find your record. We will respond within thirty days. If we need to confirm you are who you say you are before deleting something, we will ask for the minimum required and nothing more, and we will not use whatever you send for that purpose for anything else.

There is no published mailbox on this site yet. That is a real limitation and we are not pretending otherwise: it means the form is the route, and it means we cannot be reached about a privacy matter if the form itself is broken. If you get an error, try again later; the form is monitored.

If we get it wrong #

Tell us first, through the same form, and we will fix it. If you are not satisfied with how we handled it, you may complain to the data protection authority or consumer protection regulator where you live. Complaining to us first is not a condition of complaining to them.

Children #

This site is for adults. Nothing on it is directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect details from anyone under eighteen. If you believe a child has submitted a form here, tell us and we will delete the record.

Changes to this policy #

The date at the top of this page is the date of the current version. Where a change means we would use details we already hold for something you did not originally agree to, we will ask again rather than rely on a quiet edit to this page.