Data Collection Policy

This policy describes how LeadForge collects business information, which sources it uses, and how businesses can ask for corrections or removal.

Principles

• We collect only business-facing information: name, category, address, business phone, business email, website, public social profile links, opening hours and description.
• We use official APIs, publicly accessible business websites whose terms and robots directives allow automated access, and files our users import.
• We do not bypass logins, CAPTCHAs, paywalls or rate limits, and we do not rotate addresses or identities to evade limits.
• We never invent or infer contact details. A field we did not observe stays empty.
• We mark a number as a WhatsApp contact only with explicit evidence, such as a WhatsApp link or label on the business's own website, or confirmation after contact.
• Every value is stored with its source, collection date and verification status, and conflicting observations are kept rather than silently overwritten.

Sources

Sources are added one at a time after a review of their terms, access rules and retention requirements. Sources are never enabled merely because their content is publicly visible. The current list of sources, with each one's permitted method, retention rule and attribution, is shown on the Sources page inside every workspace.

We do not collect from social networks, online marketplaces, government registries without an official API, or directories whose terms forbid automated access.

Website fetching

When a business's own website is analyzed, our fetcher identifies itself as LeadForgeBot, reads the site's robots file and honors it, fetches at most a few pages at a slow rate, and never executes scripts. Analysis results describe what was observed and are dated.

Retention

Where a source limits how long its data may be stored, values from that source are removed when the limit is reached. Only the fact that a field was observed from that source on a given date is kept.

Correction and removal requests

If you represent a business and want your record corrected or removed, submit a request below. Removal applies across all LeadForge workspaces and prevents re-collection from our sources. We aim to complete requests within 30 days and will confirm by email.