Privacy Policy
Last updated: September 2026
Two different sets of people appear in this policy: the clients who use the service, and the researchers who are in the index. What we do with their data is not the same, so they are treated separately below.
Founding Hires is published by Lucas Lavielle, SIRET 999 676 836 00011, Biarritz, France, who is the data controller for both.
If you are a client
What we hold
What you gave us when you asked for access, your email address and the name of your company, plus the password you chose, which we never store in readable form: only a scrypt fingerprint, from which the password cannot be recovered. We also keep the searches you saved as alerts, the emails we sent you, and a daily counter of the rows the service served you, which is what the fair use ceiling is measured against.
The application sets one cookie, fh_session, so you stay signed in. It
is strictly necessary, it carries a random token and nothing else, it is not readable
by scripts, and it is never used for tracking or advertising. There is no analytics
script and no advertising tag on this site.
What we do with it
Run the service: sign you in, apply the ceiling of your plan, send the alerts you asked for, invoice you, and answer you. Nothing else. We do not sell it, we do not rent it, and we do not share it with other clients.
Who else sees it
| Render | hosts the application and its database, in Frankfurt, Germany |
| Vercel | hosts this website |
| Resend | delivers the emails we send you |
| Formspree | carries the message when you use the contact form |
Each of them acts on our instructions and may not use the data for anything of their own. The application and its database stay in the European Union. For the providers that operate outside it, the transfer rests on the standard contractual clauses.
How long
| Session cookie | expires with the session, at most fourteen days |
| Account, alerts, sent emails | while the account is open |
| Account data after a closure request | erased within thirty days |
| Invoices | ten years, as French accounting law requires |
If you are a researcher in the index
The full notice, with the sources, the legal basis and how to object in one click, is at app.foundinghires.tech/privacy. In short:
The data was not collected from you, which is why that notice exists. It comes from public sources: preprints and their metadata on arXiv, author records on OpenAlex, the academic history you declared on ORCID, registered theses on DBLP, and pages you published yourself. Every element shown carries its source, and every date says whether it rests on a document, on something you stated, or on an estimate.
We use it to tell a recruiter which researchers may become available on a subject. No automated decision is taken about you, no advertising profile is built, and the data is not sold. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in connecting professionals for recruitment, weighed against your rights, which the strictly professional and already public nature of the data is part of.
Records are kept three years after the last sign of research activity, or erased immediately if you object. The opt out link in any message we send takes effect at once and permanently: the record stops appearing in searches, the email address on file is deleted, and a later pass does not bring it back.
Your rights, whoever you are
Access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction and portability. Write to contact@foundinghires.tech and we answer within thirty days. You may also lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority.
Changes
We update this policy when the service changes. The date at the top says when, and a change that materially affects account holders is announced to them by email.
Questions or data requests
We answer every legitimate request within thirty days.