Beauhurst Companion — Privacy Notice

Contents

1. What this notice covers
2. What Companion does
3. What Companion sends us
4. Permissions and connections
5. What we keep
6. What Companion stores on your computer
7. Purpose and legal basis
8. Who can see your information
9. Signing in
10. How your information is protected
11. Turning Companion off
12. Your rights
13. Changes to this notice
14. Chrome Web Store and Edge Add-ons

1. What this notice covers

This notice explains what Beauhurst Companion, our browser extension, does with information about you. It sits alongside our main privacy notice, which covers everything else — our website, the Beauhurst platform, and the company information we hold. Where this notice is silent, the main notice applies.

Beauhurst is the trading name of Business Funding Research Limited, registered in England and Wales (number 07312969), registered office Fourth Floor, Brixton House, 385 Coldharbour Lane, London SW9 8GL. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as a data controller under number Z291194X, and we are the controller of the information described here.

Our General Counsel is also our Data Protection Officer. You can reach them at dataprotection@beauhurst.com.

2. What Companion does

Companion shows you Beauhurst’s information about the company whose website you are looking at. To do that, it needs to know which website you are on. The rest of this notice sets out what it reads, what it sends us, and what we keep.

3. What Companion sends us

What Companion can see

Companion cannot see the content of any page: not the text, not the title, not anything you type. There is no search box. The only thing it reads is the address of the tab, never the page itself.

Before your first lookup

The first time you sign in, Companion shows a short summary of what it sends us and asks you to agree before it looks anything up. Until you do, it sends nothing about the page you are on to Beauhurst or to Google. If you close the panel without agreeing, it asks again next time you open it.

When the side panel is closed

Nothing. Companion sends us nothing at all.

When the side panel is open

Companion sends us that address, reduced to the website address on its own: for example, beauhurst.com.

This happens for each website you go to while the panel is open, whether or not Beauhurst has information about it.

It is sent once per website rather than once per page. Read twenty pages on one company’s site and the address is sent once, not twenty times. Once Companion has looked a website up, it remembers the result on your own computer for four hours and does not ask us again in that time. After four hours, or once you have closed your browser, the address is sent again on your next visit.

Only the tab in front of you is ever looked up. When a tab in the background changes its address, Companion sees the new address, checks whether that tab is the one in front of you, and ignores it if not. Nothing about background tabs is sent to us.

A few sites are read differently

On most sites the website address is all Companion uses. On the below, it also reads the part of the address that identifies the company, and sends that instead:

• LinkedIn: only addresses of the form linkedin.com/company/... are used, and the company name is taken from the address itself. Any other LinkedIn address is ignored.
• Company registers and company information sites such as Companies House: the company registration number is taken from the address.
• Beauhurst’s own pages: the company’s reference in our system is taken from the address.
• Search engines: addresses on major search engines, such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, are ignored and never sent.

In every case the address is reduced on your own computer, before anything is sent.

What never leaves your computer

The full address of any page you visit. Companion sends the website address (for example beauhurst.com) or the single identifier described above (for example 07312969), and nothing else.

4. Permissions and connections

When you install Companion, Chrome or Edge asks you to agree to a set of permissions. In plain terms, Companion can: open its side panel; see the address of the tab you are on; hold information temporarily; read your Beauhurst login so you do not have to sign in twice, and clear it when you ask to sign in again; and label its own requests to us.

It reaches two places on the internet and no others: Beauhurst’s own platform, and Google’s public icon service, which is where company logos come from. The request to Google includes the company’s website address and, as with any web request, reveals your internet address to Google. It includes nothing about your Beauhurst account. Google handles that request under its own terms, and we do not control what it keeps.

Among those permissions, your browser warns that Companion can read your browsing history. That warning comes with the general tab permission Companion uses. It uses that permission rather than the narrower “active tab” one because the panel has to keep up as you move between tabs, and the narrower permission only lasts until you change tab. Companion uses it to read the address of the tab in front of you, as described in section 3. It never asks your browser for a list of your open tabs and contains no code that does so. The only other question it asks is whether a Beauhurst tab is open, so it can bring that tab to the front when you sign in.

5. What we keep

The identifier is not your name or email address, but we can link it to your account, so these are records about you and we treat them that way. They are made on our own systems from the lookup Companion has already sent. Companion itself contains no analytics code and sends nothing to any analytics service.

6. What Companion stores on your computer

Companion keeps some information on your computer for the following times:

• Search results — 4 hours
• Company details, funding history and key people — 30 minutes
• Shareholder information — 10 minutes
• Your choice between two similarly named companies — 24 hours

All of it is cleared when you close your browser or sign out. Each item is filed under the website address, company name or registration number that was looked up, so while it is held it also shows what you looked up. It never leaves your computer. It works like the cache your browser keeps for the websites you visit, but for much shorter periods of time.

Two of those hold information about people:

• Company details, funding history and key people: names, job titles and LinkedIn profiles.
• Shareholder information: names, the size of a person’s holding, and our estimate of the value of that holding in that one company. The estimate is never shown to you; it is used to add up a holder’s shares across different share classes, and to decide the order when two holders hold the same number.

This is the same information you would see on the Beauhurst platform. It is held briefly so the panel does not have to fetch it again, and it is not sent anywhere else.

Companion keeps one other thing, and this one stays on your computer after you close your browser or sign out: a record that you agreed to the summary described in section 3, and which Beauhurst account agreed. It is kept so you are not asked again. Clearing your browser’s history or cache does not remove it; removing the extension does. You will be asked again in a different browser, browser profile or computer, if you reinstall Companion, or if someone else signs in on the same browser.

7. Purpose and legal basis

To run the lookup. We use the website address because it is the thing being looked up. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest, and that of the organisation that subscribes on your behalf, in providing the service it pays for and you have chosen to use. Companion has to read the address of the tab you are on, and briefly hold results in your browser, in order to provide that service. Because both are strictly necessary, we do not ask for your consent to them.

To keep the service secure and working. We keep the request records and monitoring data for the periods in section 5, to fix faults and investigate misuse. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in a secure and functioning service.

To tell your organisation how much Companion is used. We may tell the organisation that subscribes on your behalf how much you have used Companion, for example how many companies you looked up in a month, so it can see the value of what it pays for. We never tell it which websites you visited or which companies you looked up. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest, and the organisation’s, in understanding how a service it pays for is used.

To understand how Companion is used. We keep the analytics record so we can see which parts of Companion earn their place, and how use develops over the life of a subscription. We keep it for 36 months because subscriptions and the relationships behind them commonly run for several years, and understanding how use changes across more than one renewal is what makes the record worth keeping at all. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in improving our own products.

7.1 Artificial intelligence

Companion does not use artificial intelligence. The records described in section 5 are not used to train or evaluate machine learning models, including the models described in section 4.1 of our main privacy notice.

7.2 What we do not do

We do not record the pages you visit, only the website addresses Companion sends us, as described in section 3. We do not sell this information or share it for advertising. We do not use it to add to or improve the company information we sell. Companion matches the website you are on to a company in our data automatically. It makes no decisions about you: it does not assess, score or rank you, and nothing it does affects your rights or what you can access.

8. Who can see your information

Inside Beauhurst, the records in section 5 are classified as Confidential under our information security practices. Access is limited to authorised personnel with a legitimate business need, under the principle of least privilege. We look at one person’s Companion records only to investigate a fault or misuse, to help you when you ask us to, to tell your organisation how much you have used Companion (section 7), or where the law requires it. Otherwise we look at them only in aggregate.

The organisation that subscribes on your behalf can be told how much you have used Companion, but never which websites you visited or which companies you looked up. Beauhurst has no feature that shows a subscribing organisation what an individual user looked up in Companion.

These suppliers hold the records for us and process them on our instructions:

• Amazon Web Services, which hosts the platform, in London, with backups in Ireland
• New Relic, for error and performance monitoring, in the European Union
• Mixpanel, for product analytics, in the United States, under the International Data Transfer Agreement / UK Addendum
• Planhat, for customer success and account management, in Sweden, which receives records of Companion activity but not the website addresses or identifiers looked up

Google receives the company website address and your internet address when Companion fetches a logo, as described in section 4. Section 5 of our main privacy notice describes these suppliers, and section 6 the safeguards for transfers outside the UK.

9. Signing in

Companion uses your existing Beauhurst login, so there is no separate account or password. When you sign in, your Beauhurst session is exchanged for a temporary access pass, held in your browser’s memory and cleared when you close it. Your access is checked each time Companion contacts us, so if your organisation removes your Beauhurst access, Companion stops working straight away.

10. How your information is protected

Companion’s records are protected by the same security controls as the rest of the Beauhurst platform, which section 8 of our main privacy notice sets out. Section 8 above says where each record is held. Product analytics is held in the United States; the other records are held in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

11. Turning Companion off

Closing the side panel stops Companion sending us anything. Signing out of Companion, or closing your browser, clears everything it holds on your computer apart from the record of your agreement (section 6). Removing the extension removes it from your browser entirely.

None of these deletes the records described in section 5, which we keep for the periods set out there. You can still ask us to delete them, or object to our keeping them; section 12 explains.

12. Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your personal data, ask us to correct or delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, ask us to send it to someone else in a portable form, or object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests — which includes the records described in section 5.

Write to dataprotection@beauhurst.com and we will reply within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

13. Changes to this notice

We will update this notice whenever Companion changes what it collects or how long we keep it, and record the change below. Where a change materially affects you, we will tell you in the extension itself rather than relying on you to come back and read this page.

14. Chrome Web Store and Edge Add-ons

Companion’s use of the information it receives complies with the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. We use that information only to provide and improve Companion’s single purpose: showing you Beauhurst’s information about the company whose website you are looking at. We do not sell it. We transfer it only to the suppliers and to Google as described in section 8, to the organisation that subscribes on your behalf as usage figures only (section 8), or where the law requires. If Beauhurst or its business is sold, we will not transfer it to the buyer without your prior consent. We do not use it for advertising, or to assess anyone’s creditworthiness or for lending. The same applies to Companion installed from Microsoft Edge Add-ons.