Your privacy.
On a lot of websites, privacy notices start with: “At [company name], we take privacy seriously.” Polkadot doesn’t just take privacy seriously. Privacy is at the very core of what we do. So here’s what happens to your personal data on polkadot.com, in actual human language.
Who’s “we”, anyway?
Excellent question. Polkadot is a decentralised ecosystem governed through a decentralised autonomous organisation, or DAO. There is no “Polkadot Inc.” sitting at the top, collecting everyone’s information. So there is no single controller, because there is no single individual, company, agency, association, foundation or fixed body that determines the purposes and means of the processing of your data. You could say the DAO itself is the grand architect behind everything, but we’re not in The Matrix, so there is no such thing either. Of course, there are people in the background making sure the website works and answering questions about Polkadot products. These people are contractors tasked with specific assignments approved by the DAO. They are not controllers; they simply carry out those assignments. Running the internet, controlling your life and building a secret dossier on you are outside the scope of their work. Frankly, their own mental load is giving them enough to manage.
So when we say “we” in this Privacy Notice, we mean the DAO on an abstract level, as well as the contractors doing the work on behalf of the DAO. You can reach them at info@polkadot.com.
What do we know about you?
What you choose to tell us.
General enquiries
Send us a message, and we receive your email address, your message and whatever else you include. We use that information to answer you. Please don’t send sensitive personal data we don’t need. A question about a broken link probably doesn’t require your medical history.
Applying for a job
Apply for a job through our careers section, and the relevant HR person receives the details you submit, such as your name, CV and experience.
We’re not Big Brother. No credit scoring, secret reputation ratings or detective work on your Facebook and TikTok.
If a position legally requires particular checks-for example, because it involves certain financial responsibilities-the person handling recruitment will explain what’s required before requesting the relevant information. No surprise background investigation.
Waitlist and mailing list
If you sign up through our “Join the waitlist” or subscription button, we collect your email address to manage your subscription and, with your consent, send you informational emails about Polkadot products, launches and related news. Signing up is optional. You may unsubscribe at any time. Please note we rely on a third party, Nitrosend, for managing this mailing list, which has its own privacy notice.
Cookies ? No thank you.
The website itself doesn’t set cookies. Our own code contains no analytics, tracking pixels or browser-storage features. We host our own fonts, too.
There’s one exception: when a news article on polkadot.com embeds a post from X. That embedded post loads X’s technology, which may read or set its own cookies and receive data such as your IP address and the page you’re visiting.
We’ve enabled the embed’s “do not track” setting, which tells X not to use the visit for personalisation. It isn’t a force field: it doesn’t guarantee that X sets no cookies or receives no personal data. A regular link to X is different: clicking it takes you to X, where X’s privacy and cookie rules apply. Please consult X privacy notice for more info. Sadly, our settings here don’t follow you around the web.
Who has access to your data?
Behind info@polkadot.com is a small team of nice, competent humans with different specialisms, including products, recruitment and legal matters. These humans are what we call “contractors”.
The contractor best placed to handle your message will be the one looking at your data. Other contractors may technically have access because it’s a shared mailbox, not a private vault. But don’t worry: access and use are limited to work purposes-not curiosity. And honestly, we’re too busy with our own tasks to go snooping through anyone else’s.
If you apply through the careers section, your application goes to Joane (contractor codename). She reviews your CV, checks that it adds up and considers how you compare with other candidates for the role. That’s it. No recruitment agency, no mysterious scoring system, no committee investigating your personality through your TikTok history. Just Joane doing her job.
Finally, we use a third-party email marketing platform, Nitrosend, to store our mailing list, including the waitlist, manage subscriptions and send emails to our subscribers. If you are one of them, please read Nitrosend’s privacy notice for information about how it processes personal data.
What are our legal grounds for processing your data?
Sorry, this paragraph is super boring and self-evident, but the privacy lawyer said we had to include it. So bear with us.
For ordinary enquiries, we rely on our legitimate interests in answering you, resolving issues and keeping necessary evidence of how we handled them.
For recruitment, the relevant basis is taking steps at your request towards an employment or services contract, or legitimate interests in assessing applications. Mandatory legal checks rely on the applicable legal obligation. Any processing requiring consent or additional protection gets a separate explanation.
That was the legal basis paragraph. Sorry about that. You made it.
How long do we keep it?
When we no longer need your personal data, we delete it.
Our privacy counsel is particularly enthusiastic about clearing out old files (she totally has a cleaning OCD, btw). Ordinary correspondence is deleted no later than three year after a thread becomes inactive, and sooner where possible. Specific records may stay longer where necessary for a legal obligation or a legal claim.
For example, if you raise a complaint, we may keep enough information to show how we handled it. So if someone later says, “There was a bug with the app but when I contacted them, they didn’t even reply,” we can say, “Wait, what? Yes, we did!” (Please be aware that our Product Quality Lead is a sensitive guy, so try to spare his feelings. Same with our Legal Lead (youngest child syndrome). Thank god, we have Joane. She is our rock. She’s been to therapy and everything.)
Does your data travel?
Yes, it does. Because your data identifies as a single millennial. #wanderlustJoke apart, if you contact us by email and send us a bunch of private info, be aware this data is likely to be processed by a member of our team who may not be in the same country as you. We don’t send your data around the world for entertainment. But we’re cool people based in different countries (#diversity). In particular, we (the contractors) work from Brazil, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Syria and the EEA (yes, you’re right, that last one is the EU plus Liechtenstein and some nordic countries).
Of course, your own email provider and platforms such as X also process personal data-including metadata-under their own privacy notices. So if you use Gmail to email us or tag us on X, and we use those channels to reply to you, those companies will have your data, and they may send it around the world, including to the US. We don’t control their systems. Believe us, if we did, they’d be run differently.
If you are relying on a third party service provider to contact us, please also read their privacy notices to see where your data is being sent to and pray that whatever they say is accurate.
Polkadot is precisely building a new system so you don’t have to pray anymore.
Your data. Your rights.
Depending on the circumstances, you can:
- Get a copy of your data: honestly, we don’t have more than what you gave us, so you might not need this-unless your computer crashes and you’re thinking, “Oh shit, I hope they still have my CV so I don’t have to start from scratch.” Joane will help you the best she can.
- Ask us to fix your data: incorrect information shouldn’t become your official biography. Of course you can tell us if you made a mistake or would like something corrected. We don’t keep records of messages for long, though, so this will probably never come up.
- Ask us to delete your data: our privacy lawyer will be delighted. She’s really into decluttering and deep cleaning.
- Object to the processing of your data: you have the right to object, just like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. Why would you? Honestly, we don’t know, because we don’t intend to do anything with your data that you haven’t asked for. But Joane is looking forward to our first objection because she has a bet riding on it. Four to one.
If processing relies on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. We take consent super seriously. (SHE SAID NO TEA, JEFF!)
Email info@polkadot.com to exercise any of these rights. We normally respond within one month. If we need more time to answer your request, we’ll explain why.
You can also complain directly to your local data protection authority. But hey, you’re in for some disappointment if you expect them to handle your complaint swiftly. They’re overworked and underfunded. Asking a handful of people to enforce privacy laws across the internet is like asking a single Jedi to patrol the entire universe. It just can’t work.
If you’d like our help, though, our privacy counsel will be happy to hear from you. She also speaks Japanese. Not a GDPR requirement, but pretty cool, huh?
Any algorithms deciding your future?
No. We don’t make decisions about you based solely on automated processing. That’s for banks and big corporations obsessed with streamlining their processes and announcing, “Hey, we’re using AI for this and that!” because they think it’ll impress their investors.
You may ask: “Wait! What about smart contracts and the whole logic of blockchain? Isn’t that a kind of automated decision-making?”
It’s automated, you’re right. But it’s your choice whether to engage. We like technology that reliably executes rules people have designed and agreed to. Not opaque rules imposed on them by someone else.
Did you make it to the end?
Kudos!
The privacy lawyer who wrote this thanks you. She believes that every time someone reads a privacy notice from top to bottom, a tech lord drops his phone. And it gets scratched and everything, and he has to get it fixed. Huhu.
Last but not least: if you wish more information on the processing of your personal data by the Polkadot Products themselves, please refer to the Privacy Notice of the Polkadot App on pcf.network website.