Privacy & data
Last updated: June 2026. Plain-English where possible. This policy will be reviewed by counsel before launch. Fountem is operated by Fountem Ltd (England & Wales), the data controller.
What we process
You submit a political claim as text. We decompose it into sub-claims, retrieve matching evidence from our corpus of primary sources, and ask a language model to produce a sourced verdict. We store the claim text, the verdict, and the citations.
What we store
- The claim text you submit and the verdict produced.
- The evidence chunks and citations used to reach the verdict.
- Your account email and per-day usage counts, used to enforce free-tier limits and prevent abuse.
- Limited technical data (e.g. IP-derived rate-limit data) used only for security and anti-abuse.
Do not submit personal or sensitive information inside a claim — submitted text may be retained to improve evaluation.
Legal basis (UK GDPR Article 6)
Our lawful basis is legitimate interests — improving the quality of public debate — balanced against your rights in a documented assessment. We also rely on contract for providing your account. We assess claims about public figures’ public statements and party positions in a journalistic/research context, and we do not build profiles of private individuals’ political opinions.
How long we keep it
We keep account data for the life of your account (and a short period after a deletion request), and usage counters on a rolling basis. Verdicts published in the public interest may be retained, subject to the review and removal route below.
Evidence sources
Our corpus is built from publicly available primary sources (official statistics, Hansard, manifestos, reputable reporting), used and attributed under their respective licences or under fair dealing. Every verdict cites the sources it relied on so you can check our work.
Your rights
You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, and portability of personal data we hold, and the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). To exercise these rights or to challenge a verdict, email privacy@fountem.ai.
Third parties and international transfers
We use Anthropic and OpenAI to generate embeddings and verdicts (we send only the claim and retrieved evidence), Supabase (EU/London region) for storage and authentication, and Vercel for hosting. Some providers may process data outside the UK/EEA; where they do, we put appropriate safeguards (such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement) in place.
Cookies
We use only strictly necessary cookies for sign-in and security. See our cookie policy.
Contact
Data matters: privacy@fountem.ai. Corrections / right of reply: corrections@fountem.ai. Legal: legal@fountem.ai.