Privacy

1. Introduction

Localwiz ("Localwiz," "we," "us," or "our") is a pre-launch platform that helps local businesses understand and improve their visibility on Google Maps and in local search. Our website lets visitors join a waitlist for the upcoming product and, in the meantime, try a free tool called the Competition Radar, which analyzes a business's nearby competitors using publicly available Google Places data and returns a report on how that business compares. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect through localwiz.io, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it. It applies to everyone who visits the site, joins the waitlist, or uses the Radar tool.

Localwiz is, at the time of writing, an early-stage project operated directly by its founder and has not yet been incorporated as a company. Section 12 explains what that means for who is legally responsible for your data today, and what will change once incorporation is complete. We are publishing a full-length policy now, ahead of that step, because we would rather be transparent about our practices from the very first visitor than wait until the legal entity catches up.

2. Information We Collect

We collect information in three ways: what you give us directly, what we generate on your behalf when you use the Radar, and what is created automatically as you browse.

When you join the waitlist or unlock a Radar report, we ask for your email address. If you tell us your business sector or city, either directly or by selecting a business from the Radar's search results, we store that too, along with the Google Place ID of the business you selected, if any. We do not ask for your name, phone number, physical address, or any payment information anywhere on the current site, and we do not currently process payments of any kind.

When you run the Competition Radar, we generate and store a report tied to your waitlist entry: the competing businesses found nearby, their category and approximate ranking relative to yours, and summary statistics about the surrounding market. This report is regenerated from Google's public place data at the time of your search; we do not scrape or store anything beyond what the Radar shows you.

We automatically log a small amount of technical and usage information: your browser's language preference (stored in a simple cookie so the site loads in the right language), a signed session token issued only if you unlock a Radar report (described in Section 5), and aggregate product-usage events — for example, that a search happened, that a report was viewed, that the waitlist form was submitted, or that a WhatsApp contact link was clicked. These events record which action occurred and basic contextual metadata such as language and the surface it came from; they do not carry your email address, IP address, or any other directly identifying field. We also keep a low-level log of calls we make to Google's Places API (endpoint, timestamp, and cost) purely to manage our own usage budget; this log is not tied to any individual visitor.

We do not use advertising cookies, third-party ad trackers, session-replay tools, or fingerprinting of any kind, and there is no advertising on this site.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information above for a short, specific list of purposes: to notify you when LocalWiz launches or when relevant updates are available; to generate the Radar report you requested and show it to you again on a later visit without making you re-enter your business; to keep the Radar tool running within its monthly budget and prevent abuse of the free tier; to understand, in aggregate, which parts of the product people use so we can prioritize what to build next; and to respond to you if you contact us. We do not use your information to build an advertising profile, and we do not make any automated decision about you that has a legal or similarly significant effect.

4. Legal Bases for Processing (GDPR)

For visitors in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, our legal basis for collecting your email and business details is your consent, given when you submit the waitlist or Radar-unlock form; you can withdraw that consent at any time by asking us to delete your data (Section 8). Our legal basis for the technical session cookie and for basic abuse-prevention logging is our legitimate interest in operating the Radar reliably and within budget, an interest that we consider is not overridden by your privacy rights given how limited and non-identifying that data is. Our legal basis for aggregate product-usage analytics is likewise legitimate interest in understanding and improving the product, balanced against the fact that those events carry no directly identifying information.

5. Cookies and Similar Technologies

LocalWiz uses only two first-party cookies, both of which we consider strictly necessary or near-necessary for the site to function, and neither of which is used for advertising. The first stores your selected language so the site doesn't need to guess it on every page. The second, `lw_session`, is issued only if you unlock a full Radar report; it is a cryptographically signed token (HMAC-SHA256) that lets us recognize you on a return visit so we can show you the same report, expires automatically after 30 days, and contains no personal data itself beyond an internal reference id. Our usage-analytics events are recorded through Vercel Web Analytics, which does not set a tracking cookie and does not use your IP address, device fingerprint, or any other persistent identifier to track you across visits or sites. Because our cookies are strictly necessary or functional rather than tracking-based, we do not currently display a cookie-consent banner; if that changes — for instance, if we introduce optional analytics cookies in the future — we will add one before doing so.

6. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. We do not share it with data brokers, advertisers, or any third party for their own marketing purposes. We share information only with the service providers who help us run the site, each acting on our instructions and each bound by a data processing agreement: Neon, our managed Postgres database provider, hosted in the European Union, stores your waitlist entry and Radar reports; Vercel hosts the site itself, runs the code that talks to Neon and Google, and provides the cookieless usage-analytics events described above; and Google provides the underlying Places data that powers the Radar. When you search for a business in the Radar, the text you type and the selection you make are sent to Google's Places API to find and return matching businesses; the business data you see (names, categories, ratings, locations) comes from Google and is governed by Google's own privacy policy, not ours. We may also disclose information if required to do so by law, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of LocalWiz, our users, or the public.

7. International Data Transfers

Your waitlist and Radar data is stored in a database hosted in the European Union. Some of our service providers — principally Vercel — operate infrastructure in the United States and other countries outside the EEA/UK as part of delivering the site to you (for example, serving pages and running the Radar's backend logic). Where information is processed outside the EEA or UK by a provider we use, that provider does so under Standard Contractual Clauses, participation in the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework, or another lawful transfer mechanism recognized under GDPR Chapter V. We do not transfer your data to any provider that has not committed to one of these safeguards.

8. Your Rights

If you are in the EEA, UK, or another jurisdiction with similar protections, you have the right to ask us to confirm what data we hold about you, access a copy of it, correct it if it's wrong, delete it, restrict or object to our processing of it, and receive it in a portable format. If you are a California resident, CCPA gives you the right to know what personal information we collect and why, to request its deletion, to correct inaccurate information, and to opt out of its "sale" or "sharing" — we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of, but you can still exercise every other right below. If you are in Canada, PIPEDA gives you the right to access the personal information we hold about you and to challenge its accuracy. In every case, the way to exercise any of these rights is the same: write to us at the contact address in Section 12 from the email address you want us to act on, and we will act on your request, typically by deleting your waitlist entry, your Radar reports, and any associated data, within a reasonable time and without requiring justification. Because LocalWiz does not currently operate accounts or passwords, we verify these requests using the email address on file rather than a login.

9. Data Retention

We keep your waitlist entry and Radar reports for as long as you have an active interest in LocalWiz — in practice, until you ask us to delete them, or until we discontinue the pre-launch waitlist entirely, whichever happens first. We do not currently run an automated retention-expiry process, so if you'd like your data removed sooner, the fastest path is to email us as described in Section 8. Aggregate, non-identifying usage-analytics events are retained by our analytics provider according to its own standard retention window and are not linked back to your waitlist entry.

10. Children's Privacy

LocalWiz is a business tool intended for business owners, managers, and marketers, and it is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 16 (or the minimum age of digital consent in their country, if higher, such as 13 in the United States). If we learn that we have inadvertently collected information from a child below the applicable age, we will delete it promptly. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us using the details in Section 12.

11. Security

We use HTTPS/TLS for all traffic to and from the site, so data in transit between your browser and our servers is encrypted. Data at rest in our Neon-hosted Postgres database is encrypted using our provider's standard encryption-at-rest. We do not ask you to create a password or maintain an account at all — the only credential involved is the signed session cookie described in Section 5, which is cryptographically verified using HMAC-SHA256 with a constant-time comparison, so it cannot be forged or brute-forced through timing analysis. Application secrets (such as the key used to sign that cookie) are stored in our hosting provider's environment-variable system rather than in source code. Access to our database and hosting infrastructure is limited to the people actively building LocalWiz. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we design the system to collect the least amount of data possible precisely so that there is less to protect.

12. Who Is Responsible for Your Data

LocalWiz has not yet been incorporated as a company. Until it is, the person responsible for your data — the data controller, for GDPR purposes — is its founder, operating LocalWiz as an individual pre-launch project. You can reach us with any question, request, or concern about this policy or your data at luisvidalescudero@gmail.com. Once LocalWiz is incorporated, this section will be updated to name the incorporated entity as the controller, and we will not change how your existing data is handled as a result of that change beyond reflecting the new legal name.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy as LocalWiz evolves — for example, as we incorporate, add features, or bring on new service providers. If we make a material change, we will update the effective date at the top of this page and, where the change meaningfully affects how your existing data is used, we will make reasonable efforts to notify waitlist members by email before it takes effect.

14. Contact Us

Questions, requests to access or delete your data, or anything else: luisvidalescudero@gmail.com.