Privacy

Carrywatch is a public archive of private equity deals, taken from public announcements. Reading it needs no account. Forms include the optional weekly email sign-up, sign-in, invitations and invite requests, Carrywatch Pro, and requests to correct or remove information about you.

Requesting an invite: we store your email address, name, firm, optional note and request dates so the owner can review your request. Submitting it sends no email, creates no account and does not include Pro. If approved, an invitation is sent using our email provider. Requests older than 90 days are removed when requests are processed or the review list is opened. To ask for deletion, contact support@carrywatch.com.

Abuse limits: to stop floods of emails and form posts, we keep short-lived counters on sign-in, sign-up, invite, removal and checkout requests. They hold keyed one-way hashes of the email address and of your network address (never the address itself), and expire within 25 hours.

If you sign up for the weekly email, we store your email address, the page you signed up from and the date, and use them only to send that email. We first send one email asking you to confirm, and nothing more until you do. Emails are delivered by our email provider. Every email includes an unsubscribe link. To have your address deleted, write to support@carrywatch.com.

Signing in: you sign in with a link we email to you, or on your return from checkout when you buy Pro with a new address, so we store your email address, when you became a member, and the time each link and session was created. A sign-in link works for 20 minutes. We keep only a hashed form of each link and session, so our records alone cannot sign anyone in. If you ask to sign in with an address that has no invite, we do not keep the address; we send it one email saying that Carrywatch Pro is by invitation. Signing in sets two cookies. One lasts a year and holds a keyed one-way hash, not your address: it lets this browser still ask for sign-in links when someone else has asked for many to your address that day. The other keeps you signed in for up to 30 days and is used for nothing else. Signing out removes it. Sign out of all devices, in Settings in the app or on your account page, ends every session, so the cookie no longer works on any device, and voids sign-in links not yet used. The cookies page lists it.

Invitations: Carrywatch Pro is by invitation from a member, and an invite lets you buy it. If a member invites you by email, we store your address with the invite and send you one email that shows the member's email address. If you open an invite link a member shared, the page shows that member's address partly hidden, and a cookie keeps the invite for 7 days so that signing in from it counts. When you sign in from an invite, we record which invite it was, which member invited you and how: by email, by shared link, or because your email domain was let in. We use this to let invited people buy Pro and to count each invite's uses, and we do not publish who invited whom. To apply the limit on email invitations, we count how many each member sends each day.

Carrywatch Pro: payments are handled by Stripe, which receives your card details, billing address and email and processes them under its own privacy policy. We never see or store your card number. We store your Stripe customer and subscription IDs, the status of your subscription, its plan and renewal date, whether founding pricing applies, and when you agreed to automatic renewal.

Your details: after you buy Pro we ask once for your firm and your role (investor, banker, operator, advisor, or other in your own words). Both are optional, and you can skip them. We store what you give with your account, and when you answered or skipped, and use it only to tailor Carrywatch for you. Only you and the owner of Carrywatch can see it: it is not shown to other members or anyone else. It is kept in our database, which a hosting provider runs for us. While you have Pro you can change or remove your firm and role under Your details in Settings in the app, or on your account page; we then keep only the date you answered or skipped, so we do not ask again. To delete that too, ask support@carrywatch.com.

Deal alerts: if you upload a contacts file on the alerts page, it is read in your browser and never sent to us. We only store the Carrywatch people and firms you choose to follow, with your email address, to send you an alert when they appear in a new deal. Every alert has a link to change or stop them.

Asking us to watch a firm: if you are a Pro member and press “Ask us to watch this firm” on a firm's page, we store that your account asked about that firm, and when. Nothing else is collected, and we send no email about it. We see how many members asked about each firm, not who; only the owner of Carrywatch can see the request itself, in our database. A request lapses 90 days after you made it and is then deleted, and all of yours are deleted with your account.

Watchlists: if you are a Pro member and save a watchlist, we store it with your account: the name you give it, the conditions you chose (such as industries, deal stages, stake types, deal size, regions, and the firms and people it watches), its place among your watchlists, when you made it and whether it is paused. We use them to show you the matching deals on your watchlists page. Watchlists send no email at present. You can rename, pause or delete a watchlist at any time, and they are deleted with your account.

If you connect your own tools to Carrywatch (a Pro feature, available only while we have it switched on), we store, for each connection key you make, only a hash of the key, the name you give it, its first few characters so you can tell keys apart, and when it was made, last used and revoked. We also count requests per minute and per day to apply usage limits. The key itself is shown to you once and never stored.

Counting visits: only if you accept on the cookie banner, we count the pages you view with our own analytics. We keep the page address without its query, the name of the site that linked to it, any campaign tags in the link, your device type and your country as reported by our hosting provider, and on the pricing page the steps of buying Pro (viewing prices, picking a plan, starting checkout, returning from payment) with the plan chosen. We do not store your IP address; to count daily visitors we keep a one-way code made from the date, your network address and browser type with a secret key, which changes every day. These records are kept for 13 months and are not shared with anyone. If you reject, make no choice, or your browser sends Global Privacy Control, nothing is counted. Your choice is kept in a cookie for 12 months, and you can change it with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page.

Your browser's local storage keeps which company pages you opened from the Deal Web, your daily puzzle answer, whether you paused the latest-deals ticker and, if you use watchlists, when you last opened your watchlists page. That data stays on your device and is never sent to us; the cookies page lists each item. Our service providers (hosting, database, email and payments providers) process standard request data such as IP address, browser type and the page requested in order to deliver the site and keep it secure.

We do not use advertising or third-party tracking tools.

In Carrywatch Pro, the Overview's map draws its background from OpenStreetMap's map tile servers. Your browser asks them for those images directly, so they receive your IP address, browser type and our site's address, but not which deals you view. That is covered by the OpenStreetMap Foundation's privacy policy.

Links to X take you to X. What happens there is covered by X's own privacy policy.

Security records: when a sign-in link fails, a sign-in is asked for an address without an invite, a form is refused, or a limit is reached, we record what happened and when, with keyed one-way hashes of the network address and of the email address involved, to spot abuse. The network hash is removed after 30 days and the record after 90 days.

Records name people and companies as they appear in public sources: public announcements, and the public sources we research for profiles. For people we keep work and professional information only: name, title and firm, the deals that name them, and, for researched profiles, a short professional biography, career history, education, board or advisory positions and links to their public profiles elsewhere, each with the public source it came from and the date it was checked. CSV downloads contain no list of people and no person, role or profile fields, and a deal's buyer, seller or target that names a person on Carrywatch is left blank. If a record names you, you can ask us to correct or remove it. We reply within 30 days. When you send that form we store your name, email address, the page, whether you asked for a correction or a removal, and your message. We use it only to handle your request.

Third-party sign-in

If you choose to sign in with a third-party account, such as Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn or X, we receive and store the unique account identifier and the verified email address that provider shares with us, solely to authenticate you and secure your account. We do not receive or store your password for that service, and we do not retain access tokens or post on your behalf. You may disconnect a linked account at any time in Settings. Your email sign-in code remains available.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it.

• If you have an account: in the app, open Settings, then Your data, to ask for a copy or to delete your account; your account page has the same. While you have Pro you can change your firm and role yourself in Settings, and anyone signed in can sign out of all devices from Settings or your account page.
• Anyone else, or for anything else: write to support@carrywatch.com from the address concerned.
• When you ask for a copy or deletion we store which you asked for and when, and email the request to the people who run Carrywatch. A person handles every request, and we reply by email within 30 days.
• Deleting an account cancels its subscription first. Stripe keeps its own records of the payments, and we keep the email that recorded the request.
• For information about you on a person or company page, use the correction and removal form.

We do not sell personal information.