Privacy Notice

1. Who we are

BNOW.NET is a subscription OSINT and data-intelligence service built and operated by Vociferous.ai, based in New York, New York.

In this notice, “BNOW.NET,” “BNOW,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to the operator of the BNOW.NET service.

For privacy questions, requests, or corrections, contact go@vociferous.nyc.

2. Scope of this notice

This notice applies to information processed through the BNOW.NET website, subscriber accounts, authentication flow, Ask feature, subscription-interest forms, support and feedback communications, and related product operations.

Third-party websites, publications, social platforms, and source links have their own privacy practices. This notice does not govern those third parties.

3. Information we collect

Information you provide

We may collect:

• Your email address when you request a sign-in link or create an account.
• Questions you submit through the Ask feature.
• Information you provide in subscription-interest, support, correction, or feedback messages.
• For beta access requests, allowlisted campaign tokens, the fixed internal landing path, and the referring hostname when available. BNOW does not store the referrer path, query, fragment, or credentials for this purpose.
• Subscription and billing information if paid checkout is enabled. Payment-card details are processed by the payment provider and are not intended to be stored directly by BNOW.NET.
• Any other information you choose to include in a message to us.

Do not submit passwords, authentication credentials, government identification numbers, payment-card numbers, medical records, or other highly sensitive personal information through the Ask feature.

Account and usage information

We collect information needed to operate and secure the service, including:

• Internal account and user identifiers.
• Account role and subscription status.
• Email-verification and account-creation timestamps.
• Authentication sessions and verification tokens.
• Ask usage records, including the submitted question, time of submission, provider and model information, usage and cost metadata, retrieval metadata, and whether the request was answered, refused, limited, or unsuccessful.
• Product activity needed to enforce usage limits, diagnose failures, prevent abuse, and maintain service reliability.
• Language preference.
• If you explicitly allow optional product analytics, an internal random account UUID, coarse account role and beta cohort, account-creation date, an approximate city- and postal-level location that our analytics provider derives from your connection IP at the time each event is received, and limited product-event categories such as digest, evidence, Search, Ask, Signals, and feedback-control use.
• Ordinary technical request and security-log information that may be processed by our hosting and infrastructure providers, such as IP address, browser or device information, request time, and requested page.

Public-source intelligence information

BNOW.NET collects and analyzes material from publicly available sources, which may include news publications, government records, public websites, Telegram channels, X accounts, public databases, and source links cited by research organizations.

This material may contain information about public officials, military personnel, businesspeople, organizations, sanctions subjects, criminal or civil proceedings, and other individuals mentioned in public reporting. BNOW may retain source URLs, publication metadata, excerpts used internally for analysis, and derived claims, entities, scores, or classifications.

A source’s inclusion does not mean BNOW endorses the source or treats every assertion from it as true.

4. How we use information

We use information to:

• Authenticate users and maintain accounts.
• Provide subscriber features and intelligence products.
• Process Ask questions and return evidence-linked answers.
• Display a user’s recent submitted questions.
• Enforce per-user usage limits and provider-spending limits.
• Operate subscriptions and respond to sales inquiries.
• Send sign-in links, service messages, and requested communications.
• Maintain, secure, debug, and improve service reliability.
• Detect misuse, protect users, and enforce our Terms of Use.
• Produce aggregate or deidentified operational and product metrics.
• Comply with law and protect our legal rights.

We do not sell personal information. We do not use personal information for behavioral advertising, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

We do not currently use submitted Ask questions to train BNOW’s own machine-learning models. We may review question content when reasonably necessary to provide support, investigate a problem, protect the service, or enforce our Terms. We may use aggregated or deidentified usage information to understand and improve the product.

5. How Ask questions are processed

Under current service settings, BNOW stores the text of submitted Ask questions together with the account email and related usage metadata. Stored questions support rate limits, cost controls, diagnostics, account history, and the recent-questions feature. Stored question, answer, and evidence content is automatically deleted or redacted under the fixed periods described under Retention below.

BNOW sends submitted questions and selected supporting evidence to AI service providers to perform functions such as embedding, relevance ranking, and answer generation. Our current primary AI provider is OpenAI.

OpenAI states that API inputs and outputs are not used to train its models by default. OpenAI’s standard API data controls may retain customer content in abuse-monitoring logs for up to 30 days unless different controls apply. OpenAI’s practices are governed by its own terms and data policies.

Do not include information in a question that you do not want processed and stored as described in this notice.

6. Legal bases where applicable

Where laws such as the GDPR or UK GDPR apply, we process personal information under one or more of these legal bases:

• Contract: when processing is needed to provide an account or requested service.
• Legitimate interests: to operate, secure, validate, and improve BNOW; prevent misuse; maintain records; and conduct responsible public-source intelligence analysis, where those interests are not overridden by an individual’s rights.
• Legal obligation: when processing is required to comply with law.
• Consent: where we specifically request consent for an optional activity. Consent may be withdrawn for future processing where applicable.

Acknowledging this Privacy Notice does not make consent the legal basis for every processing activity described here.

7. When we share information

We may disclose information to service providers that process it for us, including:

• Vercel for hosting and application infrastructure.
• Neon for managed database services.
• OpenAI and other disclosed AI providers used to process intelligence or user questions.
• Postmark, or a configured email-delivery provider such as Resend, for sign-in and service email.
• PostHog, if optional product analytics is enabled for your account, to process the minimized product events described below. BNOW uses a dedicated PostHog project hosted in the United States and an internal random account UUID, never your email address, as the analytics identity.
• Stripe or another disclosed payment provider if paid checkout is enabled.
• Professional advisers and contractors who need limited access to support, secure, or operate the service and are subject to appropriate obligations.

We may also disclose information:

• When required by law, legal process, or a valid governmental request.
• To investigate fraud, security incidents, misuse, or threats to rights and safety.
• In connection with a financing, reorganization, acquisition, sale, or transfer of the service or its assets, subject to applicable law.
• With your direction or permission.

We do not authorize service providers to use personal information for their own advertising.

8. Cookies and similar technologies

BNOW uses cookies that are necessary to provide and secure the service, including authentication-session cookies. We also use a server-readable language-preference cookie so the site can remember your selected locale.

BNOW does not use third-party behavioral-advertising cookies. Optional PostHog product analytics is default-off and is active only for a signed-in adult user who has accepted the current Terms of Use and Privacy Notice and explicitly grants permission on the Account page. You may decline without losing product access and may change the preference at any time; declining or withdrawing stops future collection. When enabled, these analytics are processed in a dedicated BNOW PostHog project hosted in the United States.

If enabled with your permission, BNOW sends only allowlisted, coarse events about product sessions and use of digests, evidence controls, source follow-through, Search outcomes, Ask outcomes, gated Signals, and feedback controls. BNOW does not send Ask or Search text, claim or source text, source URLs, email addresses, LinkedIn URLs, authentication material, broad click activity, advertising identifiers, or full referrers to PostHog. Session replay, heatmaps, broad autocapture, surveys, advertising tracking, and automatic error capture are disabled for this integration.

BNOW does not store the raw connection IP address for these analytics. PostHog uses that connection IP transiently, at the moment each event is received, to derive an approximate city- and postal-level location, which may be associated with the event and the internal account identifier; the raw IP itself is then discarded. The project's data-retention period is described under Retention below.

9. Retention

We retain information for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this notice, including providing accounts, maintaining question history, enforcing usage and cost limits, securing the service, resolving disputes, and meeting legal or financial obligations.

Ask content is subject to fixed automatic retention periods under current service settings:

• The text of a submitted Ask question, and any stored answer or supporting-evidence content produced for it, is retained for no longer than 30 days after submission, after which it is automatically deleted or redacted from the associated records.
• Stream and progress events generated while an Ask answer is produced are retained for no longer than 7 days.
• Exact-answer cache entries are retained for no longer than 7 days.

Usage, billing, and accounting metadata associated with an Ask request — such as timestamps, token and cost figures, provider and model identifiers, and outcome status — may be retained separately for as long as legally or operationally required. That metadata does not include the question, answer, or evidence content, and its retention does not extend the content periods above.

Authentication sessions and verification tokens expire according to the service’s authentication settings, although related operational records may remain for security or legal purposes.

If optional analytics is enabled, PostHog analytics events are retained for the dedicated project's configured retention period, currently seven years, after which they are deleted; associated person profiles persist until deleted. Withdrawing permission stops future collection, and you may also request deletion of associated analytics data by contacting us.

If you make a verified deletion request, we will delete or deidentify information when required by applicable law and when it is no longer necessary for a legitimate operational, security, financial, or legal purpose. Information may remain temporarily in backups or with service providers until their ordinary deletion cycles complete.

Public-source intelligence records may be retained as part of a historical intelligence record, subject to applicable correction, objection, and deletion rights.

10. Your choices and rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to:

• Ask whether we process your personal information.
• Request access to or a copy of your personal information.
• Request correction of inaccurate information.
• Request deletion of certain information.
• Object to or request restriction of certain processing.
• Request portability of information you provided.
• Withdraw consent where processing relies on consent.
• Grant or withdraw optional product-analytics permission from the Account page without affecting access to subscriber features.
• Appeal or complain to an applicable privacy regulator.

These rights are not absolute and may depend on the law and circumstances.

Send requests to go@vociferous.nyc. We may ask for information reasonably necessary to verify your identity and protect the account. Authorized agents may be required to provide proof of authority.

11. International processing

BNOW.NET is operated from the United States. Our service providers may process information in the United States and other countries. Those countries may have privacy laws different from the laws where you live.

Where required, we will rely on appropriate contractual or legal mechanisms for international transfers.

12. Security

We use reasonable technical, administrative, and organizational safeguards designed to protect information against unauthorized access, loss, misuse, or alteration.

No online service, transmission method, or storage system can be guaranteed completely secure. You are responsible for protecting access to your email account and any device used to access BNOW.

13. Adults only

BNOW.NET is intended only for people aged 18 or older. We do not knowingly permit minors to create subscriber accounts.

If we learn that a minor has provided personal information, we may disable the account and delete the information, subject to legally required retention. Contact go@vociferous.nyc if you believe a minor is using the service.

14. Corrections involving intelligence records

BNOW processes reporting from sources that can be incomplete, disputed, outdated, or incorrect. If you believe a BNOW record concerning you or your organization is materially inaccurate, misleading, or improperly attributed, contact go@vociferous.nyc.

Please identify the relevant page, claim, source, or URL and explain the requested correction. We may preserve the historical record while adding a correction, qualification, dispute marker, or updated source where appropriate.

15. Changes to this notice

We may update this Privacy Notice as the product, providers, and law change. We will update the version and effective date when we do.

If a change is material, we will provide reasonable notice through the service or by email. If a new activity requires consent, we will request consent before beginning that activity where required.

16. Contact

See also our Terms of Use.