Privacy Policy

We collect what's needed to run a marketplace where protected payments and dispute resolution are real: your account details (name, email, password — stored as a hash, never in plain text), anything you add to your profile (headline, bio, rate, skills, availability, portfolio work), the content of project conversations and files you send or deliver in them, payment and payout details needed to move money (handled by our payment processor — see below), and basic technical/usage data (sign-in timestamps, session tokens, IP address at sign-in) needed for security and to keep you signed in.

• Account — name, email, hashed password, account status.
• Profile — headline, bio, hourly rate, skills, languages, availability windows, portfolio items you add.
• Project data — messages, delivered files, delivery records, reviews, dispute statements, scope-change and payment-request records.
• Payment data — amounts, ledger entries, and payout status; card and bank account numbers themselves are held by our payment processor, not by Actuallize (see "Payment processor").
• Technical data — session cookies, sign-in timestamps, and IP address at sign-in, used for authentication and security.

We use this data to operate the product: matching clients and professionals, running project conversations, holding and paying out Protected payments, running the dispute-resolution process, sending notifications about activity that needs your attention, aggregating your public rating from published reviews, and detecting fraud, abuse, and attempts to move payment off-platform. We do not use your project data to train third-party AI models, and we do not sell your personal data.

Actuallize does not directly store your full card number or bank account number. Card charges, the holding of Protected funds, and payouts to professionals are handled by our payment processor, which receives the payment details needed to process each transaction directly from you or through their secure interface.

Actuallize stores the records needed to show you what happened with your money — amounts, timestamps, fee breakdowns, and status (Protected, Paid, or returned to the client) — as described in the Terms of Service's "Protected payments & fees" section.

Project conversations and delivered files are kept for the life of the project and afterward, because the completed conversation is the record both parties (and, if needed, an Actuallize operator resolving a dispute) can refer back to. We don't delete a project's record just because one party asks, since the other party has an equal interest in that record staying intact — see "Data retention & deletion" for what account deletion does instead.

We share data with a limited set of service providers who help us run the platform, only for that purpose, and never sell it. Today, that includes: our database host (Neon, for storing account and project data), our payment processor (Stripe, for payments, Protected-fund holding, and payouts), our file-storage provider (an S3-compatible object store, for uploaded/delivered files), and, once enabled, an email-delivery provider (for notification emails) — and it may include a hosting/CDN provider for serving the application itself. We may also disclose data if required by law or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Actuallize or our users.

Actuallize uses a session cookie to keep you signed in — this is required for the product to function and isn't an optional tracking cookie. We may use basic, privacy-respecting analytics to understand overall product usage (e.g., which pages are visited); today we do not use third-party advertising cookies or cross-site ad tracking.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access the personal data we hold about you, correct it, export it, or request deletion of your account. You can update most of your own data directly in Settings. To exercise a right this policy does not yet cover in-product, email hello@actuallize.com.

Deleting your account removes your ability to sign in and cascades the deletion of your personally-identifying account data (profile, session, notification preferences). Some records can't be fully deleted even on request: completed financial transactions and the ledger entries behind them (kept for accounting, tax, and fraud-prevention reasons, and because deleting one side of a shared payment record would corrupt the other party's own record), and a project's message/dispute record where the other party retains a legitimate interest in it (see "Message & file retention").

Financial records are kept for as long as tax and accounting law in our country of registration requires; we will state the exact periods here once fixed.

Actuallize is not directed to, and does not knowingly collect personal data from, anyone under the age of 18 (see the Terms of Service's eligibility requirement).

We'll take reasonable steps to notify active users (for example, an in-app notice) before a materially-revised Privacy Policy takes effect. This policy is versioned "2026-09-05" — see your account's terms-acceptance record for which version you last accepted.