Public Data Notice

Effective Date: 15 July 2026 | Last Updated: 22 September 2026

This notice is for people whose publicly available information may appear in data served by SocialCrawl. It explains what data our service handles, where it comes from, why we are allowed to process it, and what you can do about it. It supplements our Privacy Policy, which covers data about our own account holders.

SocialCrawl is operated by Ridio Company Ltd, registered in England and Wales at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. For anything in this notice, contact hello@ridiocompany.com.

1. What SocialCrawl does

SocialCrawl is an API that lets software developers and businesses retrieve publicly available data from social media and other public platforms in a single, consistent format. Typical uses are analytics dashboards, market and audience research, brand monitoring, academic research, and AI-powered analysis of public conversations.

2. What data is involved

Our service retrieves only information that is publicly accessible without logging in, in the same form any visitor could see it in a web browser. Depending on the request, this can include:

Public profile information: Display name, username or handle, biography, profile image, verification status, and public follower or subscriber counts
Public content: Posts, videos, comments, captions, and hashtags that the author has published publicly
Public engagement metrics: Like, view, share, and comment counts on public content
Public business information: Business listings, product pages, reviews, and app-store entries

We do not collect, retrieve, or serve:

Private accounts, private posts, or direct messages
Any content behind a login wall, paywall, or password
Data obtained with anyone's platform login credentials (we never ask for, accept, or use social media usernames or passwords)
Special categories of data as a targeting or classification criterion (we do not classify or index people by health, religion, political opinions, sexual orientation, or similar attributes)

3. Where the data comes from

The data comes from the public pages of the platforms in our documentation. It is retrieved when a customer asks, through outside data providers or the platform's own public API. The Privacy Policy describes that. It does not name a provider for each endpoint.

Retrieval is request-driven: data is fetched when one of our customers asks for a specific public profile, post, or search, not by mass-harvesting platforms in the background.

4. Legal basis

For this processing, Ridio Company Ltd acts as a controller under the UK GDPR and relies on legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)): enabling lawful access to publicly available information for analytics, research, and integration purposes. We have assessed this basis, including the necessity of the processing and a balancing of our and our customers' interests against the rights and freedoms of the people concerned. Key factors in that balance:

Only data you have already made publicly visible is involved, in the form you published it
We do not keep a general archive of every response. Most responses are cached for between 2 and 30 minutes. A transcript, and a label on a public post, comment, or review, can be kept for up to 30 days. A request that sends an idempotency key can reuse the stored response for up to 24 hours. A customer who saves a monitor or a cohort is keeping that result until they delete it, or until the cohort's retention period ends (7 to 90 days)
Our terms contractually prohibit customers from using the data for facial recognition, biometric identification, surveillance or behavioural monitoring of individuals, re-identification, or profiling based on sensitive attributes
You can object or request suppression at any time (Section 6)

Because notifying every person whose public data may appear in an API response individually is impossible in practice, we rely on Article 14(5)(b) UK GDPR and provide the required information publicly through this notice.

5. How long the data is kept

We do not build profiles of individuals, and we do not keep a general archive of every API response. Most responses are cached for 2 to 30 minutes, so a repeat of the same request does not fetch the source twice. A transcript, and a label on a public post, comment, or review, can be kept for up to 30 days. A request that sends an idempotency key can reuse the stored response for up to 24 hours. A customer can save results in a monitor or a cohort. Those stay until the customer deletes them, or until the cohort retention period they set (7 to 90 days) ends. What our customers do with data they retrieve is governed by their own legal obligations and by our terms of use.

6. Your rights and how to opt out

If your publicly available information may appear in our API responses, you have the right to:

Object to our processing of your data (Article 21 UK GDPR)
Request suppression so that your profile or content is not served through our API
Request access to what data about you a request through our service would return
Complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or your local supervisory authority

To exercise any of these rights, email hello@ridiocompany.com with the platform and profile link (or username) concerned. We respond within 30 days. When we accept a suppression request, we add the identifier to a suppression list so it is no longer served through the Service.

Please note: SocialCrawl does not control the platforms themselves. If you want your information removed from a platform (for example, making your account private or deleting a post), that change takes effect at the source. A cached copy of an ordinary response expires within 30 minutes. A transcript or a label can remain for up to 30 days. A stored idempotent response can remain for up to 24 hours. A copy a customer has already saved in a monitor or a cohort stays until that customer deletes it, or until the cohort's retention period ends.

7. Changes to this notice

We will update this notice when our practices or legal requirements change and will show the date of the latest revision at the top of this page.