Public Data Notice
How SocialCrawl handles publicly available social media data, the legal basis for that processing, and how you can object or request removal if your public information appears in our API responses.
Effective Date: 15 July 2026 | Last Updated: 15 July 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 originates from the public pages of the platforms our API covers (40+ platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, and others; the full list is in our documentation). We do not scrape these platforms ourselves: data is retrieved on demand through specialised third-party data providers, or through the platforms' own official public APIs. The categories of upstream providers we use are listed in our Privacy Policy.
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 keep no database or archive of platform data: responses are cached for between 2 and 30 minutes and then expire automatically
- 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 maintain a store of platform data. API responses are held in a short-lived cache (2 to 30 minutes depending on the type of request) solely so that repeated identical requests do not hit the source twice, after which they expire automatically. 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, and because we hold no persistent store, it is reflected in our API as soon as any cached copy expires (at most 30 minutes).
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.