Privacy Policy

Account information. Your email address and sign-in details, an internal account identifier we assign to your account, and the profile details you choose to enter — name, headline, role, organization, general location, about text, Professional Journey entries, Professional Links, Professional Spotlight configuration, and any profile photo you upload.

Invitation information. When you request a Professional Perspective, the reviewer's name and email address, the expected relationship, and optional context you provide. Reviewer email addresses are never shown publicly. We keep a one-way scrambled (hashed) form of reviewer email addresses to detect duplicate requests and honor blocks.

Perspective information. What a reviewer writes, their ratings and answers, how they choose to be identified, their consent, and any correction or withdrawal.

Verification information. Information used to confirm that a reviewer controls the invited email address — for example, opening the private link in their invitation email or entering a one-time code — and to establish that the working relationship was real, such as whether the email domain matches the organization. Where that isn't possible, a reviewer may choose to provide a LinkedIn profile link, which a Why Me! administrator reviews by hand; we record the link and the decision. We do not automatically collect data from LinkedIn.

Operational and security information. Delivery status of transactional email; security and rate-limiting records, which may be derived from your IP address; basic device information such as browser type recorded when a reviewer session starts; and privacy-conscious usage counters linked to a profile (for example, how many invitations were opened), which record no reviewer identity, no email address, and no free text.

Diagnostic information. When something goes wrong, we and our hosting provider record technical error details — such as the error message, the page where it happened, and standard request information including IP address — to keep the service working. These records are not used for advertising.

Applications and messages. If you apply to the Founding Pilot, the name, email address, LinkedIn link, current role and answers you submit. If you contact support, the contents of your message.

To operate your account and profile and its visibility setting, to deliver invitations and transactional email, to verify email control and working relationships, to publish Perspectives under the 72-hour rule, to generate Professional Patterns summaries from a profile's own published Perspectives, to support reviewer correction and withdrawal rights, to keep the platform secure, to understand and improve how the site is used, and to meet legal obligations.

We do not sell personal information. We do not use personal information for advertising, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral (targeted) advertising. We do not track you across apps or websites owned by other companies, and we do not use your device’s advertising identifier.

Essential storage. We use your browser's local storage to keep you signed in, to save a reviewer's progress, confirmation and choices while completing a Perspective, to avoid counting the same analytics milestone twice, and to remember that you've seen our privacy notice. These are needed for the platform to work.

Analytics. We use Google Analytics 4. It works the same way inside the Why Me! mobile apps’ built-in browser, and it uses a random identifier for your browser or device to count visits; we do not connect that identifier to your name or email address. Google Analytics loads when you use the site and sets its own cookies (typically named beginning with “_ga”; Google may change these). Google receives standard technical information from your browser, such as device, browser and approximate location derived from your IP address, under Google's own terms and policies. Our configuration disables Google's advertising features. Our own analytics events never include names, email addresses, LinkedIn links, profile or Perspective text, private links or tokens, and page addresses that identify a profile or an invitation are replaced with generic labels. You can block analytics cookies through your browser settings or Google's opt-out browser add-on.

We do not currently respond to browser “Do Not Track” signals, because there is no advertising tracking to turn off. You can review this at any time under Privacy choices.

Only what a Public profile is meant to show: your profile content, and Perspectives that a reviewer submitted, consented to, and that have published, along with their verification status. Public profiles can be found by name or general location through Discover and may be indexed by search engines. A reviewer may choose to have their name withheld. Private, Draft and Deactivated profiles are not publicly readable.

We use service providers that process information on our behalf: cloud hosting, database, authentication and file storage (including profile photos); transactional email delivery; an AI model provider that receives a profile's published Perspective text to generate Professional Patterns summaries, with requests sent without asking the provider to store them; and Google Analytics. They process information to provide those services to us.

You can edit or remove your profile information at any time, change your profile between Draft, Private, Public and Deactivated, and permanently delete your account. Reviewers can correct or withdraw their Perspective at any time through Manage My Perspective.

Depending on where you live and applicable law, you may have rights to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information, or other rights. To make a request, email whymeverified@gmail.com. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, and we will not discriminate against you for making one.

Permanently deleting your account removes your account, public profile, profile information, uploaded photos, Professional Spotlight configuration, Professional Journey, Professional Links, your public profile address, Perspectives received on your profile, and outstanding requests, invitations, drafts, reminder schedules and tokens. Your public profile link stops working, and we send you one confirmation email when it is done.

You can delete your account yourself in account settings while signed in, or at whyme.work/delete-account without signing in: we email a one-time link to the account's address, and deletion starts only after you open it and confirm. That page never reveals whether an email has an account.

One honest limitation: if you also wrote a Perspective about someone else, deleting your account does not delete that Perspective. Reviewers are not account holders on Why Me!, so we have no reliable link between an account and the Perspectives that person wrote, and we will not guess at that link from a name or an email address. You can correct or withdraw any Perspective you wrote at any time using the Manage My Perspective link from your original email.

We may retain minimal nonpublic records only where genuinely necessary for security, fraud prevention, legal obligations, or system integrity — including a small record that your account was deleted. Routine encrypted infrastructure backups are retained on our provider's standard schedule and age out on that schedule; we do not selectively rewrite backups, and we do not promise faster removal than the infrastructure actually supports.

We use access controls, private single-purpose links, one-time codes, rate limits, and hashing of sensitive values to protect information. No system is perfectly secure.

Why Me! is intended for working professionals and is not directed to children.

We may update this policy. Material changes will be reflected by a new effective date.

Questions or privacy requests: whymeverified@gmail.com.