Privacy Policy

Last updated June 12, 2026.

This Privacy Notice for Purple IQ, LLC (“we,” “us,” or “our”) describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share (“process”) your personal information when you use our services (“Services”), including when you:

• Visit our website at https://www.purpleiq.com or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Notice
• Use Purple IQ, a subscription search engine that brings back the feel of the web in the past: fast pages, real links, and a healthy mix of sources. There are no ads and no identifiable tracking. The people searching are the customers, so the product works for you, not advertisers
• Engage with us in other related ways, including any sales, marketing, or events

Questions or concerns? Reading this Privacy Notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. We are responsible for making decisions about how your personal information is processed. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have questions or concerns, contact us at hello@purpleiq.com.

1. What information do we collect?

Personal information you disclose to us

In short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise contact us. It may include:

• Email addresses. Your email address is your sign-in. If a family plan owner adds you to their plan, we receive your email address from them to create your account.
• Anything you send us. If you email support, we have the email you sent.

We also create a small amount of information about your account ourselves: a random account number, your plan and billing status, your content-filter (SafeSearch) preference, and a count of how many searches you have used.

Sensitive information. We do not process sensitive personal information. Search queries are free text and may contain whatever you choose to type; we process query text only to return results, and we do not store it with your identity or use it to infer anything about you.

Payment data. We may collect data necessary to process your payment if you choose to make purchases, such as your payment instrument number and the security code associated with your payment instrument. All payment data is handled and stored by Stripe, LLC, whose privacy notice is available here: https://stripe.com/privacy. Your card details never reach our servers; the only thing we keep is an internal billing reference connecting your account to its subscription.

All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.

Information automatically collected

In short: Some information (such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address and browser characteristics) is collected automatically when you visit our Services. It is used to keep the Services working and abuse-free, not to profile you.

We automatically collect certain technical information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name) and is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of the Services:

• Log data. Our servers and hosting provider keep routine, short-lived request logs: IP address, browser type, the page requested, timestamps, and error reports. Our own diagnostic logs record how long each search took and whether caches were hit. They deliberately exclude your query text and your location.
• Usage counters. To meter free and plan allowances and to stop scrapers, we keep counters keyed to a random identifier or to a salted one-way hash of your IP address. We do not keep raw IP addresses alongside your usage. To avoid counting the same search twice, a salted hash of each query is kept for about thirty minutes; the hash cannot be reversed back into the query.
• Approximate location.We derive a coarse location (country, region, and city at most, never GPS coordinates or a street address) from your IP address at request time, so that searches like “coffee near me” can work. You can turn location use off in the search controls. We never request or collect precise device location.

Like nearly every website, we also use cookies: two of them, both first-party and essential. You can read about each in our Cookie Notice: purpleiq.com/cookies.

2. How do we process your information?

In short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We process personal information only for the purposes listed below, or otherwise with your consent.

• To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. We process your email address to send sign-in codes and keep your account in working order.
• To deliver search results. We process your query, and the coarse location described above, to return results.
• To meter usage.We count searches against your plan’s allowance. We count searches, not their content.
• To fulfill and manage your orders. We process your information to manage subscriptions, payments, and billing changes made through the Services.
• To respond to user inquiries and offer support. We process your information to respond to your inquiries and solve any potential issues you might have with the requested service.
• For security and abuse prevention. We process technical data (such as hashed IP addresses) for rate limiting, fraud prevention, and keeping automated scrapers out.
• To save or protect an individual’s vital interest.We may process your information when necessary to save or protect an individual’s vital interest, such as to prevent harm.

3. What legal bases do we rely on to process your personal information?

In short: We only process your personal information when we believe it is necessary and we have a valid legal reason (i.e., legal basis) to do so under applicable law, like with your consent, to comply with laws, to provide you with services to enter into or fulfill our contractual obligations, to protect your rights, or to fulfill our legitimate business interests.

If you are located in the EU or UK, this section applies to you.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR require us to explain the valid legal bases we rely on in order to process your personal information. As such, we may rely on the following legal bases to process your personal information:

• Consent. We may process your information if you have given us permission (i.e., consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
• Performance of a contract. We may process your personal information when we believe it is necessary to fulfill our contractual obligations to you, including providing our Services or at your request prior to entering into a contract with you.
• Legitimate interests. We may process your information when we believe it is reasonably necessary to achieve our legitimate business interests and those interests do not outweigh your interests and fundamental rights and freedoms: for example, keeping the Services secure, preventing abuse of free allowances, and diagnosing performance problems. None of these involve profiling you.
• Legal obligations. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as to cooperate with a law enforcement body or regulatory agency, exercise or defend our legal rights, or disclose your information as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
• Vital interests. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of a third party, such as situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person.

If you are located in Canada, this section applies to you.

We may process your information if you have given us specific permission (i.e., express consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose, or in situations where your permission can be inferred (i.e., implied consent). You can withdraw your consent at any time.

In some exceptional cases, we may be legally permitted under applicable law to process your information without your consent, including, for example:

• If collection is clearly in the interests of an individual and consent cannot be obtained in a timely way
• For investigations and fraud detection and prevention
• For business transactions provided certain conditions are met
• If it is contained in a witness statement and the collection is necessary to assess, process, or settle an insurance claim
• For identifying injured, ill, or deceased persons and communicating with next of kin
• If we have reasonable grounds to believe an individual has been, is, or may be victim of financial abuse
• If it is reasonable to expect collection and use with consent would compromise the availability or the accuracy of the information and the collection is reasonable for purposes related to investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province
• If disclosure is required to comply with a subpoena, warrant, court order, or rules of the court relating to the production of records
• If it was produced by an individual in the course of their employment, business, or profession and the collection is consistent with the purposes for which the information was produced
• If the collection is solely for journalistic, artistic, or literary purposes
• If the information is publicly available and is specified by the regulations
• We may disclose de-identified information for approved research or statistics projects, subject to ethics oversight and confidentiality commitments

4. When and with whom do we share your personal information?

In short: We share information only with the service providers that run the product, in the specific situations described in this section. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

Vendors, consultants, and other third-party service providers.We may share your data with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents (“third parties”) who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. We have contracts in place with our third parties, which are designed to help safeguard your personal information. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do it. They will also not share your personal information with any organization apart from us. They commit to protect the data they hold on our behalf and to retain it for the period we instruct. The categories of third parties we may share personal information with are:

• Search infrastructure providers. The partners whose index and ranking infrastructure answer queries receive the query text and the coarse location context described in Section 1, never your name, email address, account number, or any identifier that could link the query back to you.
• Website hosting and cloud computing providers. They run the application and, as part of normal operation, see standard request data such as IP addresses.
• Data storage providers. They hold the account records and counters described in Section 1.
• Payment processors. Stripe handles checkout and billing; see Section 1.
• Email delivery providers. They receive your email address and the message contents (such as a sign-in code) each time we email you.
• Performance monitoring tools. Cookieless measurements that tell us when pages are slow. They measure pages, not people.

We may also need to share your personal information in the following situations:

• Business transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.

5. Do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?

In short: We use two first-party cookies that are essential to making the Services work. We do not use advertising cookies, cross-site tracking, web beacons, or third-party tracking pixels.

The complete list of cookies we set:

• A session cookie, set when you sign in so you stay signed in. It is encrypted, unreadable to page scripts, and holds nothing but a random session identifier.
• An anonymous counter, a random value created on your first visit so free searches can be counted without an account. It is not connected to your name, your email, or anything else about you.

Our performance analytics are cookieless. We do not permit third parties to place advertising or tracking technologies on the Services, and no technology we use constitutes a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information for targeted advertising as defined under applicable US state laws (see Section 11).

Specific information about each cookie and how to refuse or clear cookies is set out in our Cookie Notice: purpleiq.com/cookies.

6. How long do we keep your information?

In short: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless otherwise required by law.

We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). No purpose in this notice will require us keeping your personal information for longer than the period of time in which you have an account with us. In practice:

• Sign-in sessions expire after about ninety days of inactivity.
• Anonymous search counters expire about a year after their last use.
• The salted query hashes used to prevent double-counting expire after about thirty minutes.
• Result caches are short-lived and are never linked to a person.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible. Transaction records remain with our payment processor for as long as the law requires.

7. How do we keep your information safe?

In short: We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organizational and technical security measures, and by collecting as little of it as possible.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. Concretely: session cookies are encrypted and unreadable to page scripts, sign-in uses single-use emailed codes instead of stored passwords, IP addresses used for metering are stored only as salted one-way hashes, and the data we never collect cannot leak.

However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorized third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.

8. Do we collect information from minors?

In short: We do not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 18 years of age or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction.

We do not knowingly collect, solicit data from, or market to children under 18 years of age or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction, nor do we knowingly sell such personal information. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 18 or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction, or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to such minor dependent’s use of the Services. If we learn that personal information from users less than 18 years of age or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction has been collected, we will deactivate the account and take reasonable measures to promptly delete such data from our records. If you become aware of any data we may have collected from children under age 18 or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction, please contact us at hello@purpleiq.com.

9. What are your privacy rights?

In short: Depending on your state of residence in the US or in some regions, such as the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland, and Canada, you have rights that allow you greater access to and control over your personal information. You may review, change, or terminate your account at any time.

In some regions (like the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and Canada), you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right (i) to request access and obtain a copy of your personal information, (ii) to request rectification or erasure, (iii) to restrict the processing of your personal information, (iv) if applicable, to data portability, and (v) not to be subject to automated decision-making. In certain circumstances, you may also have the right to object to the processing of your personal information. You can make such a request by contacting us using the details in Section 13.

We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your Member State data protection authority or UK data protection authority. If you are located in Switzerland, you may contact the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the details in Section 13. However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

Account information

If you would at any time like to review or change the information in your account or terminate your account, you can log in to your account page and update or delete it there. You can also sign out of every device from the same page.

Upon your request to terminate your account, we delete your account record and usage counters immediately. Some information may persist briefly in routine backups and server logs until they age out on their own, and transaction records remain with our payment processor where the law requires it (for example, tax and accounting rules).

Cookies: Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. You can usually choose to remove or reject cookies in your browser settings; since both of our cookies are essential, the worst that happens is being signed out or losing count of your free searches. For further information, see our Cookie Notice: purpleiq.com/cookies.

If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, you may email us at hello@purpleiq.com.

10. Controls for Do-Not-Track features

Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online, though in our case there is no tracking to opt out of. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Notice.

California law requires us to let you know how we respond to web browser DNT signals. Because there currently is not an industry or legal standard for recognizing or honoring DNT signals, we do not respond to them at this time.

11. Do United States residents have specific privacy rights?

In short: If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia, you may have the right to request access to and receive details about the personal information we maintain about you and how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, get a copy of, or delete your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law.

Categories of personal information we collect

The table below shows the categories of personal information we have collected in the past twelve (12) months. The examples are illustrative of each statutory category; the “Collected” column describes what we actually collect. For the full inventory, see Section 1.

We may also collect other personal information outside of these categories where you interact with us directly, for example when you contact our support channels.

Sources, use, and disclosure of personal information

We collect personal information directly from you and from your use of the Services, as described in Section 1. We use it as described in Section 2, and disclose it to the service providers described in Section 4 pursuant to written contracts. The categories disclosed for a business purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months are identifiers, commercial information, internet activity, and coarse geolocation data, each as qualified in the table above.

We have not sold or shared any personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months, and we do not sell or share personal information for targeted advertising. We may use personal information for our own internal purposes, such as undertaking internal research for technological development; this is not considered to be “selling” your personal information.

Your rights

You have rights under certain US state data protection laws. However, these rights are not absolute, and in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law. These rights include:

• Right to know whether or not we are processing your personal data
• Right to access your personal data
• Right to correct inaccuracies in your personal data
• Right to request the deletion of your personal data
• Right to obtain a copy of the personal data you previously shared with us
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights
• Right to opt outof the processing of your personal data if it is used for targeted advertising (or sharing as defined under California’s privacy law), the sale of personal data, or profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects (“profiling”). We do not engage in any of these practices.

Depending upon the state where you live, you may also have the following rights:

• Right to access the categories of personal data being processed (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Minnesota)
• Right to obtain a list of the categories of third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in California, Delaware, and Maryland)
• Right to obtain a list of specific third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Minnesota and Oregon)
• Right to obtain a list of third parties to which we have sold personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Connecticut)
• Right to review, understand, question, and depending on where you live, correct how personal data has been profiled (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Connecticut and Minnesota)
• Right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in California)
• Right to opt out of the collection of sensitive data and personal data collected through the operation of a voice or facial recognition feature (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Florida)

How to exercise your rights

To exercise these rights, you can contact us by submitting a data subject access request, by emailing us at hello@purpleiq.com, by visiting purpleiq.com/contact, or by referring to the contact details at the bottom of this document.

Under certain US state data protection laws, you can designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf. We may deny a request from an authorized agent that does not submit proof that they have been validly authorized to act on your behalf in accordance with applicable laws.

Request verification

Upon receiving your request, we will need to verify your identity to determine you are the same person about whom we have the information in our system. We will only use personal information provided in your request to verify your identity or authority to make the request. However, if we cannot verify your identity from the information already maintained by us, we may request that you provide additional information for the purposes of verifying your identity and for security or fraud-prevention purposes.

If you submit the request through an authorized agent, we may need to collect additional information to verify your identity before processing your request, and the agent will need to provide a written and signed permission from you to submit such request on your behalf.

Appeals

Under certain US state data protection laws, if we decline to take action regarding your request, you may appeal our decision by emailing us at hello@purpleiq.com. We will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken in response to the appeal, including a written explanation of the reasons for the decisions. If your appeal is denied, you may submit a complaint to your state attorney general.

California “Shine The Light” law

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, also known as the “Shine The Light” law, permits our users who are California residents to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, information about categories of personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared personal information in the immediately preceding calendar year. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for direct marketing purposes. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit your request in writing to us using the contact details in Section 13.

12. Do we make updates to this notice?

In short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated “Last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

13. How can you contact us about this notice?

If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may email us at hello@purpleiq.com or contact us by post at:

14. How can you review, update, or delete the data we collect from you?

Based on the applicable laws of your country or state of residence in the US, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, details about how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law.

The fastest path is your account page, where you can review your details and delete your account yourself. You can also submit a data subject access request or email hello@purpleiq.com.

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