Legal
Privacy Policy
The short version: your data stays yours, deal materials are confidential, nothing personal is sold, and counterparties see only what the confidentiality process releases. The long version follows, and it says the same thing.
1. What this covers
This policy explains how FIH, LLC ("FIH", "we") handles personal information on FIH.com and the services around it: the advisory practice, the marketplace, verification, valuation tools, NDAs and deal rooms. Signed confidentiality agreements govern deal materials; this policy governs personal information. If they overlap, the stricter protection applies.
2. What we collect
What you give us: name, email, phone, the side you register on (buy-side, sell-side, or both), company and LinkedIn URLs, and anything you submit through forms - valuation requests, buyer criteria, proposals, consultation requests. If you verify, we collect identity documents and, for capital evidence, financial documentation or bank-derived confirmation through the providers below. If you sign an agreement electronically, we record your typed name, the time, your network address and the document version - that record is the contract. Automatically: standard log and device data, pages visited, and cookies as described below.
3. What we use it for
To run the services: verifying identity and capital, releasing access by tier, matching opportunities to stated mandates, preparing documents you request, processing referrals, and keeping records of what was signed. To communicate: transactional email always; lifecycle email - verification reminders, deal follow-ups, an offer of a call - relevant to what you registered for, each carrying an unsubscribe we honour through a suppression register. To protect the platform: fraud prevention, security, and enforcement of our terms. And to improve the service using aggregated or anonymised information that identifies no person and no company.
4. Your data stays yours
We do not claim ownership of the information you provide, and we do not sell personal information. Business and financial materials submitted around a transaction are confidential: they are shown to counterparties only through the access controls and confidentiality agreements the site operates, or as you direct. Anonymised listing profiles are anonymised for a reason - the identity behind them is released only under NDA.
5. Who sees it
Counterparties: only what the process releases at your stage - an anonymised profile first, detail after the confidentiality step, and your identity to a specific counterparty only as part of a transaction you are pursuing. Service providers, bound to use data only to provide their service to us: identity verification (Persona), bank connectivity for capital evidence (Plaid), email delivery (transactional and lifecycle senders), sign-in (Google, if you choose it), analytics (Google Analytics), and abuse prevention (reCAPTCHA). Professional advisers and authorities where the law requires or a transaction demands it. And, if FIH itself is ever reorganised or acquired, a successor bound by this policy. No data broker sales, no advertising-network sharing of your personal information.
6. Fraud checks and the Jid badge
When you submit a form, we check the business details you give (such as your e-mail address, company name, phone number, location and message) with Jid (jid.com), our fraud-prevention provider, to confirm the enquiry comes from a real business. Jid does not keep your e-mail address, phone number or message; it keeps the result, your e-mail domain, a keyed one-way hash of your e-mail address and a one-way hash of the message for 30 days. After we review an enquiry we may mark it with Jid as legitimate, a sales pitch, spam or a scam. Jid keeps that report for up to 24 months with the company and e-mail domain concerned and the keyed hash of your e-mail address (never the address itself). Jid publishes only counts about businesses, once at least two independent businesses agree, never anything about an individual (jid.com/privacy, section 2b). Some of our forms also use Jid Signals, which reads your approximate location and network type from your connection to help prevent fraud; your IP address is not stored. The Verified on Jid badge in the footer is an image loaded from jid.com. Like any web server, its host sees your IP address and user agent when the image loads; it sets no cookie and runs no script.
7. Cookies
We use cookies for sessions and sign-in, a first-party cookie to attribute referrals (90 days), analytics, and reCAPTCHA. Browser controls can block cookies; the site works without the optional ones, but sessions and sign-in need theirs.
8. How long we keep it
Account data for as long as the account exists and for a reasonable period after closure. Signed agreements - NDAs, engagement documents - are contracts, and we retain them as long as the legal positions they create can matter. Verification documents are kept only as long as verification and its audit trail require. Suppression-register entries are kept indefinitely, because forgetting an opt-out is how someone gets emailed again. Backups age out on their own cycle.
9. Security
Confidential documents are stored outside the public web root and served only through authenticated routes that check the requester against the record; access inside FIH is limited to people who need it for the engagement. Transport is encrypted. No system is impregnable and we do not promise otherwise - but the design assumption throughout is that a seller's financials are the most damaging thing we could leak, and the controls are built around that.
10. Your choices and rights
Unsubscribe links work, and stay worked - the suppression register survives everything else. You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for corrections, or ask for deletion; we will verify it is you first, and we will explain plainly if something must be retained (a signed contract, a legal hold, an audit trail). California residents have the rights the CCPA provides - disclosure, deletion, and opting out of sale (we do not sell) - without discrimination for exercising them. If you are in the EEA or UK, we honour access, rectification, erasure, restriction and portability requests on the same basis. Requests: through the contact page or the address below.
11. People under 18
The services are for adults transacting in businesses. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and we delete it if we learn we have.
12. Changes
We may update this policy; the effective date below moves when we do, and material changes are made conspicuous. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance.
13. Contact
FIH, LLC, 30 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014, United States - or the contact page on this site. We answer privacy requests with a person, not an autoresponder.
Related
The Terms of Use govern use of the services; signed confidentiality agreements govern deal materials.