Privacy Policy

Overview

Friends From The Files allows you to check whether any of your professional contacts appear in publicly released court documents. This privacy policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and your rights regarding your data.

Data We Collect

Account Information

When you sign in, we collect basic account information necessary for authentication (email address and authentication tokens).

Contact Data

You may provide contact data through two methods:

• Browser Extension: If you use our browser extension, it retrieves your LinkedIn connections (names, headlines, and LinkedIn usernames) directly from LinkedIn while you are logged in. This data is sent to our servers for processing.
• File Upload: You may upload a CSV file exported from LinkedIn or other platforms containing contact information (names, companies, positions).

Search Results

We store the results of searches performed against publicly available court documents, including which contacts were found and relevant document excerpts.

How We Use Your Data

• To search publicly released court documents for mentions of your contacts
• To display search results and match statistics
• To deduplicate contacts across multiple sync operations
• To track which contacts have already been searched (to avoid redundant searches)

We do not sell, share, or distribute your contact data to third parties. Your data is used solely for the functionality of this application.

Data Storage

Your data is stored securely on Convex, a cloud database platform. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We retain your data for as long as your account is active.

Browser Extension

Our browser extension operates as follows:

• It only activates on LinkedIn.com and our application domain
• It reads your LinkedIn connections using LinkedIn's internal API while you are logged into LinkedIn
• Connection data is sent directly to our servers - it is not stored locally in the extension beyond the sync operation
• A secure token is used to authenticate the extension with your account

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access: View all contact data and search results associated with your account
• Delete: Request deletion of your account and all associated data
• Portability: Request a copy of your data in a machine-readable format

To exercise these rights, please contact us using the information below.

Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services:

• Convex: Database and backend infrastructure
• Vercel: Application hosting
• Court Documents API: Third-party search API for querying publicly released court documents

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify users of any material changes by updating the "Last updated" date at the top of this page.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy or wish to exercise your data rights, please open an issue on our GitHub repository or contact the application maintainer.