1. Who we are and what this covers
Controller: Pardon My French, the operator of pardonmyfrench.tech, is responsible for deciding how and why the personal data described here is processed. For privacy questions, requests, or complaints to us, contact support@pardonmyfrench.tech.
This notice covers the public website, Visitor browsing, Member authentication by email or Google, Opportunity Preferences, Personalized Matches, Opportunity Digest, Opportunity Alerts, and related email and support interactions. It does not cover websites that we link to, including an employer's application site; those sites have their own notices.
We do not ask you to upload a CV or submit an application to Pardon My French. When you choose to apply, you leave our service and the destination's privacy notice applies.
2. Personal data we collect
Some data comes directly from you, some is created when you use the service, and some is supplied by a sign-in or delivery provider.
| Category | Examples | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Email identity | Email address; a Google identity and stable provider subject; Google profile image URL when you sign in with Google; verified and sign-in timestamps; hashed authentication tokens. | Create and secure a Member Identity, send a requested magic link, link Google sign-in, and maintain a session. |
| Opportunity Preferences | Roles and skills, sectors, experience level, locations, salary range, contract types, and work-location arrangements. | Save the criteria you chose and find, filter, and order Personalized Matches. |
| Search and visit activity | Searches, normalized search counts, last-searched timestamps, and Member visit timestamps. | Remember useful activity, understand which catalogue results you requested, secure the service, and improve it. |
| Alerts and consent records | Opportunity Alert phrases, workplace mode, saved search filters (location, contract types and workplace modes) for alerts created from a search, state and lifecycle timestamps; Digest and Alert consent wording, consent versions, enrollment and withdrawal timestamps, and unsubscribe records. | Run the optional emails you asked for and retain evidence of when and how consent was given or withdrawn. |
| Email delivery | Recipient address, message type, provider message ID, delivery status, retry metadata, and the hashed capability behind an unsubscribe link. | Send authentication email, Opportunity Digest, and Opportunity Alert messages and prevent duplicate or unwanted sends. |
| Premium billing | Selected plan, opaque checkout, customer, subscription and transaction identifiers, payment confirmation and refund status, and paid-period dates. We do not receive or store payment-card details. | Fulfil purchases, prevent duplicate charges, show Membership status and open your billing portal. |
| Security data | IP hashes used for magic-link rate limiting and abuse prevention; session cookie identifiers; infrastructure and request security logs may also contain network information. | Protect Memberships and Member Identities, detect abuse, troubleshoot incidents, and keep the service available. |
| Analytics events | Event names and properties, page and feature activity, browser or device signals, and—when a Member is identified—Member ID and email associated with those events. | Measure product use, diagnose failures, and improve the catalogue and Member experience when analytics is enabled. |
| Public opportunity data | Role, employer, location, workplace, language, and application-link information obtained from public or authorized sources. | Assess, curate, and display Career Opportunities. This is generally information about the opportunity, not about you. |
We do not intentionally collect special-category data such as health, biometric, political, or trade-union information. Please do not put sensitive personal information into a role phrase, search, or other free-text field.
3. Purposes and legal bases
For each purpose, we rely on the legal basis shown below. Where we rely on legitimate interests, we balance those interests against your rights and use the least data needed.
| Purpose | Legal basis | Data involved |
|---|---|---|
| Provide Membership, email sign-in, Google sign-in, sessions, and requested catalogue features. | Performance of a contract or steps requested before entering one — GDPR Article 6(1)(b). | Email identity, Google identity/profile image, authentication and session records. |
| Save Opportunity Preferences and select, filter, and order Personalized Matches. | Performance of the service you requested — Article 6(1)(b). | Opportunity Preferences, searches, visit timestamps, and public opportunity data. |
| Send the optional Opportunity Digest and Opportunity Alerts. | Your consent — Article 6(1)(a). Each email subscription is separate from Membership and can be withdrawn at any time. | Email address, preference or alert criteria, consent records, and delivery records. |
| Prevent abuse, rate-limit authentication, secure accounts, investigate incidents, and maintain a reliable service. | Our legitimate interests in security and service operation — Article 6(1)(f). | IP hashes, authentication attempts, sessions, visit timestamps, and security logs. |
| Measure use and improve the product with analytics. | Our legitimate interests where measurement can lawfully be carried out without consent — Article 6(1)(f); otherwise your consent where required by applicable cookie and electronic-communications rules — Article 6(1)(a). | Analytics events, feature activity, browser/device signals, and Member identifiers when enabled. |
| Meet legal obligations, establish or defend legal claims, and respond to lawful requests. | Legal obligation — Article 6(1)(c), and legitimate interests — Article 6(1)(f), where applicable. | Relevant Membership, consent, delivery, security, and correspondence records. |
Withdrawing optional email consent does not affect processing already carried out lawfully, or processing needed to operate and secure your Membership.
4. Matching, profiling, and automated decisions
We perform limited service personalization. When you use your Match Preferences, we filter the Published Opportunities catalogue by the role phrases, location, contract, and workplace choices you supplied; results are ordered by publication time, not by a score about you. Personalized Matches are therefore opportunities that match the criteria you chose, not a ranking of your employability.
Opportunity Alerts use the alert phrases you chose as case-insensitive matches against an opportunity title, plus an optional workplace-mode match. An alert created from a search instead matches the way the catalogue search does: its search terms against an opportunity's title, employer, skills and description, within the location, contract and workplace filters you had selected. Matches for such an alert are collected and sent together in at most one email a day, only when there is at least one new match. Both kinds only consider Published Opportunities that meet our publication and language-evidence requirements. The Opportunity Digest is separate: at present it sends consenting Free Members up to the three newest published Job Offers, rather than applying an individual preference score.
This is not a hiring, credit, insurance, or eligibility decision. We do not infer protected characteristics, use your data to rank your employability, or send your Member Identity or Opportunity Preferences to an employer. A match can be incomplete or wrong because it depends on public opportunity data; you can edit your Opportunity Preferences, pause or remove an Opportunity Alert, unsubscribe from the Digest, or contact us about an error.
We do not currently make a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal effects or similarly significant effects on you. If that changes, we will update this notice and explain the logic, consequences, and safeguards before relying on it.
5. Who receives personal data
We share only what a recipient needs for the purpose below, under a contract or other appropriate safeguards. We do not sell personal data or share it for third-party advertising.
| Recipient | Role | What may be shared |
|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud and our hosting/infrastructure providers | Host the production application, PostgreSQL database, backups where configured, and operational logs. | Stored Membership, Opportunity Preferences, consent, delivery, security, and service records. |
| Google Identity Services supplies the identity response when you choose Google sign-in. | Google sign-in credential and the identity claims needed to create or link your Member Identity; Google handles its own service data under its policy. | |
| Resend | Send email magic links and Identity Link confirmations. | Recipient email address, authentication email content, and delivery metadata. |
| Brevo | Send the Opportunity Digest and Opportunity Alert emails. | Recipient email address, email content, unsubscribe headers, and delivery metadata. |
| Paddle | Merchant of Record for optional Premium purchases, taxes, receipts and billing management. | An opaque checkout reference and selected product. You supply billing and payment information directly to Paddle under Paddle's privacy notice. Paddle returns payment and subscription status to us. |
| Voyage AI (MongoDB) | Turn catalogue search text into embeddings so search can match jobs by meaning, when enabled. | The search keywords you enter, without your Member Identity, and the text of Published Opportunities. We opt out of Voyage AI using this data to train its models. |
| PostHog | Provide product analytics when configured. | Analytics events and properties, browser/device signals, and the Member ID/email association described above. |
| Authorized operators, professional advisers, and public authorities | Operate, support, audit, protect, or lawfully request information about the service. | Only records reasonably needed for the relevant task, investigation, advice, or legal request. |
| Employer or Application Route destination | Receive your normal browser request only after you choose to follow an external Application Route. | We do not send your Member Identity, Opportunity Preferences, searches, or Opportunity Alerts to employers through Pardon My French. |
Provider privacy information: Google, Resend, Brevo, PostHog, Voyage AI, and OVHcloud.
6. International transfers
Our production stack is hosted on an OVHcloud VPS. We aim to use European Economic Area (EEA) services where practical, but some providers or support infrastructure may process data outside the EEA. Our current email setup includes Resend, whose published terms describe US storage, and Brevo, whose published materials describe EU storage. Google, PostHog, and Voyage AI may also process data internationally depending on their service and configuration.
When personal data leaves the EEA, we use an applicable adequacy decision, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, a valid certification or other GDPR transfer mechanism, together with supplementary technical and organizational measures where appropriate. We review provider locations and transfer terms when providers or configurations change.
Ask the privacy contact above for more information about the safeguard used for a specific transfer.
7. Retention periods
We keep personal data only for as long as the purpose requires, then delete or irreversibly anonymize it unless a longer period is required to meet a legal obligation or resolve a dispute. Our current maximums and criteria are:
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Membership, Member Identities, Opportunity Preferences, and active Opportunity Alerts | While your Membership is active. After a verified deletion request, we target deletion or anonymization within 30 days, except records that must be retained for legal or security reasons. |
| Magic-link and Google Identity Link tokens | 15 minutes for link validity. Hashed request and abuse-prevention records are kept for up to 12 months. |
| Member sessions | Up to 30 days while valid; expired or revoked session records are removed during operational cleanup and no later than 12 months. |
| Searches and visit timestamps | Up to 12 months from the last recorded activity, unless needed sooner for a security investigation. |
| Digest and Alert consent evidence, unsubscribe and delivery records | While the subscription is active and for up to 3 years after withdrawal or the last send, to demonstrate consent and honor suppression requests. |
| Analytics events | Up to 12 months in our analytics project when enabled, subject to the provider's shorter or longer backup and deletion schedules. |
| Production security logs | Up to 14 days in the production journald retention policy, with shorter retention where possible. |
Backups, provider logs, and legally preserved evidence may take longer to disappear from all copies; they remain access-controlled and are deleted or overwritten under the relevant backup or provider schedule.
8. Your rights and how to exercise them
Subject to the conditions and exceptions in the GDPR, you may ask us to:
- give you access to the personal data we hold about you and information about its use;
- correct inaccurate or incomplete data;
- delete your data;
- restrict processing while an objection or accuracy dispute is considered;
- object to processing based on legitimate interests, including profiling based on them;
- receive portable data that you provided to us where portability applies;
- withdraw consent at any time for the Digest, Alerts, or any consent-based analytics processing; and
- ask for safeguards and human intervention if a future decision is based solely on automated processing with legal or similarly significant effects.
Send a request to support@pardonmyfrench.tech from the email address associated with your Membership where possible. Tell us what you need; we may ask for proportionate information to verify your identity. We normally respond within one month, although complex or numerous requests may take longer as permitted by law. Exercising a right is free unless a lawful exception applies.
9. Changes to this notice
We may update this notice when the service, providers, or legal requirements change. We will publish the new version at /privacy and change the “Last updated” date. If a change materially affects an active consent or your rights, we will give additional notice where required.