Privacy notice

This notice explains how Ad Intel collects, uses and protects personal data. It covers our website, the free ad account check, the Ad Intel service and our referral programme.

Who we are

Ad Intel is a trading name of Cyber Investments Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17510180) whose office is at 6 Hill Rise, Seaford, East Sussex, BN25 2UA, United Kingdom. Cyber Investments Ltd ("we", "us") is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under reference ZC270114.

You can contact us about anything in this notice, or to use your rights, through the contact form on our website or by replying to any email we have sent you.

Our two roles

• Controller. For the personal data of the people who visit our website, contact us, create an account, join our referral programme or are invited to use Ad Intel, we decide why and how the data is used. This notice describes that.
• Processor. The advertising, website and sales information that a customer puts into Ad Intel belongs to that customer. We handle it on the customer's instructions under a data processing agreement. If you are a customer's client, customer or website visitor and want to use your rights over that information, please ask the business you deal with; we will help them.

What we collect and why

We do not need, and ask you not to upload, personal data about your own customers. Where it appears in a file, our imports are built to leave it out or to turn it into a hashed value.

How we use AI

Parts of Ad Intel use an AI service to write plain-English summaries, answer questions and draft wording. AI is used only through our own system, which sends it summarised business facts, such as totals and trends, and not personal data. Before anything the AI writes is shown to you, we check that the figures it quotes match your data and remove sentences that do not. AI can still be wrong, so every AI output is labelled and you should check it before acting on it.

The AI provider we use is Mistral AI, in France, under its data processing terms. What we send it is processed to produce the answer, and Mistral keeps it for a limited period, currently about 30 days, to detect and prevent abuse, and then deletes it. We have opted out of Mistral using what we send it to train its models, and we do not use customers' data to train AI models ourselves.

Ratings and reviews. You can mark an AI chat answer, a dashboard review or a Today briefing as helpful or not helpful, and add a short note. We ask you not to put names or contact details in a note, and we remove email addresses and phone numbers from it before saving. Our staff can read ratings, notes and the answer or review they relate to, to find and fix poor output and improve our prompts. We do not use them for anything else.

Ad Intel does not make decisions about individual people with legal or similarly significant effects. If a customer switches on the optional Automatic mode, Ad Intel can change that customer's campaign settings within limits the customer sets; this concerns advertising accounts, not individuals.

The AI assistant on our website

You can ask the assistant questions about Ad Intel. It is an AI and can be wrong, and it has no access to any customer account. Please do not type personal details. Your last few messages are kept in your browser session while you chat. We keep an anonymised copy of questions and answers for 30 days to check quality. If you leave your email address, we store it only with your consent, to reply to your question, for up to 12 months, and you can ask us to delete it at any time.

The free ad account check

You upload one file of advertising performance data (figures such as spend and clicks by campaign and day). We read it once, work out the results and delete the file straight away; the figures are not stored. We keep only a short summary of the results (scores, totals, campaign names and advice) for 24 hours behind a private link, then delete it. We do not ask for your name or email address, we do not use an AI service for this check, and please do not upload files containing personal data about your customers.

Our referral programme

People can join our referral programme to earn commission on customers they refer. We use a member's name, email address and payment details only to run the programme and pay them, and keep payment records for as long as the law requires for our accounts. Members see only counts of visits and sign-ups and the commission earned; we never tell them who you are. If you sign up through a referral link, the only thing we record about the referral is which member's link it was and what you pay, so that commission can be calculated. The referral programme terms are on our legal pages.

Cookies

We use the cookies the service needs to work: a session cookie, a security token and, if you ask for it, a "remember me" cookie. We do not use advertising cookies. With your permission ("Accept all" on our banner) we also use Google Analytics 4 on our public website (not inside the Ad Intel app, the client portal or shared report links) to see how the site is used. It sets two cookies, _ga and _ga_<our property id>, which hold a random identifier and session counters. Under Google's default settings they last up to two years (some browsers shorten this). Google receives your IP address, browser and device details and the pages you view. We turn off Google's advertising features, so the data is not used for advertising or ad personalisation, and we do not link it to your account. Google acts as our processor and may process data in the United States under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. If you choose "Essential only", or change your mind later with "Cookie settings" in the footer of our website, Google Analytics is not loaded and we delete its cookies. If you arrive through a referral link and accept cookies on our banner, we set one more cookie, adintel_ref, for up to 60 days, to credit the person who referred you if you sign up. If you do not accept, we keep the code only for that visit. Our lawful basis for the optional cookies is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. Full details, with lifetimes, are in our cookie policy.

Google user data

If you choose to connect Google Analytics, Ad Intel asks Google for read-only access and reads totals such as visits, engagement, key events and revenue by day, traffic source, campaign and landing page path. We use them only to show you your website results next to your ad results, to warn you about large differences, and to give you advice about your own account. We do not read personal data about your visitors, we do not change anything in your Analytics account, we do not sell the data or use it for advertising, and nobody at Ad Intel reads it unless you ask us for support. You can disconnect at any time in Ad Intel, or remove Ad Intel in your Google account permissions. Ad Intel's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Other connected accounts

If a customer connects an advertising or business account (for example Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising, HubSpot, Stripe or Shopify), we receive the access permission the customer approves and read, and where the customer allows it change, only the information needed for the service. The access tokens are stored encrypted. The customer can disconnect at any time, which stops all further access.

Who we share it with

We share personal data only with service providers that help us run Ad Intel, under contracts that protect it, and when the law requires it. They include providers of hosting, email delivery, text-message alerts for our own team, secure backup storage, AI processing (Mistral AI) and payments (Stripe). Our current list, with what each does and where, is on the sub-processors page. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for other companies' marketing.

If you are invited into a customer's workspace or client portal, that customer and the people it gives access to can see your name and email address, and your activity there.

Where your data goes

We are based in the United Kingdom and our customers are worldwide. Some of our providers process data outside the UK. Where personal data leaves the UK or the European Economic Area, we rely on an adequacy decision, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or addendum, or standard contractual clauses, so that it stays protected. Our sub-processors page says which applies to each provider.

How long we keep it

Where the law requires us to keep records for longer, we keep only what it requires.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR, and the EU GDPR where it applies to you, you can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to receive a copy of it in a portable format, and to object to or ask us to restrict how we use it. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. We reply within one month. You do not have to pay a fee, and we may ask you to prove who you are.

If you are not happy with how we have used your data, please tell us first so that we can put it right. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to the data protection authority where you live or work.

Do you have to give us your data?

You do not have to give us any personal data, but we cannot reply to an enquiry, create an account, take payment or pay referral commission without the details involved.

Changes

We will update this notice when our practices change. The version number and date are shown at the top of this page, and we will tell account holders about important changes and ask them to accept the new version where our terms require it.