Privacy notice

This notice covers two groups, and it is worth being clear which one you are in.

If you created an account, you gave us your data yourself and this notice tells you what we do with it.

If you are self-employed and your business appears in the directory, you did not give us anything. We obtained your data from a public register and published it without ever having contacted you. That situation is governed by article 14 of the GDPR, and the sections below are addressed to you specifically.

For each listed company we hold: the enterprise number, the company name, the legal form, whether the entity is a natural person, the registered trades (NACE codes), the commune and postcode of the registered seat, the register status, and the registration start date.

This comes from the open data published by the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO/BCE), downloaded as a bulk file under its open-data licence. We do not scrape the public search interface and we do not buy company data from brokers.

Separately, we record dated observations about a company: whether VIES reported its VAT number as valid on a given date, and whether the register showed an insolvency proceeding on a given date. Each observation stores the source that produced it and the date it was made, and observations are added rather than overwritten so the history of what was shown remains visible.

For a sole trader, all of the above is personal data, because the business and the person are the same legal entity.

The stated basis is legitimate interest (GDPR article 6(1)(f)): helping people in Belgium find construction professionals and see, before they commit, what the public registers say about them.

A legitimate interest has to be weighed against the rights of the people affected. That balancing test is being reviewed by a lawyer before the directory is opened to search engines, and it is listed as an open point below. Until that review is complete, directory pages are not indexed and are excluded in robots.txt.

We rely on legitimate interest and never on consent for these listings, because asking a sole trader for consent would mean contacting them — and the licence under which we hold their data forbids using it to do so.

We do not send marketing to the companies in this directory. Not an invitation to claim a listing, not a newsletter, not a partnership offer, nothing.

This is not a policy we could change our minds about. The Belgian open-data rules under which we hold this data forbid reusing personal data for direct marketing, and there is no mechanism anywhere in this product capable of sending such a message.

We do not sell, rent or licence the directory to third parties, and we do not offer it for bulk download or automated collection.

If you are a sole trader whose listing appears here, you can: object to the processing, ask for inaccurate information to be corrected, ask for your listing to be removed, and ask for a copy of what we hold about you.

To exercise any of these, use the report link at the foot of any page, or write to the address given below. Tell us which company it concerns; you do not need an account.

An objection is not a request we weigh at leisure. Where we cannot demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, we stop publishing the listing.

You can also complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority (Autorité de protection des données / Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit).

If you have an account we hold your name, email address, interface language, and a hashed password. We use them to run your account, to send you transactional email such as address verification and password resets, and to remember which listing you have claimed.

You can export everything we hold about your account as a machine-readable file, and you can delete your account, both from the privacy screen in your settings. Deleting an account removes your account data; it does not remove a company listing, which exists independently of any account.

Company identity is refreshed from each new register extract and reflects the current state of the register.

Dated observations are kept as history so that a page can show how old a result is, and so that a result that has since changed does not silently disappear. The retention period for that history is an open point below.

Account data is kept until you delete your account.