Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Annie ("Annie", "we", "us") is a business-development intelligence platform for recruitment firms, operated by Vantage Search Group ME DWC-LLC, a company registered in the Dubai South (DWC) free zone in Dubai, United Arab Emirates under licence number 14082. The Annie platform and the meetannie.ai website are owned and operated by Vantage Search Group ME DWC-LLC. This policy explains what personal data Annie collects, why, and how it's handled, whether that data belongs to you (our customer), your colleagues, or the candidates and client contacts your firm works with.

2. What we collect

Account data. Name, email address, firm name, and the sector, function, market and outreach-tone preferences you set up during onboarding.

Your business data. The candidates, companies, contacts, jobs and pipeline records you add or import into Annie, including anything you upload (such as a LinkedIn export) or connect.

Signal and enrichment data. Public and licensed business information Annie gathers about companies and contacts relevant to your market (leadership changes, funding, hiring activity, job postings), including data returned by our enrichment provider, Apollo.io.

Usage and AI interaction data. Messages you send to Ask Annie, actions you take on signals and daily actions, and standard technical logs (IP address, browser, timestamps).

Mailbox data, if you connect a mailbox. Annie reads the mail in the connected account to work out who you correspond with and when. When a new message arrives, its body is read once, in transit, and sent to Anthropic so Annie can write a one-line dated note on the contact. The body is not stored. What Annie keeps is the note, the subject line, who the message was with, the direction and the date. Ranking works only from who and when. Annie never sends mail by itself; a drafted message is only sent when you click send, from your own mailbox and your own address.

Billing data. Handled directly by our payment processor, Stripe. We do not store your full card number.

3. How we use it

• To operate the core product: generating your daily BD agenda, matching candidates to opportunities, drafting outreach messages, and running Ask Annie.
• To monitor your specified markets for relevant business signals.
• To process payments and manage your subscription.
• To keep the service secure, diagnose problems, and improve the product.
• To contact you about your account or material changes to the service.

We do not sell your data, or the data of your candidates and contacts, to third parties, and we do not use it to train models for any customer other than you.

4. Who we share it with

Annie is built on a small number of specialist infrastructure and AI providers, each of which processes data strictly to provide their part of the service:

We do not otherwise share personal data with third parties, except where required by law or with your explicit consent.

5. Candidates and client contacts

Much of the data Annie processes concerns people who are not Annie's own users, primarily candidates and client-side contacts entered by our customers as part of their recruitment work. If you are one of these individuals and want to understand how your data is being used, please contact the recruitment firm you dealt with directly, as they control that data. Our customers are responsible for having a lawful basis to hold and process this information under their own applicable data protection obligations.

6. Governing framework

Vantage Search Group ME DWC-LLC is established in the Dubai South (DWC) free zone, which is a non-financial free zone. This policy is therefore written against the United Arab Emirates federal data protection law, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data (the "PDPL"), which applies to controllers and processors established anywhere in the UAE other than the financial free zones. The PDPL is administered by the UAE Data Office. The separate regimes of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) do not apply to us, as we are not established in either.

The PDPL's Executive Regulations had not been issued at the date of this policy. Where the Regulations, once issued, require something different from what is set out here, the Regulations prevail and we will update this policy. Section 8 below sets out additional rights for individuals based in the UK.

7. International data transfers

Annie is used by recruiters across the UK, UAE/GCC and other markets, and our infrastructure providers (listed in section 4) operate internationally, including outside the UAE. The PDPL restricts transfers of personal data outside the UAE unless the destination country provides an adequate level of protection, or an appropriate safeguard applies (such as a contract containing the required protections, the data subject's consent, or another basis permitted by the PDPL). Where we transfer personal data across borders, we rely on our providers' own contractual and technical safeguards, consistent with these requirements.

8. Your rights

Under the PDPL, you have the right to: request confirmation of and access to your personal data; request correction of inaccurate data; request erasure of your data, subject to legal retention requirements; object to or restrict certain processing; request a copy of your data in a portable format; not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects concerning you; and lodge a complaint with the UAE Data Office if you believe your data has been mishandled.

If you're based in the UK, you additionally have rights under UK data protection law (UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018), including the right to lodge a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 13.

9. Data retention

We keep account and business data for as long as the subscription is active. After you cancel, or after the subscription lapses, those records stay on the account. Contacts, companies, notes, candidates and history remain, so you can download them or resubscribe. The product does not delete that data on its own when billing stops.

You can ask us to delete the account and its data at any time, from Settings inside the app or by emailing us, subject to any legal retention obligations we may have under the PDPL or other applicable law.

What happens when you ask us to delete. Deletion is handled by a person rather than a button. We confirm your request with you at your account email within 3 working days, and delete the account and its data within 30 days of that confirmation. Nothing is removed before you confirm. Download my data is in Settings for the account owner and for any team role allowed to export. Anyone else on the team is told that the full download is the owner's to take.

10. Security

We rely on our infrastructure providers' security controls (encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, authentication) and apply reasonable technical and organisational measures on our own side, consistent with the PDPL's security requirements. In the event of a personal data breach that's likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we'll notify affected customers and, where required, the UAE Data Office, without undue delay. No system is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

11. Children's privacy

Annie is a business tool intended for recruitment professionals and is not directed at, or knowingly used to collect data from, children.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the product, our providers, or applicable law change. We'll update the date at the top of this page when we do, and notify you of material changes.

13. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data can be sent to mstubbs@meetannie.ai.