Privacy Policy
How Black Buoy LLC collects, uses, discloses and retains Personal Information in connection with Encontado, and the rights available to you.
Last updated October 17, 2026.
Summary
- We collect the information you provide to build your website, your account details, and the records needed for billing, security and support.
- AI service providers process your material to design, write and check your pages, under contracts that limit their use of it.
- Websites built with Encontado collect their customers' information for the business, not for us. We process it on the business's behalf.
- We do not sell or share Personal Information, we do not engage in targeted advertising, and we use only necessary cookies.
- Websites built with Encontado count their visits on our servers, without cookies or tracking scripts, and keep only daily totals that identify no one.
- You may delete a website in the studio, ask us to close your account, and exercise the privacy rights described in Sections 13 and 14.
This summary is for convenience only. The full Policy below governs.
1. Introduction and scope
This Privacy Policy (the "Policy") describes how Black Buoy LLC, a New Hampshire limited liability company located in Dover, New Hampshire, USA ("Black Buoy LLC", "we", "us" or "our"), collects, uses, discloses and retains Personal Information in connection with Encontado (the "Service"). It applies to Personal Information we process in two capacities:
- As a business or controller. For owners of accounts and their teams, people who request access or join our waitlist, and anyone who contacts us or submits a report, we determine the purposes and means of processing.
- As a service provider or processor. For the customers and visitors of websites built and hosted with the Service ("Hosted Websites"), the business that owns the Hosted Website determines the purposes and means of processing, and we process Personal Information on the business's behalf and in accordance with its instructions. The business's own privacy notice governs that processing. Requests concerning such information should be directed to the business first; we will assist the business in responding, and you may also contact us.
This Policy should be read together with our Terms of Service and Content Guidelines.
2. Definitions
In this Policy, the following terms have the meanings set out below:
- "Personal Information" means information that identifies, relates to, describes or could reasonably be linked with a particular person or household, and includes "personal data" as defined in applicable data protection law.
- "Account Information" means the details associated with an account, such as name, username, email address, phone number, role and plan.
- "Owner Content" means the material an account holder provides or generates through the Service, including interview answers, uploads, imported website content, generated pages and change requests.
- "Customer Data" means Personal Information that a Hosted Website collects from the customers and visitors of the business that owns it.
- "Service Provider" means a company that processes Personal Information on our behalf under a written contract that restricts its use of that information to the services it provides to us.
- "Sell" and "Share" have the meanings given in the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (together, the "CCPA").
3. Personal Information we collect
3.1 Information you provide
- Account Information, including your password, which we store only as a salted one-way hash, and anything you write in a request for access or a waitlist entry.
- Owner Content, including photographs, logos, documents and inventory spreadsheets you upload, and the text and images of an existing website you ask us to import.
- Billing information, including your plan, the dates and amounts of payments and refunds, and your payment processor's customer and subscription references. We do not receive payment card numbers.
- Domain registration details, including the registrant name, organization, email address, postal address and telephone number, and a record that you accepted the registrar's agreements. We pass them to the registrar (Section 6.2). After registration we retain only the name, organization and email address; the registrar holds the remainder.
- Communications, including support requests and reports submitted through our forms.
3.2 Information collected automatically
- Usage and security information, including IP addresses (which, in most stored records, we retain only as a shortened one-way hash), sign-in sessions, server logs and an audit record of significant account and moderation actions.
- Service records, including records of each AI processing request made for your websites, its size and cost, and the website and account concerned.
3.3 Information processed for businesses
Depending on the features a business enables, its Hosted Website may collect Customer Data such as orders and delivery addresses, product subscriptions, bookings and deposits, event tickets, memberships, donations, quotes and invoices, customer accounts (an email address and a password hash, or a Google or Apple account identifier), newsletter subscriptions and unsubscriptions, contact form messages and the contact records the business maintains. We process Customer Data solely to provide the Service to that business and do not use it for our own purposes.
3.4 Visit statistics for Hosted Websites
To show a business how its Hosted Website is used, our servers count visits as each page is served. Hosted Websites set no cookies and run no scripts for this, and nothing is stored in a visitor's browser. For each day we keep only totals: the pages viewed, the address that is not found when a visit reaches one, the kind of source a visit came from (such as a search engine, a social network, another website or a campaign name in the link), the country, region and city that our hosting provider associates with the network connection, the type of device, browser and operating system, and the visitor's local weekday and hour. We do not store IP addresses, and we do not create or store any identifier, fingerprint or profile of a visitor; the IP address is used only for the moment it takes to deliver the page and to recognize automated traffic. We do not track visitors across websites, combine these totals with other information about a visitor, or use them for advertising. Visits from our own studio, search engine crawlers, link previews and other automated traffic are left out. Only the business and its team, and our personnel for support and safety, can see a website's totals.
4. Purposes and legal bases for processing
| Purpose | Description | Legal basis (where applicable law requires one) |
|---|---|---|
| Provision of the Service | Creating, editing, reviewing, hosting and publishing websites, operating business features and sending the email they require. | Performance of our contract with you |
| AI-assisted generation and review | Providing Owner Content to AI Service Providers so that they may plan, write, edit, review and screen pages, as described in Section 5. | Performance of our contract with you |
| Safety and content standards | Screening briefs, uploads and pages against the Content Guidelines, handling reports and appeals, and preventing fraud and abuse. | Our legitimate interest in a safe service; compliance with legal obligations |
| Security | Rate limits, protection of sign-in, logging and audit records. | Our legitimate interest in protecting accounts and systems |
| Billing and accounting | Charging for plans and domain names, issuing refunds, and keeping tax and accounting records. | Performance of our contract; compliance with legal obligations |
| Support and service communications | Responding to you and informing you of changes to your account, the Service or our policies. | Performance of our contract; our legitimate interests |
| Improvement of the Service | Understanding which features are used, measuring cost and reliability, and correcting faults. | Our legitimate interest in improving the Service |
| Processing on behalf of businesses | Processing Customer Data only as the business instructs. | The business’s own legal basis; our contract with the business |
We do not Sell or Share Personal Information, we do not use Personal Information for targeted or cross-context behavioral advertising, we do not use Owner Content or Customer Data to train AI models of our own, and we do not send marketing email to a business's customers on our own behalf.
5. Artificial intelligence processing
The Service uses AI models operated by us and by AI Service Providers to design and write pages, to review them against the facts you supply, to examine page layouts in screenshots, to screen material against the Content Guidelines and to route your change requests. The material these models process may include Personal Information that you include in your brief or on your website.
Automated screening may decline or pause a brief, an upload or a publication. Such a decision does not produce legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affect you, and you may request human review as described in the Content Guidelines. Removing a published website or closing an account is carried out by a person.
We provide each AI Service Provider only the material required for the task, over encrypted connections, through its business application programming interface (API) service and not a consumer application. Each AI Service Provider is bound by contractual terms that govern its use and retention of that material.
6. Disclosure of Personal Information
We disclose Personal Information to the following categories of Service Providers, solely for the purposes described, and under written contracts that restrict their use of it. Certain providers are used only when a stated condition is met, such as when a business enables a particular feature.
| Category of recipient | Purpose of disclosure | Personal Information disclosed |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud hosting, storage and security providers | Run the Service: host the studio and every Hosted Website, store data and files, run background work, render pages for layout checks, protect sign-up forms from automated abuse and run the DNS for domain names purchased through the Service. | All information stored in the Service, including Account Information, Owner Content and Customer Data. |
| Artificial intelligence (AI) service providers | Design, write, edit and review pages, read uploaded images and page screenshots, screen material against the Content Guidelines, sort requests and reports, and suggest answers during the interview. | The material needed for the task, such as interview answers, uploaded documents and images, imported website text, generated pages and change requests. This may include Personal Information that you place in that material. |
| Payment processors | Process payments for plans and domain names, and, where a business connects its own payment account, payments made to that business on its Hosted Website. | Names, email addresses, amounts and order or subscription details. Payment card numbers are provided by the payer directly to the payment processor and are never received by us. |
| Email delivery providers | Deliver email sent by or through the Service, such as sign-in links, notices, receipts, confirmations, newsletters and support replies. | The recipient address and the content of the message. |
| Sign-in providers chosen by a customer | Allow a customer of a Hosted Website to sign in with an existing account from another provider, where the business has turned this on. | The identifier, email address and name that the provider returns when the customer chooses to sign in. |
| Services a business connects | Where a business connects one of its own accounts (for example Google, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Calendly, its point of sale or another online store), read the information the business chooses to bring in; where it connects an email marketing, customer relationship or accounting service (for example Mailchimp, HubSpot or QuickBooks), send the newsletter subscribers who consented, the contact messages or the paid orders it chooses to that service; where a business adds a webhook address, send the events it chooses (such as a new message, booking, order or sign-up) to that address; and where a business switches it on, send its paid orders to a print-on-demand service to be made and shipped. | The business’s own listing, reviews, posts, booking pages, statistics, products, menus and opening hours from that service; for email marketing, the name, email address and consent of subscribers; for a CRM, the name, contact details and message of a person who wrote in; for accounting, the customer’s name and email address and the order’s items and amounts; for webhooks and orders sent to be made and shipped, the details of the message, booking, order or sign-up, which may include a customer’s name, contact details and shipping address. |
| Domain name registrar | Register and maintain a domain name purchased through the Service, in the name of its owner. For domain registration data the registrar is an independent controller; see Section 6.2. | The domain name and its owner’s name, organization (if given), postal address, email address and telephone number. |
| Reference and lookup services | Search stock photography, and look up the approximate location of a postal code to check a delivery distance. | Search words describing a type of business or scene, or a postal code. No other Personal Information. |
A current list of the Service Providers in each category, and the countries in which they process Personal Information, is available to business customers and to supervisory authorities on request through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com.
6.1 Content loaded from third parties on Hosted Websites
- YouTube (privacy-enhanced mode) and Vimeo. Videos a business adds to its website play from YouTube or Vimeo, and YouTube preview pictures load from YouTube.
- Links a business adds. Maps, booking pages, payment pages and social profiles that a business links to (for example Google Maps, Calendly, Zoom, Square, PayPal, Venmo, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, LinkedIn or X) are only contacted if a visitor follows the link.
- Reservation and delivery apps a business links to. When a business adds a Reserve a table or Order delivery button (OpenTable, Resy, Tock, DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub), or booking buttons from Calendly or Acuity Scheduling, nothing is sent to those services; they are only contacted if a visitor follows the button.
- Posts a business shows from Google, Facebook or Instagram. When a business shows its own Google reviews and posts, Facebook posts or Instagram posts on its website, the pictures in them load from Google, Facebook or Instagram.
6.2 Domain names purchased through the Service
When you buy a domain name through the Service, it is registered by Name.com, Inc. (Denver, Colorado, USA), an ICANN-accredited registrar. For the registration data (the domain name and its owner's name, organization, postal address, email address and telephone number), Name.com, Inc. is the controller, and we collect and pass that data to it on its behalf. It is used to register, service, manage and maintain the domain name as registrars and registries are required to, including the address confirmation and transfer procedures ICANN requires. The registrar shares it with the registry operator for the domain's ending, with ICANN-approved data escrow providers and with others where ICANN policy or the law requires. Where the registry allows, the registrar's privacy service, provided by Domain Protection Services, Inc. under its Whois Privacy Service Agreement, shows its own contact details in public registration lookups instead of yours and forwards communications to you. Our legal basis is performance of the contract to register the name. Name.com, Inc.'s privacy policy explains how it handles the data. You may send a request about this data to us or to the registrar; we pass requests we receive to the registrar and help it respond.
6.3 Other disclosures
We may also disclose Personal Information where required by law or legal process, to protect the rights, property or safety of any person, to enforce our Terms of Service, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of all or part of the Service, in which case this Policy will continue to apply to the Personal Information transferred.
8. Retention
We retain Personal Information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, as follows:
- Account Information and Owner Content: for as long as the account and websites exist, and then as described in Section 9.
- Sign-in sessions: 14 days for the studio, or until you sign out; 30 days for customer and member sessions on Hosted Websites.
- Email sent through the Service: the message content is cleared once delivered, and the delivery record is deleted after approximately 30 days.
- Visit statistics for Hosted Websites: daily totals that identify no one, kept for up to 400 days and deleted with the website.
- Rate-limit counters: contain only a one-way hash and a count, never the address itself, and expire at the end of their time window (typically one hour or one day).
- Support requests, reports, moderation decisions, appeals and audit records: for as long as needed to resolve them and to maintain an accountability record, including after a website is deleted.
- Billing and tax records: for the period required by tax and accounting law, normally up to seven years.
- Domain orders: the order record (the domain name, prices, dates, the owner's name, organization and email address, and the record that the registrar's agreements were accepted) for as long as the domain is registered through the Service and then for as long as tax law and the registrar's agreements require. The registrar holds the full registration data under its own privacy policy.
- Backups: point-in-time recovery copies are kept for up to 30 days, after which deleted information is no longer present in them.
- Deletion records: after a deletion we keep a minimal permanent record of the deleted website or username so that a pending background task cannot restore it.
9. Deletion
You may delete a website yourself by opening it in the studio and choosing "Delete this website" on its overview. Deletion stops the website from being served, closes open checkouts, cancels its subscriptions and memberships with the payment processor, disconnects its custom domain, and removes its drafts, versions, shop, bookings, events, members, customer accounts, subscribers, messages, visit statistics and files. Photographs in your photo library remain with your account.
To close your entire account, submit a request through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com. After verifying that the request came from you, we delete every website you own in the same manner and remove your sessions, uploaded photographs and account.
The following are not deleted: records held by the payment processor in your own payment account; a domain name you purchased, which remains registered to you; and the records described in Section 8. If deletion cannot be completed immediately, for example because a payment is still being settled, the studio informs you and the deletion is completed later rather than left partially done.
A customer of a Hosted Website may ask the business to delete their information, or may ask us, in which case we will forward the request to the business and assist it in responding.
10. Security
We maintain reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards appropriate to the nature of the Personal Information we process. All traffic is encrypted with HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Sign-in cookies are HTTP-only and secure and, on Hosted Websites, restricted to that website's address. Service Provider credentials are kept as encrypted server secrets and are never sent to browsers. Access within the Service is limited by role, and only a small number of our own personnel may access other account holders' websites, for support and safety purposes. Payment card processing is performed entirely by the payment processor. No system is completely secure; if we become aware of a breach affecting your Personal Information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.
11. Children
The Service is intended for adults operating a business. We do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under 13 years of age (or under 16 where that is the applicable age of consent), and we do not Sell or Share the Personal Information of consumers we know to be under 16. A business whose Hosted Website is directed to children is responsible for complying with applicable children's privacy law, including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States. If you believe a child has provided Personal Information to us, please contact us and we will delete it.
12. International transfers
The Service is operated from the United States, and our Service Providers process Personal Information in the United States and in other countries, including in Asia and Europe, where AI models and other services are operated. Where we transfer Personal Information from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland to a country that has not received an adequacy decision, we rely on appropriate safeguards, including the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable. You may request a copy of the relevant safeguards through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com.
13. Notice to California residents
This Section supplements the rest of this Policy and applies to residents of California. It constitutes our notice at collection and our privacy policy under the CCPA.
13.1 Categories of Personal Information collected in the preceding 12 months
| Category | Examples | Sources | Business or commercial purposes | Categories of recipients | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Identifiers | Name, username, email address, postal address and telephone number (for example, for a domain registration or an order), IP address, account and session identifiers, and a Google or Apple account identifier. | You; customers of a Hosted Website; automatically from your device; sign-in providers. | Providing the Service; security and fraud prevention; billing; support; legal compliance. | Cloud hosting providers; email delivery providers; payment processors; sign-in providers; the domain name registrar, for a domain you buy; AI service providers only where included in material you submit. | For the life of the account, then as described in Section 8. |
| Customer records (Cal. Civ. Code section 1798.80(e)) | Name, postal address, telephone number, email address and payment references. We do not receive payment card numbers. | You; customers of a Hosted Website; payment processors. | Providing the Service; billing; processing orders and bookings for businesses. | Cloud hosting providers; payment processors; email delivery providers. | For the life of the account; billing and tax records up to seven years. |
| Commercial information | Plans purchased, payments and refunds, and, for businesses, orders, subscriptions, bookings, tickets, memberships, donations, quotes and invoices. | You; customers of a Hosted Website; payment processors. | Providing the Service; billing; accounting and tax compliance. | Cloud hosting providers; payment processors; email delivery providers. | For the life of the account; billing and tax records up to seven years. |
| Internet or other electronic network activity information | IP address, session and security records, server logs, audit records and records of AI processing performed for your account. | Automatically from your device and from our systems. | Security and fraud prevention; operating, measuring and improving the Service. | Cloud hosting providers. | Sessions: 14 days (studio) or 30 days (Hosted Websites). Other records: as described in Section 8. |
| Audio, electronic, visual or similar information | Photographs, logos and documents you upload, and images of pages generated for your websites. | You; an existing website you ask us to import. | Providing the Service, including designing and reviewing pages. | Cloud hosting providers; AI service providers. | For the life of the website or account. |
| Professional or employment-related information | Information about your business and your role in it, and any staff details you choose to include in your brief or on your website. | You; an existing website you ask us to import. | Providing the Service. | Cloud hosting providers; AI service providers. | For the life of the website or account. |
| Sensitive personal information | Account log-in credentials: a username or email address in combination with a password. We store passwords only as salted one-way hashes. | You. | Only to provide the Service and to keep accounts secure. We do not use it to infer characteristics about you. | Cloud hosting providers. | For the life of the account. |
The visit statistics for Hosted Websites described in Section 3.4 are kept only as aggregate daily totals that are not linked or reasonably linkable to any consumer or household. The location in them is the approximate country, region and city of a network connection, not precise geolocation.
We do not collect precise geolocation, biometric information, or characteristics of protected classifications, and we do not create profiles or inferences about you.
13.2 Sale, sharing and sensitive Personal Information
In the preceding 12 months we have not Sold or Shared Personal Information, and we have no actual knowledge of Selling or Sharing the Personal Information of consumers under 16 years of age. We use and disclose sensitive Personal Information only for the purposes permitted by Cal. Code Regs. tit. 11, section 7027(m), and not to infer characteristics about you. Accordingly, we do not offer a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" or "Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information" link, because neither applies.
13.3 Your rights under the CCPA
Subject to certain exceptions, you have the right to:
- Know and access: request the categories and specific pieces of Personal Information we have collected about you, the categories of sources, the business or commercial purposes, and the categories of recipients, and receive a copy in a portable format;
- Delete: request deletion of Personal Information we collected from you;
- Correct: request correction of inaccurate Personal Information;
- Opt out: opt out of the Sale or Sharing of Personal Information (we do neither);
- Limit: limit the use of sensitive Personal Information (we use it only as described in Section 13.2); and
- Non-discrimination: exercise these rights without receiving discriminatory treatment, such as different prices or quality of service.
13.4 How to submit a request
You may submit a request through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com, selecting "Privacy request" as the topic. We will confirm receipt within 10 business days and respond within 45 calendar days, which we may extend by a further 45 days where reasonably necessary, with notice to you. To protect your information, we verify your identity before responding, normally by corresponding with the email address associated with the account. You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf; we may require the agent to provide your signed permission and may ask you to verify your identity directly. If we deny a request, we will explain why, and you may appeal by replying to our response.
13.5 Other California disclosures
We do not offer financial incentives or price or service differences in exchange for Personal Information. Under California Civil Code section 1798.83 ("Shine the Light"), California residents may request information about disclosures of Personal Information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes; we make no such disclosures. This Policy is available in a format accessible to people with disabilities; to request it in an alternative format, contact us through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com.
14. Rights under other laws
Depending on where you reside, including in other states of the United States, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, you may have some or all of the following rights, subject to applicable exceptions:
- to access Personal Information we hold about you and to receive a copy of it in a portable form;
- to rectify inaccurate Personal Information;
- to erase Personal Information;
- to object to or restrict certain processing, and to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent;
- to appeal our decision on a request; and
- to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, such as the authority in your country of residence in the European Economic Area or the UK Information Commissioner's Office.
Requests may be submitted, and will be verified and answered, in the manner described in Section 13.4. If you are a customer of a Hosted Website, please identify the website so that we can forward your request to the business concerned.
15. Changes to this Policy
We may amend this Policy from time to time to reflect changes to the Service or to applicable law. The "Last updated" date at the top of this Policy identifies the current version. If we make a material change, we will notify account holders by email or through the studio before the change takes effect.
16. Contact information
Black Buoy LLC, Dover, New Hampshire, USA. Questions, requests and complaints about this Policy or our processing of Personal Information may be submitted through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com.