Privacy Policy

This explains what we collect and why, in the plain terms we would want from somebody else. Section 5 covers what other customers can and cannot see; section 7 covers what deleting your account does and does not remove.

1. Who this covers

This policy covers GetTopQuestions at gettopquestions.com, operated by gunel in the United States. gunel decides how and why the data described here is handled.

This policy is published in several languages. The English version is the controlling one; if a translation disagrees with it, the English text applies.

2. What we collect

If you create an account:

  • Your email address — typed at signup, or provided by Google if you sign in with Google.
  • Your name, if you give one, or the name on your Google profile. This is optional.
  • A link to your Google profile picture, if you sign in with Google. We store the link, not a copy of the image.
  • A hash of your password, if you signed up with email. We never store the password itself.
  • Your account status and the dates it was created, last seen and confirmed.

As you use the service:

  • The keywords and questions you search. These are stored against your account, or — if you are signed out — against a random identifier held in your browser.
  • Which questions you asked us to check, and the search results we retrieved for them.
  • A ledger of every credit added to or spent from your account, and why.
  • Usage records: what was done, whether it succeeded or was refused, how many credits it used and what it cost us.
  • If you subscribe: the plans you hold, their status and billing periods, which plan you chose as your default, the identifier our payment provider gives your customer record, and a log of billing events — for example a checkout started, a payment received or declined with the reason the provider gives, or a plan cancelled.

We do not store your IP address. We derive a salted, truncated cryptographic hash of it and store only that, so we can count the free daily search and stop abuse. The address itself exists only for the moment the request is handled and is never written down; because the hash is salted with a secret we can rotate, the stored values can be made meaningless at will. Our hosting provider keeps its own connection logs, which are outside our control.

3. Cookies and what your browser keeps

The GetTopQuestions website sets no cookies of its own. There is no analytics and no tag manager. The one third-party script is Cloudflare Turnstile, loaded only with the search box shown to a visitor who is not signed in, to tell people from automated traffic (see section 4). Fonts are served from our own domain rather than fetched from anyone else.

Your browser keeps a few values locally, on your device, which we cannot read remotely:

  • Your session, for fourteen days. Signing out removes it.
  • A random identifier that counts the free daily search for signed-out visitors.
  • Your light or dark theme preference.
  • Your interface language.
  • Your country and language search preference.
  • Your own website address, if you typed one to check whether it is cited. This one never reaches us at all — the comparison happens inside your browser.

Our internal staff tool uses one session cookie. Customers never encounter it.

4. Who else receives data

We use a small number of providers, and send each of them only what it needs:

  • Our search data provider receives the keyword or question text you searched. It does not receive your email address, your IP address or any account identifier.
  • Our semantic matching provider, when that feature is enabled, receives question text and the titles and addresses of search results. It receives no identifiers.
  • Our email provider receives your address and the message, so that verification and password-reset mail can be delivered.
  • Our payment provider receives your email address and an internal account number when we set up your customer record before your first checkout, and whatever you enter on its own hosted checkout page. It tells us when a payment succeeds or fails, and when a subscription starts, renews or ends.
  • Google receives nothing beyond the sign-in exchange, and only if you choose to sign in with Google.
  • Our hosting provider runs the service; our mailbox provider holds any mail you send to support.
  • Cloudflare, through its Turnstile check, receives your IP address and technical signals from your browser when you search without an account, to confirm the request comes from a person. It receives no account identifier.

Card numbers never reach us. Checkout is hosted by the payment provider, and we keep only the record of the payment it sends back.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising.

5. What is private from other customers — and what is not

This deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one, because the design is deliberate.

  • Your list of searches is private. Another customer cannot see which keywords you searched or open your saved analyses. Asking for an analysis that is not yours returns “not found” rather than “not allowed”, because the mere existence of a search is itself information.
  • The underlying search data is shared. The questions and search results we retrieve from our data provider are kept in one store used for every customer, not in a private copy per account, so a search you run may be answered from data first retrieved for another customer, and the other way round. What you build from it is yours: your question trees and the gap checks you paid for are shown only to you, and another customer searching the same keyword still pays for their own search.
  • Verdicts you give with the “is this really a gap?” buttons are stored without your account attached, and are used to improve how the scoring works.
  • If you are signed out, access to your own analyses rests on the random identifier in your browser. That keeps them away from strangers, but it is not cryptographic protection — clear your browser storage and you lose access to them.

6. Why we are allowed to hold it

To provide the service you asked for, to operate accounts and billing, to prevent abuse of a service that costs us money per request, and to improve the accuracy of our scoring.

Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it by closing your account.

7. Deleting your account — and what we keep

You can delete your account yourself from your account settings, or ask us to do it at support@gettopquestions.com. Deletion removes your name, your profile picture, your password, your saved preferences, and the link between you and the searches you ran.

If you have a paid subscription, deleting your account first cancels it with our payment provider, immediately, so that you are not charged again. The rest of the current period is not refunded. If the cancellation cannot be completed, the account is not deleted and you are asked to try again.

Two things are deliberately kept, and we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise:

  • Your email address, so that if you come back we can recognise the account and restore any credits you had that have not expired.
  • Your payment records — the amounts, dates and currency — which tax and accounting rules require us to retain.

If you would like your email address removed as well, write to support@gettopquestions.com and say so, and we will remove it. After that we will have no way to recognise you, so a past credit balance cannot be restored.

The questions you searched remain in the shared corpus described in section 5, because after deletion they are no longer stored against you.

8. Your choices

Write to support@gettopquestions.com to get a copy of the data we hold about you, to correct it, or to object to how we use it. We answer within 30 days.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to complain to a data protection authority. We would rather you came to us first, but the route is yours.

9. Children

GetTopQuestions is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, write to support@gettopquestions.com and we will remove it.

10. Where the data is held

We operate from the United States, and our providers run in the United States and the European Union. Using the service means your data may be handled in either.

11. Changes to this policy

We will post changes on this page and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects you, we will tell account holders by email rather than relying on you to notice.

Questions about any of this:

support@gettopquestions.com