Privacy Policy

Valent Projects Ltd (“Valent”, “we”, “us”) is registered in England and Wales under company number 08119752, 332 Ladbroke Grove, London W10 5AD. We are the data controller for the personal data described below. Contact us at privacy@valent.co.uk.

This Privacy Policy covers people who visit our website, contact us or use our services, and people whose publicly available social media content we process as part of our analytical services, including people named in that content or in news articles we collect.

Website visitors, customers and enquirers

What we collect

Name, email address, organisation and role; correspondence with us; usage and technical data such as pages visited, referring URLs, approximate location derived from IP address, and browser and device information; and, for customers, billing details and contract records.

Lawful basis

Where we rely on legitimate interests, our interest is in responding to people who contact us and keeping our website and services secure and working properly. You do not have to give us personal data, but without it we may not be able to respond to you or provide our services.

Sharing and transfers

We share this data only with service providers who process it on our behalf, such as website hosting, CRM, accounting, email and sign-in providers, and with others where required by law. We do not sell any data. Some of these providers process data outside the UK, including in the European Union and the United States. We rely on UK adequacy regulations or appropriate safeguards. Contact us for details.

Cookies and retention

This website sets no cookies and no other tracking or analytics storage on your device. We keep enquiry and marketing data until it is no longer needed, and no longer than two years after our last contact. We keep contract and billing records for six years after the contract ends, to meet legal and accounting requirements. Product log retention is set out in customer agreements.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and ask us to correct or delete it, restrict our use of it, or object to it. You can withdraw consent to marketing at any time, and ask for data you have given us in a portable format where we rely on contract or consent.

Public social media data

This part applies if you hold a public social media account whose content we have collected in providing our analytical services, or if you are named in publicly available posts or news articles we have collected. You do not need to have any relationship with us.

Lawful basis

We analyse publicly available social media content to identify coordinated activity that artificially amplifies content, so our clients can distinguish genuine public engagement from manufactured visibility. We track this activity over time to anticipate how it develops and use this data to develop and improve our analysis. We do not make decisions about people based solely on automated processing.

We rely on legitimate interests. Our interest, shared by our clients and the wider public, is in identifying coordinated artificial amplification, which depends on the relationship between accounts and so cannot be established from content alone.

Data

We do not collect data from you directly. We obtain public content and public profile information directly from social media platforms through their APIs and from commercial data providers, and news articles through a commercial news service. We only collect content its authors have made public, not private messages or content from private accounts or closed groups.

We hold public post content and its public metadata, public account profile information and analytical information we derive from these. We do not include accounts that appear to belong to under-18s in our network analysis, and if one is found to have been included, we delete it and its content.

Sensitive information

We do not seek to collect sensitive information, such as political opinions, religious beliefs or sexual orientation, but the social media data we collect can reveal it, because people have chosen to make it public themselves or because it can be inferred from the context of a post. We process it on two legal grounds: that the person has manifestly made it public, and that our overall collection and analysis of social media data serves the substantial public interest in protecting the public against inauthentic amplification that dishonestly distorts public debate.

Sharing, transfers and retention

We share data with our clients, with our data, hosting and technology providers, and with others where required by law.

Our main systems are hosted in the UK. Some of our data and technology providers process data outside the UK, including in the European Union and the United States. Where personal data is processed outside the UK we rely on UK adequacy regulations or on an appropriate safeguard such as the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Contact us for details.

We keep personal data for up to three years from collection, except data about accounts acting together, which is reviewed every six months and deleted for accounts no longer participating in a coordinated network.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct, delete or restrict it, and object to our processing at any time. If we have reasonable doubts about who is making a request, we may ask you to confirm that the account is yours.

Contact and complaints

Contact privacy@valent.co.uk to raise a concern. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

We will update this page when our processing changes materially.