What OwnedBy knows about you

Your lookup history lives in your browser’s local storage and is never uploaded. That is the list of things you searched or photographed, what we answered, and when. Clearing your browser data deletes it, and we have no copy.

Alongside it we keep a few small things in the same place:

• Your language choice, so the app opens in the language you picked.
• Whether you have seen the intro screen, so you are not shown it every visit.
• When a search matches several companies, the list of choices we offered you, so the page still works if you come back to it. It expires after a day.

When you look a brand up, the name of that brand is sent to our server so the research can run. That is the search itself — without it there is nothing to answer.

When you photograph a product, the photo is sent for recognition and is not stored. It is used to read what is on the label, the text that comes back is what continues through the system, and the image is not written to our database or kept in your history.

If you tell us an answer looks wrong, we record that a report was made against that record. There is no field for personal information and we do not ask who you are.

There is exactly one feature that asks for an email address: asking us to send you a finished ownership report. Nothing else in the app collects one, and there is no account to make. The offer appears on a record whose research is still running — a report you can already read on the screen is not worth an email.

Asking for that report also starts an occasional OwnedBy news email. We say so on the form, above the field, before you type anything, because it is the whole reason we are allowed to keep the address at all — and every email we send carries who we are and a one-click unsubscribe.

• What we collect: the address you type, and nothing else. No name, no device identifier, and your lookups are not attached to it.
• Why: to send the ownership report you asked for, and occasional news about OwnedBy.
• How long we keep it: while you are subscribed. Unsubscribe and we stop sending; you can unsubscribe from any email we send you, including the report itself.
• Who else sees it: our mail provider, which receives the address in order to deliver the message. It is not sold, not shared for advertising, and never joined to your lookup history.
• What we never do: we do not sell your address, we do not pass it to advertisers, and we do not use it to work out what you searched for.

The mail arrives from OwnedBy, its subject line is the answer to the lookup you asked about, and it contains the report itself rather than a link telling you a report is ready.

Answering “who owns this?” means asking other services. The brand name you searched is sent to some of them; none of them receives your history, your identity, or anything about you.

• Search providers (Serper, Google Programmable Search, OpenAI web search) receive the brand or company name being researched.
• Language model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter) receive the brand name and the page snippets that search returned. When you use the camera, the vision provider receives the photograph.
• Public reference sources (Wikidata, GLEIF, SEC EDGAR, Corporations Canada, company websites) receive ordinary web requests for company records.
• Supabase stores the research itself, and Vercel hosts the site and keeps standard server logs.

Your IP address is used for rate limiting — stopping one source of traffic from exhausting the research budget everyone shares. It is not joined to your lookups, not used to build a profile, and not sold. Vercel also records it in standard server logs, as any web host does.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand aggregate traffic and whether core product flows work. It is cookie-free and does not assign you a persistent identifier. Vercel receives limited request information such as the page type, timestamp, referring site, browser and device type, plus coarse geography derived from the connection. We remove query strings, local result identifiers and searched company names from analytics page addresses before an event is sent.

We do not use session replay, advertising pixels or cross-site tracking, and analytics events never contain a product photograph or the words you typed into search.

One, and it holds your language choice. The server needs to know whether to render the page in English or French before the page loads, which is the one thing browser storage cannot do in time, so that single preference is also written as a cookie. It contains the two letters en or fr and nothing else — no identifier, nothing that follows you between sites. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, which is why this app has no cookie banner to dismiss.

• No accounts and no sign-in. An email address only if you ask us to send you a report; that also subscribes you to occasional OwnedBy news, and every email has an unsubscribe link.
• No advertising pixels, session replay or cross-site tracking. Aggregate Vercel Web Analytics is the only analytics client in this app.
• We do not sell personal data or share it for targeted advertising. Limited request data reaches the hosting and research processors described above.
• No storing of your photographs.
• We do not build a personal lookup profile. The device history stays in your browser; individual lookup requests are processed as described above without being assembled into that history.

The ownership records this app publishes are built from public sources — regulatory filings, company registries, companies’ own statements and reporting of record. When one person’s lookup improves a record, the improved record is served to everyone who looks up that brand afterwards. That is about companies, never about the person who searched.

OwnedBy is a shopping tool for a general audience. We do not knowingly solicit personal information from children. There are no shopper accounts; the same limited request data described above is processed when anyone uses the public site.

OwnedBy is operated by Touch Grass AB, registered as 559484-7435 in Sweden, which is the controller of the limited personal data described above.

Idunsgatan 46
214 46 Malmö
Sweden

The terms of use cover what the records are, and how to dispute one that names you or your company.

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Questions about what is written here, or about a record you think is wrong, can go through the add or correct page.