Last updated: 10 October 2026
This notice explains what personal information FindaBiz Networking holds, why, who sees it, how long we keep it and what you can do about it. It covers this website, the members’ app, our meetings (in person and online) and anything you send us.
The short version
- We collect what we need to run groups, bookings and your account, and nothing for advertising. We never sell your information.
- Your private details (postcode, contact email, birthday) are never shown on the website.
- Your public member profile is only shown if you choose, and you decide what goes on it.
- The site only uses cookies it needs to work, unless you agree to more in the cookie banner (analytics, Facebook and LinkedIn advertising, and videos and maps from other websites). You can change your mind at any time.
- You can see, correct or delete your information at any time. “Delete my account” in the app removes everything about you.
Who we are
FindaBiz Networking is run by Findabiz Ltd, registered in England and Wales (company number 08309449), registered office 37 Tiverton Drive, Nuneaton CV11 6YJ. We are the controller of the information described here and we are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
For anything about your information, contact Gemma Worthington at [email protected] or write to the address above.
Our groups are run by local hosts, some of whom run their group as a FindaBiz franchise. A host can see the details of people in the groups they run, and uses them only to run those groups, under our rules.
What we collect and why
Your account
When you sign up we ask for your name, email address, a password, your business name, your trade (the “seat” you would hold in a group) and your postcode. Your password is stored scrambled, so nobody at FindaBiz can read it.
Your postcode stays private. We use it to work out your town and to show you the groups and events nearest to you. We need these details to provide the account you asked for (the legal basis is our contract with you). If you tick the box for news and offers, we record that consent and you can change your mind at any time.
Your member profile
If you are a member of a group you can add more to your profile: job title, website, a public email address, mobile number, social media links, a short bio, a photo and your business logo. Your profile only appears on the website if you choose to show it. When it is shown, people can see your photo and logo, name, job title, business, trade, town, the details you added, the groups you belong to and any review you have written. Leave a field blank and it isn’t shown.
Group hosts, and the charity a group supports, appear on their group’s page as part of that role.
A public profile may also be listed on our pages for local towns and trades within about 12 miles of you. We work that out from your private postcode; the postcode itself is never shown.
Booking and coming to meetings
Every booking needs an account, including when you book at the door. We record which meetings you book, whether you came, when you were checked in, who invited or referred you and how you heard about us. Hosts use this to run their meetings and follow up with visitors. We also use it to apply our booking rules fairly, for example how often visitors can come to the same group and one business per trade in each group. The legal basis is our contract with you and our legitimate interest in running fair, well-attended meetings.
If you sign in at a meeting, on the host’s tablet or with the QR code, and don’t have an account yet, we make you a free account from the details you give and email you a link to confirm your address and choose a password. If you already have one, signing in only marks you as there; nothing you type at the door changes your account.
If you use “check in” with your phone’s location, the location is only used inside your browser to find the meeting you’re at. It is never sent to us or stored.
Friday online networking
To join an online session you log in and press Join. We record when you pressed it and mark you as attending, then send you to the meeting. We don’t connect to Zoom (or any other video platform) and we don’t track how long you stay. While you are in the meeting, the video platform’s own privacy notice applies to what it collects. If you take part in the breakout rooms, we keep a note of who you were paired with, so later sessions introduce you to people you haven’t met yet.
Meeting agendas
Hosts can print an agenda for each meeting. It lists the group’s members with their business contact details, and visitors with their name, business and trade. A visitor’s email, phone, website and photo are only included if they have agreed to share them (you can change this in your profile). Agendas are only available to the group’s hosts and our team, every download is logged, and the stored copy is deleted 30 days after the meeting.
Feedback, reviews and photos
After a meeting we may ask how it went. Hosts see ratings and comments without names; our admin team can see who left them. If you write a review, it is checked before it is published with your name and business.
Photos you upload to an event album are checked by the host before they appear. We remove location and camera data from every photo. Please only upload photos of people who are happy to appear on the website. Anyone in a photo can ask us to remove it.
Birthdays
You can add your birthday (day and month only, never the year) so we can send you a birthday email and your group can wish you happy birthday. It is never shown on the website. It is optional and you can remove it whenever you like.
Dietary needs
Some meetings include food. If you tell us about dietary needs, this can reveal information about your health or beliefs, which the law treats as special category data. We only record it with your explicit consent, it is only seen by the people who arrange the catering, and you can ask us to delete it at any time.
Waiting lists
If you join a waiting list for a seat in a group, we record the group, the trade and when you joined so we can offer you the seat when it frees up.
Tickets bought on Eventbrite
Some of our events are sold through Eventbrite. When you buy a ticket there, Eventbrite passes us your name, email address, ticket and what you paid, so we can add you to the event’s guest list, check you in, send you the follow-up after the event, and keep our accounts. Eventbrite’s own privacy notice covers what they do with your details.
Enquiries
When you contact us or register interest in a group, we keep your name, email, any phone number you give and your message so we can reply.
Newsletters and group emails
If you agree, we send you our newsletter, news from the groups you belong to, and invitations to meetings and events, including our Friday online networking. You can agree when you sign up to the newsletter on our website (we email you a link to confirm first), when you create an account, on your profile, or on a form at one of our events. We record when and how you agreed.
If you are a member or host, we also send you news and invitations from FindaBiz and from your groups, as an existing customer, unless you tell us not to. If you book a SWAP event or our Friday online networking, we send you invitations to future ones in the same way. A group’s own news goes only to its members and hosts, not to visitors. There is a box for this when you book, and every email has an unsubscribe link. Visitors don’t get our newsletter unless they sign up for it.
To send these emails we keep your name and email address, and which mailing lists you are on: everyone, members, hosts, SWAP networking, the groups you are a member or host of, and our Friday online networking if you have booked it in the last 12 months. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can choose which kinds you get. Unsubscribing, or unticking the box on your profile, takes you off every list straight away. If you unsubscribe, an email to you bounces or you mark one as spam, we keep a note so you are not added back by mistake. If you only have a record of the address, we keep a scrambled code made from it, not the address itself.
Our email service tells us whether an email was delivered and opened and which links were clicked, so we can see what is useful and fix emails that don’t arrive. We look at this in totals, and don’t use it to profile you.
You can choose exactly which emails you get, or stop them all, on your profile, through the link at the bottom of every newsletter, or at findabiznetworking.com/unsubscribe. If you haven’t opened any of our last twelve newsletters we stop sending them (members and hosts excepted), and you can sign up again at any time.
Emails about your bookings and your account are sent whether or not you get the newsletter.
Notes kept by hosts and our team
Hosts and our admin team can keep short notes about the people they deal with, for example a visitor’s interest in joining. Notes are shared only between hosts and our team, are never shown to other members, and must be factual and professional. They are included if you ask for a copy of your information.
AI writing tools
Our editors have an optional “Generate with AI” and “Rewrite with AI” button to help write text such as a profile bio or a group description. When someone uses it, the text in the box and the facts needed to draft it (for a bio: your name, business, role, trade, town and text from your public website) are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to produce a draft. A person always reads the draft and decides whether to save it. AI is never used to make decisions about you, and our AI provider does not use this information to train its models.
Chatting with Fabby
Fabby is the AI chat helper on our website. What you type, and public information from our website that helps answer it, is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to write Fabby’s replies. We keep conversations for 30 days so we can see what people ask and make Fabby better; then they are deleted. If you are logged in, the conversation is kept with your account, so our admin team can see who asked and follow up if Fabby couldn’t help; if you are not logged in, it is kept with no name, IP address or link to you. Please don’t type personal details into the chat, and never a password. If you have a technical problem (for example you can’t log in), Fabby can pass it to our support team for you, but only after you have checked the details and said yes: your name, the email address to reply to, what’s going wrong, the page you were on and your conversation with Fabby are emailed to our team, who reply by email. Fabby can make mistakes, so check anything important on the page it links to.
Security and records of access
To keep the site and your account safe we keep security logs, which include IP addresses, failed log-in attempts and blocked attacks. We also keep a record whenever a host or admin opens someone’s personal details, adds a note or downloads an agenda, so we can show who saw what. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in security and our duty to be accountable for the data we hold.
Searching the site
Searches aren’t linked to you. If you search by postcode, the postcode is sent to our postcode lookup service to find its location; we don’t store it against you. Fabby writes a short summary at the top of the results: to do that, your search words and the matching public results are sent to Anthropic. Summaries are kept for a day so the next person searching the same thing gets them straight away, and are not linked to you.
Analytics and advertising cookies
Only if you agree in the cookie banner, we use Google Analytics to see how our public pages are used, and the Facebook (Meta) Pixel and LinkedIn Insight Tag to measure our adverts and show them to people who have visited us. These send details of your visit (the pages you looked at, your device and browser, your IP address and an identifier stored in a cookie) to Google, Meta and LinkedIn. The legal basis is your consent, which you can take back at any time with “Cookie settings” at the foot of every page. They are never used in the members’ app. Our cookie policy lists the cookies.
Who we share information with
We never sell your information or share it for other companies’ marketing. We share it only:
- Within FindaBiz: with the hosts of the groups you belong to, visit or wait for, and with our admin team.
- With other members and visitors: your public profile (if you choose to show it), and your details on a meeting agenda as described above.
- With companies that provide services to us, who may only use it to provide those services:
- our web hosting company (Reforest Hosting, using 20i), which stores the website and its data;
- Cloudflare, which protects the website and delivers it quickly, checks that log-ins, sign-ups and form messages come from real people, and counts visits to our public pages without cookies (we see totals only, never who you are);
- Wordfence, our security software, which blocks attacks on the site and protects log-ins;
- Google (Google Analytics), Meta (Facebook) and LinkedIn, only if you agree to analytics or marketing cookies on our website: they receive details of your visit, such as the pages you looked at, the device you used and your IP address. See our cookie policy;
- Resend, our email service, which sends our emails and holds the newsletter mailing lists (names and email addresses of subscribers only);
- Anthropic, for the AI writing tools and Fabby, described above;
- postcodes.io and OpenStreetMap, which turn postcodes and place names into locations;
- our backup service, which keeps secure copies of the site;
- our accountants, for invoices and payments.
- With services you choose to use: when you join an online session (Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams) or book an event that is sold through Eventbrite, that company handles the information you give it under its own privacy notice.
- When the law requires it, for example to the police or a court.
Some pages show content from other services, such as a map from OpenStreetMap on group pages and reviewers’ photos from Google on our reviews. Your browser fetches these directly, so those services receive your IP address. They are not used to track you.
Information sent outside the UK
Some of our service providers, including Cloudflare, Resend, Anthropic and (if you agree to their cookies) Google, Meta and LinkedIn, are based in the United States or use servers outside the UK. When information goes outside the UK we make sure it is protected to UK standards, using the UK-US data bridge where the company is certified under it, or the UK’s approved contract terms (the International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum) where it is not.
How long we keep information
- Your account and profile: while your account is in use. If you don’t log in for 12 months we email you twice, then pause your account (it is hidden from the site) until you log in again.
- Visitors and free accounts: 12 months after your last booking or log-in, unless you ask us to delete it sooner.
- Former members: 12 months after your membership ends. After that, your attendance and referral history is kept only in anonymous totals.
- Meeting agendas: 30 days after the meeting.
- Fabby conversations: 30 days.
- Technical help requests passed on by Fabby: kept in our email while we sort the problem out, and deleted within 12 months.
- Event photos waiting for approval: deleted if not approved within 60 days.
- Consent records: while we rely on the consent, and for 2 years after, so we can show we had it.
- Mailing lists: until you unsubscribe. The note that stops us adding you back after you unsubscribe is kept for as long as we send newsletters.
- Security logs and records of access: 2 years.
- Invites from a host: if the invite isn’t used, the email address is deleted 30 days after it was sent, once the meeting has passed.
- Friday online breakout pairings: 12 months.
- Invoices and accounts: 6 years, as the law requires.
When you delete your account, everything about you is removed straight away, apart from two things we must keep to show we handled your data properly: the record of who accessed it (which holds account numbers, not your details) and a note that the deletion happened, which holds a scrambled code instead of your email address.
Your rights
You have the right to:
- ask for a copy of the information we hold about you;
- have anything wrong corrected (most of it you can change yourself in your profile);
- have your information deleted (“Delete my account” in the app does this straight away);
- ask us to limit how we use your information;
- object to us using your information for our legitimate interests, and to stop any marketing at any time;
- receive your information in a format you can take elsewhere;
- withdraw any consent you have given, at any time, without affecting what we did before.
Email [email protected] to use any of these rights. We will reply within one month. It is free unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.
Automatic booking rules
When you book, the site automatically checks our booking rules, such as how many visits you have had to a group and whether your trade’s seat is already taken. If a rule stops a booking, the host can still invite you: you can ask for an invite from the booking page, and we pass the group’s hosts your name, business and trade so they know who is asking. You can always ask us to have a person look at it again.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first at [email protected]. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and tell you what we are doing about it. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.
Keeping information safe
We use encrypted connections, a firewall, scrambled passwords, two-step log-in for accounts that can see other people’s details, and limits on who can see what. Hosts only see the groups they run, and every time staff open someone’s details it is recorded.
Children
FindaBiz is for people in business. Our services are not meant for anyone under 18.
Changes to this notice
We will update this notice when our services change, and put the date at the top. If a change affects you significantly, we will email you.