Privacy policy

About this policy

This policy explains how Best Charlotte (bestcharlotte.com), a guide to local businesses in Charlotte, handles personal data. We collect as little as possible.

Visiting the site

You can read Best Charlotte without creating an account or giving us any personal details. Like any website, Best Charlotte records technical information when you visit, such as your IP address, browser and device type, the pages requested and the time of the request. We use these logs only to keep the site secure, prevent abuse and fix problems, never to build profiles of visitors.

Hosting, security and statistics

The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which also protects it against attacks and processes technical data such as IP addresses to do so. We use Cloudflare's visit statistics, which count page views without cookies and without identifying individual visitors.

Cookies

Best Charlotte does not show advertising and does not use advertising or tracking cookies. Our visit statistics work without cookies. The business area may use a strictly necessary cookie to keep a signed-in business owner logged in, and it is used for nothing else.

Maps

Pages with a map load map tiles from OpenFreeMap, built on map data from OpenStreetMap contributors. To display the map, your browser connects to OpenFreeMap's servers, which receive technical data such as your IP address. We send them no other information about you.

Emails you send us

If you write to info@bestcharlotte.com, we receive your email address, your name if you include it and the content of your message. We use them only to reply and to deal with your request, for example to correct a listing.

Business accounts and payments

Businesses can use the business area to claim their listing, edit their details and choose a plan. For this we keep the email address used to sign in, the changes the business submits to its listing and the details of its plan. Payments for paid plans are handled by Stripe. We never see or store card numbers: Stripe processes them and tells us only what we need to manage the plan, such as whether a payment went through.

Who else receives data

We do not sell personal data. We share it only with the service providers named in this policy, and only as far as each of them needs it to do its job.

How long we keep data

Technical logs are kept only as long as needed for security and troubleshooting. Emails are kept as long as needed to deal with your request and any follow-up. Business account data is kept while the account is active; when a business asks us to close its account, we delete it, except for payment records we are required to keep by law.

Your rights

You can ask us at any time to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it or to object to how we use it. Write to info@bestcharlotte.com and we will respond within a reasonable time. Depending on the state where you live, state privacy laws may give you further rights, and we honor them where they apply.

If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you also have the rights given by the GDPR, including the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

Changes and contact

Best Charlotte is a general guide and is not aimed at children. We may update this policy when the site or the law changes; the current version is always on this page. For any question or request about your personal data, write to info@bestcharlotte.com.