Privacy policy

This policy explains what personal data Icon Magazine collects, why, and the choices you have. To ask about your data, or to have it corrected or deleted, contact us through our contact page.

What we collect

• When you apply or contact us: your name, email, role, company, website, LinkedIn profile, country and your message.
• When you nominate a founder: your name, email and how you know them, and the founder's name, role, company, website and your reasons. We don't tell the founder who nominated them without asking you.
• For editorial invitations: business contact details of founders and executives (name, role, company and work email), gathered from public sources such as company websites, startup directories, investor portfolio pages and Wikidata.
• When you pay: payments are processed by Dodo Payments, which acts as the merchant of record. We receive your name, email and the payment status, never your card details.
• Emails we exchange with you about a feature.
• When you subscribe to the weekly email: your email address, the page you signed up on, and which of our emails we have sent you (see “The weekly email” below).
• Technical data: our servers process IP addresses to deliver the site and limit abuse of our forms.
• Reading statistics: for each page view we count the page, the website that linked to it, the country and whether it was a phone or a computer. No cookies, no IP address, nothing that identifies you or follows you between visits. If your browser sends “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control, we don't count your visits at all.

Why we use it

To review applications and arrange features; to invite founders and leaders to be featured, where we have a legitimate interest in contacting them about their work; to take payment and deliver the feature you paid for; and to keep the site secure.

Who processes it for us

• Google Workspace, for our email.
• Dodo Payments, for payments.
• TradingView, for the market price strip (see “Market prices” below).
• Cloudflare, which delivers the site and, with Cloudflare Web Analytics, counts visits without cookies. Its script reports which pages are viewed, how fast they load, and your browser and approximate location, under Cloudflare's privacy policy.
• Google (Gemini), to help us sort replies to our emails. Email addresses, phone numbers and links are removed before a reply is analysed.

The weekly email

If you sign up, we first email you a link to confirm; nothing else is sent until you click it. Then you get a welcome email, an email about our Founder Playbook a few days later, one email about being featured yourself, and every Monday the founders we profiled that week (nothing in a week without new profiles). We send it from our Google Workspace email. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops all of them. We don't share your address, and we don't track opens or clicks.

Local weather

The weather at the top of each page is for your area. To find it, our server looks up the approximate city of your IP address in a database on our own server (DB-IP City Lite); your IP address isn't sent anywhere else, and we don't store it or the place. We then ask MET Norway for the forecast for that place, using coordinates rounded to about a kilometre, never your IP address.

If you click “Use my location” or “Not here?”, your browser asks before sharing your position. We round it to about a kilometre, use it only for the forecast, and remember it in your own browser (not on our servers) so you needn't share it again. Clearing your browser's site data forgets it. Weather data: MET Norway; IP location: IP Geolocation by DB-IP, both under CC BY 4.0.

Market prices

The market strip under the menu is a widget from TradingView, which supplies the prices (delayed as each exchange requires). To show it, your browser loads it from TradingView, which then receives your IP address and browser details and may set cookies, under TradingView's privacy policy. We choose which markets to show from your approximate country (worked out on our server, as for the weather, and not stored). In the EU, the UK and Switzerland the widget loads only after you click “Show live markets”; your choice is remembered in your browser.

Your choices

You can ask us to stop contacting you at any time: reply to any of our emails with “unsubscribe”, or contact us. We then keep your email address only on a do-not-contact list, so that we never email you again. You can also ask for a copy of your data, or for it to be corrected or deleted.

Changes

We will update this page if how we handle data changes, and show the date of the latest version above.