Vallience Competitor Data & Scanning Notice

1. Organisations, not individuals

Vallience analyses organisations rather than individuals. A person may be named where their professional identity is materially relevant to a significant, publicly reported business event, such as an executive appointment or departure. Vallience does not create standalone personal profiles or infer sensitive personal characteristics.

2. What you provide

When you request a competitor scan, you supply:

• The competitor organisation’s name.
• Its website address.
• Optional notes explaining why you are researching it.

Vallience uses the organisation name and website to plan and carry out research. It does not ask you to provide personal information about individuals at the competitor organisation.

3. Sources Vallience uses

Vallience researches publicly accessible business information. It uses a web search service to find relevant pages and then processes the results using automated systems.

Sources may include:

• Company websites and official company channels.
• Official announcements and press releases.
• Reputable news and media publications.
• Public company registers and regulatory filings.
• Publicly accessible review platforms and business directories.
• Other lawful public sources returned by the web search service.

Vallience does not use sources that require bypassing authentication, paywalls or CAPTCHAs. It relies on the results returned by the web search service for publicly indexed pages.

The sources available may vary by organisation and over time. Vallience does not guarantee that every relevant source will be located during a scan.

4. How research works

A scan proceeds in stages:

• Discovery: Vallience generates search queries targeting commercially material developments and executes them through the web search service.
• Evidence processing: search results are filtered for commercial materiality, classified by research category, and assessed for source authority and source independence.
• Investigation: where Stage 1 identifies commercially important leads, Vallience runs targeted follow-up searches to corroborate or deepen the intelligence.
• Signal synthesis: accepted evidence is synthesised into intelligence signals.
• Assessment generation: signals and evidence are used to produce a strategic competitor assessment.

Each stage uses automated systems and artificial intelligence to identify, classify, summarise, compare and evaluate information.

5. Information sent to service providers

To perform a scan, Vallience sends the following to its external service providers:

• To the web search service: search query strings containing the competitor name, domain and research terms. No account or personal information about you is sent to the search service.
• To the AI service: the competitor name, domain, description and the titles, URLs, source names, publication dates and snippets of search results. The AI service processes this to classify evidence, synthesise signals and generate the assessment.

Vallience does not send your account password, authentication tokens or payment details to these providers.

6. What Vallience retains

For each scan, Vallience retains:

• The evidence accepted during the scan, including the source URL, source name, publication date and a short factual summary.
• Intelligence signals synthesised from the evidence.
• Research coverage diagnostics showing how many searches were performed and how many results were reviewed for each research category.
• The completed assessment.

Source links and publication dates are retained where available so you can examine the evidence supporting an assessment.

Vallience does not retain full copies of the underlying web pages. It retains the search-result metadata and AI-generated summaries described above.

7. References to people

Vallience analyses organisations rather than individuals.

A report may name a person where their professional identity is materially relevant to a significant, publicly reported business event, such as an executive appointment or departure. In these circumstances, Vallience may process limited professional information such as the person’s name, their professional role, their organisation, the publicly reported event and the source.

Vallience does not:

• Create standalone personal profiles.
• Monitor people independently of an organisation.
• Collect private contact information.
• Collect information about private or family life.
• Infer sensitive personal characteristics.
• Speculate about unsupported personal motives.

You must not use Vallience to monitor, profile, harass, intimidate or target an individual. This is set out in the Terms of Use.

8. What Vallience does not do

Vallience does not intentionally:

• Bypass authentication or technical access controls.
• Circumvent paywalls or CAPTCHAs.
• Collect private contact details.
• Research private or family life.
• Monitor individuals independently of an organisation.
• Infer sensitive personal characteristics.
• Speculate about unsupported personal motives.

9. Limits of each scan

Each assessment reflects the evidence found during a particular scan. It is not a definitive or exhaustive account of the competitor.

Automated systems can make mistakes. They may misunderstand information, miss relevant evidence, associate information with the wrong organisation or draw conclusions from incomplete material.

Vallience assessments are business-research outputs, not authoritative statements of fact.

The absence of information from an assessment does not establish that no relevant information exists. A statement that Vallience found no evidence means only that sufficiently relevant evidence was not identified during that scan.

Information may change after a scan is completed, and an assessment may therefore become outdated.

10. Your role

You should examine the cited sources and independently verify important findings before acting on them.

Vallience does not use automated analysis to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about individuals appearing in source material.

11. Scans and report history

Scans may be initiated by you or run automatically at the scheduled interval included in your plan. Vallience uses periodic scans and does not continuously monitor competitors in the background.

When a further scan runs for a competitor assessed before, Vallience may compare the new findings with the previous scan to identify developments, changes and emerging trends.

Completed assessments are retained in your account so you can access your report history.

12. Correction, restriction and removal requests

If you believe that a Vallience assessment contains information about you that is inaccurate, outdated, unnecessary or inappropriate, you can request correction, restriction or removal.

You can also request changes to information about your organisation or account.

Contact Vallience at:

Please provide enough information to identify the relevant report, scan or source.

Vallience will consider the request under applicable data protection law. Where appropriate, it may correct, remove, restrict or annotate the information.

Changing a Vallience assessment will not alter the original information published by a third-party source.

info@vallience.co.uk

13. Changes to this notice

Vallience may update this notice when its research methods, sources, providers or processing activities change.

The current version will be published through the Vallience website.

14. Contact

Questions concerning this notice can be sent to: