Privacy

We follow the GDPR and the Swiss data-protection act because we think they are right — not because we worked out where they apply.

Same standard for everyone, in every country, including you. If you want something about you taken out, you do not have to prove that a particular law reaches us. Just ask.

Who we are

authoritative-web — the search index behind websear.ch — is built and run by the impactIA Foundation in Switzerland. We are the controller for the personal data described on this page.

For anything here — a question, a request, a complaint — write to bender@impactia.org. That is the same address that handles removals, and it is the only contact route you need.

What websear.ch actually is

It is a finder of sources, not a library. Ask it something and it answers with the URL of the page that authoritatively says so — a federal statute, a library's own documentation, a statistics office — so that an AI agent can go and read the real thing instead of inventing an answer.

For each page we index, we keep a minimal record: the URL, the title, a short snippet, a numeric representation used for matching, and metadata such as the language, the licence, and when we last saw the page. We do not mirror pages and we do not store their full text. Every result sends you to the publisher's own site.

So if a page on the web mentions you, what we hold is a pointer to that page — not a copy of what it says about you, and not a profile assembled from it. Removing yourself from the source page removes you from us at the next refresh; you can also ask us directly.

Names in the index

There is one deliberate exception, and it deserves to be spelled out rather than buried.

Swiss commercial-register cards — built from what the register itself publishes via Zefix and the official gazette — carry the people the register names in connection with a company: signatories, board, management. This is in effect today, not a plan. That is statutory publicity: the register publishes it to the world precisely so that anyone can check who is entitled to sign for a company. An agent asked "who signs for this company" should be sent to the register, not left to guess.

How it is actually stored matters, so here it is exactly. Your name is not written anywhere in the card's text. It is not in the title, not in the snippet, not in any field we would ever display. It exists only as a matching token — the machinery that decides whether a company card is relevant to what someone typed. The single practical consequence is that the company card can be matched by your name, the same way it can be matched by its domain or its UID. You will not find your name printed on websear.ch.

The limits we hold ourselves to are structural, not promises:

• A name is a search token on a company card — never a record about a person. There is no person object anywhere in our data.
• No person pages, no profiles, no people-search. The only thing that changes is that a company card can also be found by the name of someone the register lists on it, the same way it can be found by its domain or its UID.
• No linking across companies. We never assert that the same name appearing on two different cards is the same human. No "other directorships", no mandate counts, no disambiguation. Each name is scoped strictly to the one card it came from.
• Nothing added from anywhere else. No biography, no photo, no address, no employment history, no scoring. Exactly what the register prints, and nothing attached to it.
• It expires by itself. When the register shows you have left the role, the next register pass removes the name automatically — no request needed.

Separately, a well-known public figure may have an entity card pointing at their own official website, the same way a company or an institution does. That is a link to something you published about yourself, and the removal route below covers it too.

Why we consider this lawful

Our basis is legitimate interest — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, and the corresponding basis under the Swiss LPD/nDSG. The interest is concrete: letting an AI agent find the authoritative source for a fact that is already published, rather than confabulating one.

That basis is only balanced because of the limits above — minimal data, no aggregation, currency tracked from the register itself, and an objection route that actually works and is fast. We would rather write the reasoning down and be held to it than leave it implicit.

And to say the first line again in plainer words: we do not check whether European or Swiss law reaches you before deciding how to treat you. We apply the standard to everyone. It is a design constraint we chose, in the same way we chose to license every record honestly and never to resell a competitor's search results.

Your rights, and how to use them

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, object to it, or ask us to remove it. Anyone, any country, any nationality. No lawyer, no forms, no legal formalities — a plain email is enough.

We acknowledge within 3 business days and resolve within 7. We strip your name from that card's searchable text; the company card itself stays, because it is admissible on its own account. The removal is pinned, so a later register refresh cannot quietly put it back.

If you think we have got a decision wrong, say so in the same thread. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority — in Switzerland the FDPIC, or in the EU/EEA your national data-protection authority.

What this website does when you visit

Very little, and we checked rather than assumed. Every statement here was verified against the running service on 6 August 2026.

• No cookies. We do not set a single one. There is nothing to consent to, which is why you are not being asked.
• No analytics, no trackers, no third parties. Every asset on this site is served from websear.ch. No advertising network, no tag manager, no external fonts, no embedded anything. Nothing on this page talks to anyone but us.
• No account, ever, to search. There is no sign-in, and no identifier is assigned to you.
• Your IP address is not recorded. The proxy in front of the search service keeps no access log for websear.ch, so your address is not written down anywhere.
• Your search terms do appear in an operational log. The search service writes one standard line per request to its own log, and for a search that line contains the words you typed — but not your address, and with nothing to tie one line to another. Those lines exist so we can debug a broken query; they stay on the server, are never exported or sold, and are discarded when the service is redeployed.
• Your language choice stays in your browser. Picking EN / FR / DE / IT saves a value in your browser's local storage so the page comes back in the same language. It is never sent to us.
• We do not keep a record of what people search for. There is no query database and no demand analytics today. We may add a measure of what people look for, to decide what to index next — if we do, this page will say so, and say exactly what is kept, before it starts.

The same applies to the MCP endpoint and the JSON API: no keys, no accounts, no per-caller records.

Where this fits

This notice reflects our index admission policy (§4.9.1, "register-published individuals") and our published removal procedure. Both are part of an open-source project: the rules that govern what may enter the index are written down, versioned, and changed only by a ratified amendment — not by whoever is on shift.

If we change this notice in a way that affects you, we will change it here before the change takes effect, not after.

This notice is published in English. German, French and Italian versions follow.