This notice explains how the central contacts store operated at hub.openoutreach.app collects, uses, and discloses personal data. It is published for the people whose work contact details may appear in the store and for the operators who contribute to and read from it.
The store is operated by the maintainer of the open-source project OpenOutreach. It is a small database of work email addresses pooled across the OpenOutreach operator network: a contact one operator has already resolved can be served to another, lowering each operator's email-finder spend as coverage grows.
Throughout this notice, an operator is a person running a self-hosted OpenOutreach instance that contributes to and reads from the store.
The store is minimised. For each person it holds these core fields:
| Field | Example | Why it is kept |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn public identifier | jane-doe |
The lookup key for contribution and resolution. |
| Country code | in |
Drives the geographic exclusion below. |
| Work email address(es) | jane@acme.com |
The contact detail the store exists to serve. |
The store also records, for internal operation, which operator token contributed a record (provenance) and the timestamps of first and last contribution.
Profile vector. Where an operator has opted in to contribute it (see the operator notice), the store may also hold a 384-dimension numeric profile vector (an "embedding") for a person: a compact mathematical representation derived from their public professional profile, computed on the operator's own machine so the raw profile text is never sent or stored. The vector exists to support the similarity search described under How data is used and disclosed below.
What is not collected: no name, headline, job title, company, phone number, postal address, or raw LinkedIn profile text.
Only professional, business-context (B2B) contact data is in scope. Consumer contact details and any special-category data are out of scope and are not collected.
Any person located in the EU/EEA, the UK, or Switzerland — or whose location cannot be determined — is never written to the store. This exclusion runs authoritatively on the server, at the point data enters the store, regardless of what a contributing client sends.
Data reaches the store from OpenOutreach operators at the two moments a real contact comes into existence:
- after an operator's paid email-finder lookup returns a work email, and
- after an operator's 1st-degree LinkedIn connection exposes their contact info.
The maintainer does not scrape LinkedIn or buy data to populate the store; it is filled only by operators' own contributions, subject to the geographic exclusion above.
- Resolution (disclosure to operators). An operator may query the store for a person's email before paying a finder service. A match is returned to that operator. This means an email in the store may be disclosed to operators other than the one who contributed it, so they can carry out business-to-business outreach. This is a disclosure of personal data to a third party — comparable to commercial B2B contact-data providers. The data is not sold.
- Similarity search (profile vector). Where a profile vector has been contributed, an operator may query the store for the stored professional contacts most similar to a given profile, and a set of matching records is returned to that operator so they can carry out their own business-to-business outreach. Like resolution, this is a disclosure of professional contact data to operators: it returns which existing contacts resemble a query, not any new score, rating, or prediction about a person, and it makes no automated decision producing legal or similarly significant effects. It operates only on the non-EU/EEA/UK/CH professional contacts described above. The store itself does not send any outreach — operators send from their own infrastructure and are responsible for that. You may object to this use and request suppression at any time (see Your rights below).
- No consumer-facing purpose. The store is not used for advertising to consumers or any consumer-facing purpose.
Where data-protection law applies, the store relies on legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR and equivalents) for both of its purposes — resolution (serving a known work email) and similarity search (returning the stored contacts most similar to a query). Both are the same activity in substance: facilitating business-to-business professional communication using professional contact data, by disclosing existing professional contacts to operators who carry out their own outreach. Neither purpose involves profiling for the store's own marketing, automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects, or the sending of marketing email by the store — operators send from their own infrastructure and are responsible for their own sends and the anti-spam law that governs them.
A legitimate-interest assessment balances that interest against the rights of the people in the store. The safeguards that keep the balance reasonable are: the geographic exclusion (people located in the EU/EEA, UK, or Switzerland — or whose location cannot be determined — are never written to the store, so they are never in the searchable set); strict data minimisation (a handful of work-contact fields plus a numeric vector — the raw profile text is computed on the operator's machine and never transmitted or stored); the B2B-only, professional-context scope, with no special-category and no consumer data; and the objection and suppression rights below, honoured across the whole store. Operators contributing or resolving data may be controllers or joint controllers and carry their own responsibilities.
If your work email is in the store, you may request access, correction, or erasure, and you may object to the processing. To exercise any of these, or to be excluded from the store entirely:
- Suppression / opt-out: a request submitted to
POST /api/suppress/(or via the contact route below) removes the record and blocks the email and public identifier from re-entering the store. Suppression is honoured across the whole store, including against future re-contribution, and applies to both the resolution and the similarity-search purposes.
Suppression is recorded immediately as a request; the suppressed identifiers are excluded from the data served to operators, and the underlying records are erased on the store's maintenance cycle.
Records persist while they remain useful for resolution and are refreshed when re-contributed. A suppressed record is removed from served results immediately and erased from source on the maintenance cycle.
Questions, complaints, or data-subject requests: open an issue on the OpenOutreach repository or contact the maintainer at the address published there. If your country has a data-protection regulator (for example the AEPD in Spain, the ICO in the UK, or another EU/EEA supervisory authority), you may also lodge a complaint directly with that regulator.
This notice is published in good faith and may be updated as the store evolves; material changes will be reflected here.