Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal information Hmong Network collects when you browse the directory, claim or manage a business listing, buy or sell in the marketplace, RSVP to a community event, nominate someone for Bold Beginnings, or talk to our on-site chat assistant — and what we do with it.

It does not cover information a business you contact through our directory collects on its own behalf (a phone call, an in-person visit, a purchase made directly through that business's own website). We're a directory and marketplace connecting you to independent businesses, not a party to every interaction that follows.

Account information: your name and email address when you create an account, whether as a customer or a business owner.

Order and shipping information: when you buy something through the marketplace, we collect the shipping address and order details needed to get the purchase to you and to keep a financial record of the transaction.

Business listing information: if you claim or add a business, the business's name, address, phone number, hours, and description — this is public information by design, since the point of a directory listing is to be found.

Messages and reviews: the content of messages you send to a business through our contact tools, and any review you leave.

Nomination and story information: if you're nominated for a Bold Beginnings feature, or you nominate someone else, we collect the contact details and answers needed to run that process, and a photo if one is submitted.

Usage information: which pages you visit and what actions you take on the site, collected in a form designed not to identify you personally where that's possible — see "Analytics" below.

Anything you type into the on-site chat assistant, which is processed to generate a response.

To operate the directory, marketplace, and community features you actually use — creating your account, processing an order, delivering a message to a business, running an event RSVP.

To send you order confirmations, account notices, and — if you're a business owner — updates about your listing's performance and leads.

To detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and policy violations.

To improve the site, using aggregated or de-identified usage patterns rather than your individual browsing history where possible.

We do not sell your personal information. Where we share it with a third party, it's because that third party is helping us provide the service you asked for (see "Who we share information with" below) — not because we're selling access to it.

Service providers who help us run the platform: our database and hosting provider, our payment processor for marketplace purchases, our email provider for transactional messages, and — once a shipping integration is live — a shipping carrier to deliver marketplace orders. Each is listed, along with what it can access, in our internal subprocessor registry, and each is required to protect your information and use it only to provide their service to us.

A business you contact or buy from through the marketplace receives what's needed to fulfill that specific interaction — your message, your order and shipping details for a purchase you made from them — and nothing more.

We disclose information when required by law, or when necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of Hmong Network, our users, or the public.

We do not share your information with advertisers for their own marketing purposes.

We use a privacy-focused, cookieless analytics tool to understand overall site usage. We also track, on each business listing page, aggregate counts of views and contact actions (like phone taps or direction requests) — this system is designed to record that an action happened, not who took it: it does not store your IP address, browser identifier, account, or any cookie tied to you.

If a business owner connects their own Google Analytics account to their listing, that forwarding only happens after you've made an explicit, revocable choice in the cookie-consent banner shown on that page.

We keep different kinds of information for different lengths of time, based on why we collected it. Shipping addresses are kept only as long as needed to fulfill and resolve an order, then removed. Financial records are kept longer, to meet accounting and tax obligations, but are disconnected from your live account if you ask us to delete it. Leads, chat transcripts, and similar lower-stakes data are kept for a limited window and then deleted or anonymized. A full, current retention schedule is maintained internally and available on request.

You can ask us to access, correct, delete, restrict, or export your personal information, or object to certain uses of it. Signed-in customers can request account deletion directly from their account settings; any other request can be sent to the contact below.

We'll confirm receipt of your request and respond within the timeframe required by applicable law — generally within one month. Some information may be retained after a deletion request where we have a legal or accounting obligation to keep it, in which case we'll tell you what's being kept and why.

We restrict access to personal information to what each system and person actually needs, encrypt data in transit and at rest through our hosting provider, and log access to sensitive operations for audit purposes. No system is perfectly secure, and we maintain an internal incident-response process so that if something does go wrong, we can respond quickly and tell you what happened.

Hmong Network is not directed to children, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 (or the relevant minimum age in your jurisdiction).

If we make a material change to how we handle your information, we'll update this page and, where required, notify you directly.

Questions about this policy, or a privacy request, can be sent through our contact form or emailed to the address listed in your account settings.