Data Privacy Statement
With the following information we want to give you an overview of how we process your personal data and what rights you have. What we process depends on which part of this site you use, and for most visitors the answer is nothing at all.
1. Who is responsible for data processing, and how can I contact them?
The controller is:
Manthano GmbHData Protection
Rebmattli 52c
CH-8832 Wilen bei Wollerau
Schwyz
Switzerland
Email: legal@manthano.ai
2. What data do we collect, and where does it come from?
We collect only what you type into one of our two forms, plus what our hosting provider records in order to serve the site. We do not buy personal data, and we do not collect it from public registers or other third-party sources.
If you register as an annotator (the annotator form), we receive the answers you give in that form. Depending on which parts you complete, that is: your first and last name, email address, phone number, country, city and timezone; your education, field of study and current occupation; the languages you speak and your proficiency in each; your areas of expertise; whether you have annotated data before and if so which types, which tools and for how long; whether you have a computer and its specifications, whether you have reliable internet and its speed; how many hours a week you are available and from when; your goals and motivation in your own words; optionally links to LinkedIn, GitHub or a portfolio; optionally references; and anything you write in the free-text field. We also store the consent choices you made in the form.
If you send us a project brief (the project form), we receive: what you need, the kinds of work involved, the domains and languages, the approximate volume, the timeline, your data residency requirement, your name, your email address, optionally your company, and anything you write in the notes field.
If you email us, we receive your message and whatever your email program sends with it.
Server logs. Our hosting provider, Vercel, records technical data about requests, which can include IP addresses, in order to deliver the site and protect it from abuse. We do not combine those logs with form submissions.
3. What we deliberately do not do
These are worth stating because each is unusual, and each is verifiable in this site’s own source code:
- No cookies. The site sets none, of any kind. That is why there is no cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to.
- No analytics and no tracking. There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, and no third-party analytics or advertising script on any page.
- No third-party fonts loaded while you browse. The typefaces are compiled into the site when it is built, so your browser never contacts a font service.
- We do not store your IP address or your browser’s user agent with either form submission. Neither is read by the code that handles them.
- No advertising, and no sale or sharing of personal data for advertising.
4. Why we process your data, and on what legal basis
We process personal data under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, for people in the EU and EEA, under the GDPR.
To match annotation work to people who have registered for it. This is what the annotator form is for. Registering does not create a contract, does not guarantee any work, and is not a job application: annotation work arrives per project, in particular languages and domains, and often not at all for any given person. The basis is the consent you give in the form, together with our legitimate interest in keeping a pool of people who have asked to be considered.
To answer a project enquiry and to prepare or perform a contract. If you send a brief, we use it to reply, to scope the work, and, if it goes ahead, to deliver it.
To keep the forms usable. We screen submissions automatically for signs of machine abuse, so the forms stay open to real people. See section 9.
To meet legal obligations, including keeping business records where the law requires it, and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
We do not process your data for direct advertising, for market or opinion research, or to build marketing profiles.
5. Who receives my data?
Within the company, only the people who need it for the purposes above.
Outside the company, our processors, who act on our instructions and only for us:
- Supabase, which hosts the database both forms write to. The project is hosted in Zurich, Switzerland.
- Vercel, which hosts and serves this website and records the request logs described in section 2.
- Our email provider, for correspondence you start by writing to us.
We do not otherwise disclose your data and we do not sell it. For client projects, we share only what a specific project requires and only on your instruction, and annotators working on a project see only the data that project needs.
An earlier mobile labelling application used Google Firebase. It has been retired, and neither this website nor the services described on it uses Google Cloud or Firebase.
6. Is data transferred abroad?
Form submissions stay in Switzerland. Everything you send through the annotator registration or the project brief is stored in our database in Zurich.
Request logs may not. Vercel operates a global network, so the technical request data in section 2 may be processed outside Switzerland, including in the United States, subject to the safeguards in our agreement with them. The same applies to email you send us, which is handled by our email provider.
If a project of yours has a data residency requirement, tell us when you scope it and we will confirm in writing what is possible for your data before any of it moves. That question is asked directly in the project form.
7. How long do we keep it?
We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purposes in section 4, or as long as the law requires us to.
Annotator registrations and project briefs are kept for up to 24 months from our last contact with you, and are then deleted. Where the law requires us to keep business records for longer, for example accounting records relating to a project we actually carried out, we keep those for the required period and nothing beyond it.
You can ask us to delete your data at any time, and for a registration you no longer want considered we will do it without asking why.
8. What are my data protection rights?
You have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you and to receive a copy, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have data deleted, to object to processing we base on our legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing, and, where it applies, to receive your data in a portable form. Where processing rests on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time; the withdrawal takes effect from then on and does not affect what was lawful before it.
To exercise any of these, email legal@manthano.ai. We do not charge for it and we do not ask why.
You may also complain to a supervisory authority: in Switzerland the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), and in the EU or EEA your national authority.
9. Automated processing, scoring and profiling
Two automated steps run on form submissions. Both are described here because neither is visible from the outside.
A qualification score on annotator registrations. When you register, the answers you gave are scored automatically out of 100. It is a summary that lets us search and compare a long list. It is not a verdict on you, it is not a pass mark, and no decision about you is made by it alone: a person looks before anyone is contacted. The score is stored with your registration.
Abuse screening on both forms. Every submission is checked automatically for signs of machine-generated content: links pasted into fields that are not link fields, link markup, long runs of repeated characters, text that is mostly capitals, and disposable email domains. The result is a number and a list of named reasons, stored with your submission so that whoever reviews it can see why it was flagged. Nothing is ever rejected on this basis. That is deliberate: wrongly discarding a real person’s registration is a worse outcome than keeping a junk record. We also do not treat free email providers, non-Latin scripts or unusual names as suspicious, because that would filter out exactly the people the annotator programme exists for.
Beyond these, we do not carry out fully automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects on you, and we do not profile you for marketing.
10. Security
The forms are protected by a proof-of-work check that runs in your browser and by validation on our server. The database denies all direct public access and is reachable only by our server-side code, using a credential that never reaches your browser. Data is encrypted in transit, and our database provider encrypts it at rest.
11. Do I have to provide data?
No. You can read every page of this site without giving us anything. If you want to register as an annotator or send us a brief, we need the fields marked as required in those forms, because without them we cannot reply to you or understand what you are asking for.
12. Changes to this statement
We update this statement when what we do changes. The date shown with this statement is the version you are reading.
Appendix: your right to object
On grounds relating to your particular situation you may object at any time to processing we base on our legitimate interests, including any profiling based on them. If you object, we will stop, unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, rights and freedoms, or the processing is needed to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. If that would leave us unable to continue a working relationship or provide a service, we will tell you.
An objection needs no particular form. Please send it to:
Manthano GmbHData Protection
Rebmattli 52c
CH-8832 Wilen bei Wollerau
legal@manthano.ai