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Prohibited Data Policy
LeadsByCity is for business data only. This policy lists what can never be sold here, how uploads are screened, and how to report a listing.
Working draft. This is not final legal text.
1The rule: business data only
Everything sold on LeadsByCity is data about businesses: a business name, its address, its business phone number, its website, and email addresses on the business’s own domain. A file may contain these columns:
Business name, Address, City, State or region, Postcode, Country, Phone, Website, Email, Category, Rating, Review count, Opening hours, Social links.
Data about private individuals does not belong here, however it was collected.
2What can never be sold
- Consumer data: data about private individuals, not businesses.
- Breached, hacked, leaked or stolen data, or anything obtained without the source's permission.
- Passwords, hashes, dates of birth, government ID numbers, financial account or card data, and health data.
- Lists built to wash spam traps.
- Files the seller does not have the right to sell.
3How uploads are screened
Every file is checked automatically before it can be listed. Three of the checks enforce this policy:
- Prohibited data scan
- Each column is classified by its name and by sample values. Passwords, hashes, dates of birth, government ID numbers, card numbers, bank details and health data lead to automatic rejection.
- Consumer data check
- The share of free-mail addresses and residential markers is measured. Above 30%, the file is held and a reviewer looks at it before it can go live.
- Recycled data
- A fingerprint of the file is compared with files already on the platform, to flag resold copies of someone else's file.
Sellers also pass an ID check before any payout, and confirm for every file that it meets this policy. The wording of that confirmation is in the Seller Agreement.
4What happens when a file breaks this policy
- The upload is rejected and cannot be listed.
- Repeat attempts to upload prohibited data mean a ban.
- A listing that is found to break this policy after it went live is removed.
- Payouts for the affected files can be withheld.
5Where Instant Lists data comes from
The lists LeadsByCity builds itself come from public business information, including the email addresses each business publishes on its own website. They follow the same rule: business-level data only.
6Reporting a listing
If you believe a listing contains prohibited data, your business’s details, or data that someone had no right to sell, use the takedown form. You do not need an account. The team answers every request within 7 days.