Privacy Policy

In Short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide when you register on the Services, register to bid, list equipment, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our Services, participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise contact us.

Account information. When you create an account we collect your name, username, email address, and password. You may also provide a company name, phone number, and a short biography or profile image.

Business verification information. Registering to bid requires more. We collect your legal business name, business type, years in business, business street address, and the name and title of the person representing the business. We also collect your Employer Identification Number (EIN) or Tax ID, which we store in full so that our staff can review your registration. It is never shown to other users; where your Tax ID appears back to you in the Services, only the last four digits are displayed.

Listing information. If you sell, we collect what you put in your listing, including descriptions, specifications, and photographs. Listing photographs are stored in a publicly readable location, so anything visible in a photograph is visible to anyone with the link — take care not to include documents, faces, or premises you would rather not publish.

Sensitive information. When necessary, with your consent or as otherwise permitted by applicable law, we process financial information, including card details, bank account details, and account access information.

All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.

In Short: Registering to bid asks you to name the person representing your business. That is someone else’s information.

When you register to bid we ask for the name and job title of the person representing the business. Where that is not you, you are giving us personal information about somebody else. You may also give us a colleague’s contact details when you ask us to deal with them about a listing or a payment.

Please do not give us information about another person unless you are authorized to do so, or they have agreed. We handle what you give us about them in the same way as your own information, as described in this notice, and they may exercise the same rights over it.

In Short: When you register a card or link a bank account, Stripe passes us details about it — and, for a bank account, a balance snapshot.

We use Stripe, Inc. to process payments, to store cards, and to connect your bank account through Stripe Financial Connections. We never see or store your full card number or your full bank account number. Stripe holds them and gives us a token that lets us charge you.

If you register a card, what Stripe passes to us, and what we store, is:

• the card brand, the last four digits, and the expiry month and year;
• the results of the checks your card issuer ran when you registered it — whether the security code and postcode matched, whether you completed an authentication step with your bank, the card’s funding type and issuing country. We record these because they are shown to our staff while they review your registration to bid; and
• the status of payments we initiate, so we can tell you whether a charge succeeded.

If you link a bank account, what Stripe passes to us, and what we store, is:

• the name of your bank and the last four digits of the account;
• a snapshot of the account balance at the moment you link it, together with the time your bank reported that figure. We request this because it is shown to our staff while they review your registration to bid. Nothing in the Services approves, refuses, or limits bidding based on it;
• the balance available immediately before we debit you, if you have won an auction. We read it again at that point so that we can hold the debit back rather than presenting one that would be returned. We store the figure we read and the time we read it, alongside that transaction, so we can explain afterwards why a debit was delayed. We do not read your balance at any other time, and never merely because you are bidding; and
• the status of payments we initiate, so we can tell you whether a debit cleared.

Stripe processes your information under its own privacy notice, available at https://stripe.com/privacy. You can remove a card or disconnect a bank account at any time from your account settings, though you must have at least one payment method registered in order to bid.

In Short: Some information — such as your IP address and browser characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit our Services.

We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not generally reveal your specific identity but may include device and usage information such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, and information about how and when you use our Services. It is needed to maintain the security and operation of the Services.

Log and usage data. Our servers and our hosting provider automatically record diagnostic, usage, and performance information in log files. Depending on how you interact with us this may include your IP address, device information, browser type and settings, the pages you view, and error reports.

Bidding activity. Bids you place are recorded against your account, and the bidding history on a listing — including the bidder’s username and the amount and time of each bid — is visible to anyone viewing that listing.

Your payment authorization. Because bidding is what authorizes us to charge your card or debit your account if you win, each bid is also a payment authorization. With it we record the IP address and browser you bid from, and which version of the authorization wording you were shown. That is the proof the debit was authorized, and payment network rules require us to keep it — so it is retained with the transaction record rather than deleted when you close your account. It is never shown to other users.

This is the disclosure most specific to how the Services work, and it is deliberate. When a winning bidder’s buyer’s premium clears, we release that buyer’s contact details to the seller, and the seller’s contact details to the buyer. We do this because the sale itself happens directly between you — we do not handle the payment for the equipment — and neither of you can complete it without being able to reach the other.

What is released is the information needed to make contact: name, business name, email address, and phone number where you have provided one. Your Tax ID, your card and bank details, and your balance snapshot are never released to another user. Once contact details have been released we cannot recall them.

The other party is independent of us and becomes responsible for how they handle and use your information from that point. We do not control what a buyer or a seller does with contact details once they have them. If you have a question or a concern about how the other party to your sale is using your information, you should raise it with them directly.

This release happens because you chose to bid or to list, and it is made to complete the transaction you asked for. It is done at your direction, and we do not treat it as a “sale” or “share” of your personal information. We receive nothing for it.

We share information with the companies that operate parts of the platform for us, under written contracts that limit what they may do with it:

• Stripe, Inc. — payments, bank account connection through Financial Connections, and the ACH debit for the buyer’s premium. Privacy notice.
• Supabase — the database that stores your account and registration details, authentication, and storage for listing images.
• Postmark — delivery of transactional email, such as outbid notices, auction results, and payment receipts. Postmark receives your email address and the contents of those messages.
• Vercel — hosting for the website, which processes request data including your IP address.

We may also share your personal information in these situations:

• Business transfers. In connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
• Legal obligations and rights. Where we are required to by law, or where disclosure is necessary to investigate suspected fraud or misuse, to protect the safety of any person, or to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
• With your consent. In any other case where you have asked us to or agreed that we may.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for targeted advertising.

If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information — which may be express or implied depending on the applicable law — you have the right to withdraw it at any time by contacting us using the details in section 13.

This will not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before you withdrew, nor will it affect processing we carry out on lawful grounds other than consent. Withdrawing the authorization for a bank debit does not cancel an amount you already owe.

You can unsubscribe from our marketing and promotional communications at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the emails we send, or by contacting us. You will then be removed from those lists. We may still send you service messages that are necessary for the administration and use of your account — an outbid notice, an auction result, or a payment receipt is not marketing and cannot be turned off while your account is open.

If you would at any time like to review or change the information in your account, or close it, log in and go to your account settings. Closing an account is something only you can do, from your own signed-in session — we will not close an account on the strength of an email, because we cannot tell from an email who is really asking.

What closing your account deletes. Your profile details, and your business verification in full — the Tax ID, the business address, the representative’s name and title, the card brand and last four digits, the bank name and last four digits, and the balance snapshot. Both the card and the bank account are released at Stripe so no further charge can be initiated. Your watchlist, notifications, and email preferences go too.

What stays. Bids and comments remain on the auctions they belong to, under an anonymous handle rather than your username — other bidders relied on that history while an auction was running, and removing it would rewrite the record of a completed sale. We also keep the record of any transaction, and the payment authorization attached to each bid, for the purposes set out in section 5. Payment network rules set how long that authorization must be kept, so it is not ours to delete on request.

Closing your account takes effect immediately and cannot be undone. You will be signed out and will not be able to sign in again.

You cannot close an account with unfinished business on it, and the settings page will tell you which of these applies to you:

• you are the current high bidder on an auction that is still running;
• a buyer’s premium you owe is unpaid, still clearing, or was returned;
• you have a listing that is live or awaiting our review; or
• a sale of yours has not settled, so contact details have not yet been released.

Each of these leaves somebody else mid-transaction, so the account has to stay open until it finishes. Once it has, the option becomes available on the same page.

The table below shows the categories of personal information we collect. For the full detail, see section 1.

We collect sensitive personal information only as permitted by law or with your consent, and we do not collect or process it for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you. You may have the right to limit its use or disclosure.

We limit the use of that information to what is reasonably necessary to provide the Services and for purposes applicable law permits. Your bank details are used for one thing: initiating the debit you authorized, and telling you whether it cleared. There is no secondary use to limit. If you decline to provide this information you will not be able to bid.

We may also collect other personal information where you interact with us in person, online, or by phone or mail — for example when you receive help through our support channels, take part in a survey, or ask us a question.

Learn more about how we use your personal information in section 2, and how we disclose it in section 3.

We have not sold or shared personal information for targeted advertising, and we will not do so. We disclose personal information to the service providers listed in section 3 under written contract, and we release contact details between the buyer and the seller of a completed sale, as described there.

You have rights under certain US state data protection laws. These rights are not absolute, and in some cases we may decline a request as permitted by law. They include:

• Right to know whether or not we are processing your personal data
• Right to access your personal data
• Right to correct inaccuracies in your personal data
• Right to request the deletion of your personal data
• Right to obtain a copy of the personal data you previously shared with us
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights
• Right to opt out of processing for targeted advertising, the sale of personal data, or profiling in furtherance of decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects. We do none of these, so there is nothing to opt out of.
• Right to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including in California)

To exercise these rights, contact us by visiting our contact page, by emailing us at info@successionequipment.com, or by using the postal address at the bottom of this notice.

Under certain US state data protection laws you can designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf. We may deny a request from an agent who does not submit proof that they have been validly authorized to act for you.

Request verification. Before we act on a request we have to be sure it is really yours. Without that, someone else could ask us to hand over or destroy your information.

Deletion is handled by putting it in your own hands rather than ours: you close your account from a signed-in session, and we do not accept deletion requests any other way. Being signed in is the proof, so there is nothing further for you to verify and no request for us to misjudge.

For other requests — access, a copy of your information, or a question about how we processed it — we check the request against the account it concerns before answering, and we may ask for more information where we cannot identify you from what we already hold. Anything you give us for that purpose is used only to verify you and to answer the request.

Appeals. Under certain US state data protection laws, if we decline to act on your request you may appeal by emailing us at info@successionequipment.com. We will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken in response, including a written explanation of the reasons. If your appeal is denied, you may submit a complaint to your state attorney general.

California “Shine The Light” law. California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits users who are California residents to request, once a year and free of charge, information about categories of personal information we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes, and the names and addresses of those parties. We do not disclose personal information for third-party direct marketing. If you would like to make such a request, please write to us using the details in section 13.