Privacy Policy

Your privacy matters to us. We believe you should be able to search for good design without being tracked, profiled, or monetized.

Last updated: May 2026

Our Privacy Philosophy

At S68, privacy is a foundational principle, embedded in the architecture of our search engine from the beginning. We built S68 to help people discover jury-verified design excellence, and we intentionally designed our systems to operate with minimal data collection.

Our purpose is connecting people with outstanding design, innovation, architecture, creativity, and technology. That mission requires a functional, well-organized search engine. It does not require collecting, storing, or monetizing your personal information.

What We Do Not Do

We Do Not Track You

We do not use tracking pixels, fingerprinting techniques, or behavioral analytics tools designed to monitor your individual activity across our search engine or across the web.

We Do Not Use Tracking Cookies

We do not place advertising cookies, third-party tracking cookies, or any cookies designed to follow you across websites. Our use of cookies is limited to those strictly necessary for basic search engine functionality, as described below.

We Do Not Sell Your Information

We do not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise disclose your personal information to advertisers, data brokers, or any third parties for their commercial or marketing purposes.

We Do Not Build Profiles

We do not create individual user profiles, interest graphs, search history profiles, or behavioral models based on your search queries, browsing patterns, preferences, or activity on our platform.

We Do Not Use Targeted Advertising

We do not serve personalized or behaviorally targeted advertisements. Any advertising displayed on S68 is contextual, based on the search query or page content you are viewing, and does not rely on your personal data, search history, or browsing behavior.

We Do Not Correlate Your Searches

We do not link your search queries together to build a search history associated with your identity, device, or session. Each search you perform on S68 is treated independently.

We Do Not Share Data with Social Networks

We do not embed social media tracking widgets, share buttons with embedded trackers, or transmit your search activity or browsing data to social networking platforms.

Minimal Data Collection

We collect the minimum information necessary to operate our search engine securely and provide you with a functional search experience. The legal basis for this limited processing is our legitimate interest in maintaining a secure, functional search engine.

Server Logs

Like virtually all web servers, ours automatically record basic technical information when you visit a page or perform a search. This may include your IP address, browser type, operating system, referring page, pages visited, and timestamp. These logs are used solely for security monitoring, abuse prevention, troubleshooting technical issues, and generating aggregate, non-identifying usage statistics. They are not used to identify or track individual users, are not associated with search queries for profiling purposes, and are periodically purged in the ordinary course of operations.

Essential Cookies

We may use strictly necessary cookies required for basic search engine functionality, such as maintaining a browsing session, remembering accessibility preferences, or supporting essential search operations. These are functional cookies that do not collect personal information for marketing, analytics, or profiling purposes. They typically expire when you close your browser or shortly thereafter.

Search Queries

When you perform a search on S68, your search terms are processed to return relevant results from our search index. This processing occurs in real time to serve your query.

We may retain anonymized, aggregated search query data to improve search relevance, index organization, and the overall quality of search results. This aggregated data reflects general patterns across all users and is not associated with individual users, sessions, devices, or IP addresses. It is not used for profiling, marketing, or any purpose beyond improving the search experience.

We do not maintain a search history linked to your identity, device, or session. We do not use your search queries to build a profile about you. We do not share individual search queries with third parties.

AI-Generated Answers

When S68 provides direct answers through its AI-powered answer capabilities, your search query is processed to generate a response. This processing is performed to fulfill your search request. We do not store the association between your identity and AI-generated answers. We do not use your queries to train AI models on an individually identifiable basis. Aggregated, anonymized query patterns may be used to improve answer quality across the platform.

Advertising

S68 may display advertisements to support the operation of the search engine. All advertising on our platform is contextual, meaning it is determined by the content of your search query or the page you are viewing at the time. Advertisements are served based on context. They do not rely on personal data, behavioral tracking, search history, or user profiling.

We require that any advertising partners who display content through our platform respect our privacy-first standards. We do not permit advertising partners to place tracking cookies, deploy tracking pixels, or collect personal data about our visitors through advertisements displayed on S68.

Search Results and External Links

S68 search results contain links to external websites, including the websites of designers, brands, architects, studios, institutions, and other parties whose work is indexed in our search engine. When you click a search result link and leave S68, you become subject to the privacy policies and practices of that third-party website.

We encourage you to review the privacy practices of any external site you visit through S68 search results. We are not responsible for the privacy practices, data collection policies, tracking technologies, cookie policies, or content of third-party websites. The presence of a link in S68 search results does not constitute endorsement of that website's privacy practices.

When you click an external link in S68 search results, standard web protocols may transmit a referrer header to the destination website indicating that you arrived from S68. This is standard browser behavior and is not a privacy practice of S68. You may configure your browser settings to manage referrer header transmission.

Indexed Party Information

S68 displays information about award-winning designers, brands, architects, agencies, studios, and institutions, including their names, countries, recognition histories, and descriptions of their jury-verified work. This information is sourced from curated directories (IS8 and INS8), records of design competitions including the A' Design Award, publicly available records, and partner databases. Individuals and organizations whose information appears in S68 search results have participated in evaluation processes through which they consented to public recognition of their achievements, or their information has been compiled from publicly available sources.

If you are an indexed designer, brand representative, or any party whose information appears in S68 search results and you have questions or concerns about your listing, or if you wish to request a correction or removal, please contact us using the information provided on our Impressum page. We will review and respond to such requests promptly.

Service Providers

We may engage trusted service providers to assist with the technical operation of our search engine, such as hosting infrastructure, content delivery networks, and search processing systems. These providers process data solely on our behalf, under our instructions, and are contractually obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of any information they process. We do not authorize service providers to use data processed on our behalf for their own purposes, marketing, profiling, or any use beyond the specific services they provide to us.

Legal Obligations

In limited circumstances, we may be required to disclose information we hold in response to valid legal processes, such as court orders, subpoenas, or lawful requests from public authorities for law enforcement or national security purposes. In such cases, we will disclose the minimum information necessary to comply with our legal obligations. Given our minimal data collection practices, the scope of any such disclosure is inherently limited.

Do Not Track Signals

Some web browsers transmit "Do Not Track" signals to websites. Because our standard practice is to collect minimal data and to refrain from tracking visitors, we treat all visitors with the same privacy-first approach regardless of whether a Do Not Track signal is received. Our baseline behavior already aligns with the intent of Do Not Track signals.

International Visitors

S68 serves a global audience. Our servers may be located in jurisdictions different from your own. By accessing and using the search engine, you acknowledge that the limited technical data described in this policy may be processed in the country where our servers are located. We apply the same privacy protections to all visitors regardless of their geographic location.

Your Rights

Because we collect minimal data and do not maintain user accounts, search histories, or individual profiles, there is typically very limited personal information associated with any individual visitor. Nonetheless, we fully respect your privacy rights under applicable laws.

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict processing of, or object to processing of your personal information. California residents have additional rights under the CCPA, including the right to know what personal information is collected and the right to request deletion. European visitors have rights under the GDPR, including the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information provided on our Impressum page. We will respond to legitimate requests within the timeframes required by applicable law.

Data Retention

We retain the limited technical data described in this policy only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, primarily security monitoring, abuse prevention, and technical troubleshooting. Server logs are periodically purged in the ordinary course of operations. Anonymized, aggregated search data retained for search quality improvement does not contain personally identifiable information. We do not maintain long-term archives of visitor data or individual search activity.

Security

We implement reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect the limited information we process. Our search engine uses HTTPS encryption to secure data transmitted between your browser and our servers, including your search queries.

No method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. However, our minimal data collection approach significantly reduces privacy risks by limiting the scope of information that could be affected by any potential incident. We believe the most effective data protection strategy begins with collecting as little data as possible.

Children's Privacy

S68 is a general-audience search engine featuring information about design products, projects, services, architecture, innovation, and creative professionals. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16 (or under 13 in jurisdictions where that threshold applies). If you believe that a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us through our Impressum page so we can take appropriate action to delete such information.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technologies, legal requirements, or for other operational reasons. When we make material changes, we will update the "last updated" date at the top of this page. Your continued use of S68 following any changes to this policy constitutes your acknowledgment of those changes. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

Contact Us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us through the official communication channels listed on our Impressum page. We are committed to addressing your privacy concerns and will respond to inquiries in a timely manner.

Our Commitment to You

We believe privacy is a fundamental right. When you search S68, you can focus on discovering outstanding design, innovation, architecture, creativity, and technology without worrying about surveillance, tracking, or profiling. That is the experience we are committed to providing, and we hold ourselves accountable to the standards described in this policy.

Your search is your own.