Scout — Privacy Policy
Effective date: 2026-05-23 Last updated: 2026-05-23 Version: 1.0
This Privacy Policy explains how Options Scout LLC ("Scout," "Company," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, discloses, and protects information when you access or use the Scout website, application, chat interface, and related services (collectively, the "Service"). Capitalized terms not defined here have the meanings given to them in our Terms of Service.
For a higher-level, operator-readable framing of how Scout handles data, see our Disclosures page. This Privacy Policy is the formal document that governs.
By using the Service, you acknowledge the practices described in this Privacy Policy.
1. Scope of this policy
This Privacy Policy applies to information collected through the Service, including when you create an account, connect brokerage integrations, interact with Scout through chat, subscribe to a paid plan, contact support, or otherwise use Scout features.
This Privacy Policy does not apply to third-party websites, brokerages, payment processors, market-data providers, AI model providers, or other external services that may be linked to or integrated with Scout. Those third parties have their own privacy notices and data practices, and we encourage you to review them.
2. Information we collect
We collect the categories of information described below.
2.1 Information you provide directly
- Account information, such as your name, email address, login credentials (passwords are stored as a salted hash, never in plain text), and subscription information;
- Profile or settings information you choose to provide;
- Operator Content you submit through the Service: prompts, chat messages, notes, watchlists, strategy descriptions, position descriptions, technical readings, pinned chats, and other inputs;
- Images, screenshots, charts, and other files you upload or share through the Service;
- Communications you send to us, including support requests, feedback, and survey responses.
2.2 Brokerage and account-linked information
When you authorize a Brokerage Connection through our integration provider, we receive read-only access to brokerage data the integration makes available, which may include:
- Open positions;
- Account balances;
- Trade history;
- Holdings and related account state information.
Brokerage data is given elevated care. It is encrypted in transit and at rest, is accessible to a limited set of internal services strictly necessary to operate the Service, and is not used for marketing, sold, or shared except as described in Section 5. We do not receive trade-execution authority through the Brokerage Connection.
2.3 Market and trading-related information
We may receive or derive market data used to support product features, including open-interest values, earnings dates, implied volatility, and similar inputs from third-party data providers. This information is generally not personal to you, but it is associated with your session when used to evaluate your positions or hypothetical setups.
2.4 Usage and device information
We automatically collect technical and usage information when you use the Service:
- IP address and approximate location derived from IP;
- Browser type, device type, operating system, and app version;
- Log data, timestamps, crash reports, diagnostics, and performance information;
- Feature usage, session activity, page views, and interaction data;
- Cookie, local-storage, and similar identifier data.
2.5 Payment and billing information
If you subscribe to a paid plan, payment-card and billing information is collected and processed by our payment processor (currently Stripe, Inc.) rather than stored in full by Scout. We receive limited billing metadata — subscription status, payment confirmations, invoice history, and the last four digits and brand of your payment method — sufficient to support billing and customer support.
3. How we use information
We use the information described in Section 2 to:
- Provide, operate, maintain, and improve the Service;
- Authenticate users and manage accounts;
- Sync brokerage data and display account-linked information you have authorized us to access;
- Generate Output, including chat responses, methodology checks, operational flags, and related product outputs;
- Store, organize, search, and display your chat history and pinned content;
- Process subscriptions, payments, renewals, cancellations, and related billing functions;
- Monitor performance, debug issues, analyze usage, and secure the Service;
- Communicate with you about product updates, account activity, security matters, support requests, and legal notices (we do not send marketing emails without your consent);
- Enforce legal terms, prevent misuse, investigate suspected fraud or abuse, and comply with applicable law;
- Develop, test, and improve features, models, and workflows, including quality assurance and system performance review, subject to applicable contractual and legal restrictions.
We do not use Operator Content or Brokerage data to train any general-purpose machine-learning model, whether our own or a subprocessor's, except in de-identified, aggregated form that cannot reasonably be linked back to you.
4. AI processing
The Service uses large language models to generate Output in response to your Operator Content. You should understand the following:
4.1 What goes to the AI provider. When you send a message through the Service, your message text — together with relevant context the Service assembles (which may include selected position information, methodology rules, and recent chat history) — is transmitted to our language-model provider, currently Anthropic, PBC, through Anthropic's API.
4.2 What the AI provider does with it. Anthropic processes the input to generate a response and returns that response to the Service. Under the API terms applicable to Scout's account, your inputs and the resulting outputs are not used to train Anthropic's models. Anthropic retains API logs for up to 30 days for trust-and-safety review per its standard API retention policy; after that window, the logs age out automatically. Anthropic's data-handling practices are governed by Anthropic's privacy policy and the API agreement between Anthropic and Scout.
4.3 What we retain. The Service stores your message and the resulting Output in your chat history so you can search and reference it. You can delete chats at any time from the Service settings.
4.4 Output is not advice. Output is informational only and is generated probabilistically. As described in our Terms of Service, Output is not investment advice, is not guaranteed accurate, and should be independently verified before you act on it.
5. How we share information
We share information only as described in this Section.
5.1 Service providers and subprocessors
We share information with vendors and service providers that help operate the Service, including for cloud hosting, database infrastructure, analytics, authentication, payment processing, brokerage connectivity, market data, AI processing, customer support, and related functions. A list of current subprocessors is in Section 6. These providers are bound by contractual obligations to protect the information and use it only for the purposes we direct.
5.2 At your direction
We share information when you instruct or authorize us to do so — for example, when you connect an external account, request a feature that relies on a third-party service, or communicate with us through an integrated tool.
5.3 Legal and safety disclosures
We may disclose information if reasonably necessary to:
- Comply with applicable law, regulation, court order, subpoena, or legal process;
- Enforce these Terms, agreements, or policies;
- Detect, investigate, or prevent fraud, security incidents, or illegal activity; or
- Protect the rights, property, safety, or security of Scout, our Operators, our service providers, or the public.
5.4 Corporate transactions
We may disclose or transfer information as part of an actual or proposed merger, financing, acquisition, sale of assets, reorganization, bankruptcy, or similar business transaction, subject to confidentiality obligations and to this Privacy Policy as it may be updated by the successor.
5.5 Aggregated or de-identified information
We may use and disclose aggregated, anonymized, or de-identified information that cannot reasonably be used to identify you, to the extent permitted by law.
5.6 What we do not do
We do not sell your personal information. We do not share Operator Content or Brokerage data with third parties for advertising or marketing purposes. We do not allow our subprocessors to use your information for their own purposes outside the services they provide to Scout.
6. Subprocessors
The Service depends on the following categories of third-party providers. Specific providers may change from time to time; we will keep this list current.
| Function | Current provider | Information processed |
|---|---|---|
| Brokerage integration | SnapTrade | Account credentials (held by SnapTrade, not Scout), positions, balances, trade history |
| Payment processing | Stripe, Inc. | Payment-card details, billing address, transaction history |
| Language model | Anthropic, PBC | Operator Content and assembled context sent for AI processing |
| Market data | Intrinio | Market data flows; no personal data |
| Hosting and infrastructure | Vercel | All Service data, encrypted at rest |
| Email delivery | Resend | Email address and message contents for transactional emails |
| Analytics | PostHog | Aggregated and pseudonymized usage data |
| Error monitoring | Sentry | Error metadata, may include limited context |
| Rate limiting and cache | Upstash Redis | IP addresses for abuse prevention; ephemeral cache data |
Each provider is contractually obligated to protect information consistent with this Privacy Policy and applicable law.
7. Data retention
We retain information for as long as reasonably necessary to provide the Service, maintain account history, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce agreements, and protect the security and integrity of the Service.
Retention periods vary depending on the type of data, whether your account remains active, whether the data is needed for fraud prevention or legal compliance, and whether deletion would impair core product functionality such as chat history or account records. We may retain certain information after account closure where reasonably necessary for legal, compliance, accounting, security, backup, or dispute-resolution purposes.
If you would like a more specific retention answer for a particular category of data, contact us at privacy@optionsscout.com.
Compliance acknowledgments. When you accept disclosures or consent flows within the Service — for example, the onboarding acknowledgment, the self-directed-trader acknowledgment, or the brokerage-connection consent — we record an acknowledgment row capturing your user identifier, the consent type, the version of the consent text you accepted, and the timestamp. These records are retained for as long as your account is active and for a reasonable additional period thereafter to support audit and compliance obligations.
8. Your privacy rights
Depending on where you reside, you may have rights regarding the personal information we hold about you. We honor verifiable requests under applicable U.S. state privacy laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act / California Privacy Rights Act and other state comprehensive privacy laws as they apply.
8.1 Common rights. Subject to verification and to limited exceptions in the applicable laws, you may have the right to:
- Know and access the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you, the sources, the purposes for which we use it, and the categories of recipients with whom we share it;
- Correct inaccurate personal information we hold about you;
- Delete personal information we hold about you;
- Receive a portable copy of personal information you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used format;
- Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising (we do not sell or share personal information for these purposes);
- Limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information to purposes necessary to provide the Service (we do not use sensitive personal information for purposes beyond providing the Service); and
- Not be subject to discrimination for exercising these rights.
8.2 California residents. California residents have all of the rights above. Sensitive personal information under the California Privacy Rights Act includes financial-account information; we use this information only to provide the Service and do not use it to infer characteristics about you or for any other purpose.
8.3 How to exercise your rights. Email us at privacy@optionsscout.com with the subject line "Privacy Rights Request." We will need to verify your identity before fulfilling certain requests; we will use reasonable means to do so based on the information you have provided to us. We will respond within the timeframes required by applicable law (generally 45 days, with one 45-day extension where reasonably necessary).
8.4 Authorized agents. You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf where permitted by applicable law. We will require proof of authorization and may also require verification of your identity directly.
8.5 Appeals. If we decline a request, you may appeal that decision by replying to our response. We will reconsider the request and respond within the timeframe required by applicable law.
You may also:
- Update account information through your account settings;
- Disconnect Brokerage Connections through the Service settings; once disconnected, you may request deletion of brokerage data Scout received from that connection by contacting privacy@optionsscout.com. We honor such deletion requests under our agreement with our brokerage-integration provider (currently SnapTrade), which requires Scout to delete End User data passed through the SnapTrade API upon request from the End User or from SnapTrade, subject to the legal and accounting exceptions described in Section 7;
- Cancel your subscription through the in-Service settings;
- Contact us at the address in Section 13 for any other privacy-related assistance.
9. Cookies and similar technologies
We use cookies, local storage, pixels, SDKs, log files, and similar technologies to authenticate users, remember preferences, maintain sessions, understand product usage, improve performance, and support security.
We use the following categories:
- Strictly necessary — required for authentication, session management, and security. Disabling these prevents the Service from working.
- Functional — remember preferences and settings.
- Analytics — help us understand which features are used and where errors occur.
We do not use third-party advertising or behavioral-tracking cookies. Most browsers allow you to control cookies through their settings; disabling strictly-necessary cookies will prevent the Service from working.
10. Security
We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect information against unauthorized access, loss, misuse, and alteration. These include:
- Encryption of data in transit and at rest;
- Access controls limiting employee and contractor access to personal information on a need-to-know basis;
- Multi-factor authentication for administrative access to production systems;
- Logging and monitoring of access to systems holding personal information;
- Vendor diligence on subprocessors that handle personal information.
No system is perfectly secure. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials, using secure devices and networks, and notifying us promptly if you suspect unauthorized access. If we become aware of a security incident affecting your information, we will notify you and applicable regulators where required by law.
11. Children
The Service is not directed to and is not intended for use by anyone under 18. Eligibility to use the Service requires that you be at least 18 years of age, as described in our Terms of Service. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and specifically do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 within the meaning of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
If you believe a person under 18 has provided personal information to us, contact us at privacy@optionsscout.com and we will take reasonable steps to delete the information.
12. International users and changes
12.1 U.S.-only Service. The Service is offered only to U.S. residents. Information collected through the Service is processed and stored in the United States. We do not currently offer the Service in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or other jurisdictions outside the United States, and we have not designed the Service to comply with GDPR, UK GDPR, or other non-U.S. comprehensive privacy laws. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and acknowledge that your information will be processed in the United States under U.S. law.
12.2 Changes to this policy. We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post the updated policy with a revised "last updated" date. For material changes, we will provide additional notice by email to the address associated with your account or by a prominent notice within the Service before the changes take effect. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes your acceptance of the changes. We maintain a record of prior versions of this Privacy Policy and will provide one upon request.
13. Contact
For questions about this Privacy Policy, to exercise your privacy rights, or to report a security concern, contact us at:
- Privacy inquiries and rights requests: privacy@optionsscout.com
- Security concerns: security@optionsscout.com
By postal mail:
Options Scout LLC Attn: Privacy 6701 Corporate Dr Ste R Johnston, IA 50131
See also: Terms of Service · Disclosures
End of Privacy Policy.