Privacy policy
This policy explains what Local Chile (“we”, “us”) collects when you use the site, why, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do with it. It follows article 19 N.º 4 of Chile’s Constitution, which protects private life and personal data, Ley N.º 19.628 on the Protection of Private Life, and Ley N.º 21.719, which applies from 1 December 2026; we already apply the standards of the new law. It applies to every visitor, in Chile or elsewhere. Short version: we collect very little, we never sell personal data, and most pages work without any account or cookie at all.
Effective 20 October 2026.
1. Information we collect
1.1 Information you give us
You can read the whole directory without telling us who you are. We collect personal data only when you:
- Create an account: e-mail address, display name and a salted password hash (never the password itself), plus a two-factor secret if you enable it;
- Add or claim a business: your name, work e-mail, phone number, your message and any documents you send us for verification;
- Buy a paid plan: the billing details needed to issue the receipt and handle the payment (card data is handled by the payment provider, not by us);
- Contact us or report content: whatever you put in the message.
Giving us these data is optional, but without them we cannot open an account, process a claim or answer you.
1.2 Information collected automatically
- Server logs: IP address, user agent, requested page and time, kept for security and for a short period (section 3);
- Outbound clicks: we count clicks on business website links per listing; the count is not linked to you;
- Quick-search questions: what people type into the search box or the assistant is stored as text with a counter, without any IP or identifier, to improve the parser;
- Approximate location: when the assistant suggests places near you, it uses the country and city hint our CDN attaches to the request, or coordinates you explicitly share by tapping “Use my location”. Neither is stored.
1.3 Business listings
Listings contain business contact details that are already public: name, address, phone, website, opening hours, Google rating and the latest public reviews as shown on Google Maps. Where a sole trader’s name is the business name, that name is part of the listing. To correct or remove a listing, use the notice and takedown process.
1.4 What we do not collect
We do not collect or process credit, debt or financial-solvency data about anyone, we do not build profiles of visitors, we make no automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on you, and we do not ask for sensitive data such as health, religion or political opinions.
2. How we use information
- To run the site and keep it secure (logs, rate limiting, abuse prevention);
- To operate your account, claims, listings and paid plans and to e-mail you about them;
- To verify that a claimant represents a business (claim verification policy);
- To answer messages and reports;
- To improve search and the assistant, using aggregated queries;
- To show advertising (section 7) and to meet legal obligations.
We do not send marketing e-mail and we never make marketing calls or send marketing WhatsApp messages. The only calls we make are the verification calls described in the claim verification policy. Transactional e-mails (claim decisions, password resets, receipts) are the only messages you receive.
Legal basis. We process personal data only for the specific purposes above and only as much as they need. We rely on your consent; on the need to perform a contract you started with us or to take steps you asked for before it (your account, your claim, a plan you bought); on a legal obligation; or on our legitimate interest in keeping the site secure and in publishing contact details that businesses themselves make public, always provided your rights and freedoms do not prevail. Where we rely on consent (for example when you share your location), you can withdraw it at any time, without affecting what was done before.
3. Retention
- Server logs: 30 days;
- Verification documents: deleted within 30 days of the claim decision;
- Account data: until you delete the account, then removed within 30 days except records we must keep by law;
- Billing records of paid plans: for as long as tax and accounting rules require;
- Listing edits and claim records: for as long as the listing exists, so we can show who changed what;
- Aggregated statistics and query counters: indefinitely, because they identify nobody.
4. Sharing and disclosure
We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing. We share only with:
- Infrastructure providers: our hosting provider and our CDN and security provider (Cloudflare), which see the traffic needed to deliver the site and act on our instructions;
- Payment providers, when you buy a paid plan;
- Advertising partners such as Google AdSense, which set their own cookies as described in section 7;
- Google, whose image servers deliver listing photos directly to your browser (we send no referrer, and we do not send them who you are);
- Authorities, when required by law or a court order, or to protect the safety of a person;
- A successor, if the site changes hands, under this same policy.
5. International transfers
The site is hosted outside Chile and served through a global CDN, so your data are stored and processed in other countries. We only use providers that commit, through contractual and technical safeguards, to a level of protection adequate under Chilean law, and we limit what leaves our servers to what is needed to run the site.
6. Your rights
Chilean law gives you, and we honour at any time and free of charge, the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you and know where they came from, what we use them for and who receives them;
- Rectification of data that are wrong, out of date or incomplete;
- Erasure (supresión) of your data, or deletion of your account (you can also do this from your account page);
- Objection to a use of your data, such as advertising, and withdrawal of consent you gave earlier;
- Portability: a copy of the data you gave us in a structured, commonly used electronic format;
- Blocking (bloqueo): the temporary suspension of processing while a request for rectification, erasure or objection is being resolved.
To exercise a right, email us from the e-mail address on the account, or with enough detail for us to find your data. We may ask you to confirm your identity. We answer as soon as we can and always within the legal deadline: today the one set by Ley N.º 19.628 and, from 1 December 2026, within 30 calendar days of receiving the request, as Ley N.º 21.719 provides.
If you disagree with our answer. If we do not answer in time, or you disagree with our answer, you can go to the Chilean courts under Ley N.º 19.628 and, from 1 December 2026, file a complaint with the Agencia de Protección de Datos Personales created by Ley N.º 21.719.
Visitors from the European Union. If you visit from the EU or the EEA, you also have the rights the GDPR gives you (including restriction, objection and portability) and may complain to the data-protection authority of your country.
Children. The site is not directed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child gave us personal data, tell us and we will delete it.
7. Cookies and similar technologies
We set very few cookies of our own and no cookie banner is needed for them because they are strictly necessary or store a choice you made:
| lcl_session | Keeps you logged in. Set only when you sign in; deleted when you log out or after 30 days. |
|---|---|
| lcl_lang | Remembers that you chose English, so we do not send you back to Spanish again. One year. |
| Browser storage | The quick-search assistant keeps its open/closed state in your browser only. Nothing is sent to us. |
Advertising cookies. Where advertising is shown, Google AdSense and its partners may set cookies to show and measure ads, including personalised ads where you have agreed to them in your Google settings. We do not control those cookies. You can opt out of personalised advertising at adssettings.google.com, and browsers let you block or delete cookies; the directory keeps working without them, you may simply see non-personalised ads.
No analytics trackers. We do not use third-party analytics scripts. Our traffic figures come from our own server logs, aggregated.
8. Security
Passwords are stored as salted hashes, accounts can be protected with two-factor authentication, admin sessions require it, the site is served over HTTPS only, and requests are rate-limited. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will tell you and, where the law requires it, the Agencia de Protección de Datos Personales.
9. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the site changes, or as the personal-data rules in Chile develop. The effective date at the top tells you when. Material changes are announced on the site, and by e-mail to account holders.
10. Controller and contact
The controller (responsable) of your personal data is the operator named in the legal notice. Privacy questions or requests: email us. Some links on this site are affiliate or sponsored links. If you book or buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.