Privacy Notice

This notice explains how Cynthia Barnes, LLC, operating as Black Women’s Wealth Lab®, collects and uses personal information through this website, and in particular through the Private Decision Review.

1. Who we are

Cynthia Barnes, LLC is the controller of the personal information described in this notice. We trade as Black Women’s Wealth Lab®.

Postal address: 270 W. Millbrook Rd, Suite 210, Raleigh, NC 27609

Privacy contact: legal@blackwomenswealthlab.com

We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer. We are not required to.

2. What the Private Decision Review collects

The Private Decision Review is a written application. It is free, and submitting one creates no obligation on either side. When you complete it, we collect:

• Your first name, last name, email address, and, if you give it, your company or title.
• Your description of the financial decision you are preparing for, including the type of decision, who the other party is, when you expect it to happen, and what is at stake.
• Financial context you choose to give, including your current terms, an impact range, and any figure you have in mind.
• What evidence you hold, and what you cannot currently access.
• Scope information, including whether your situation involves a legal proceeding, a claim, or a settlement discussion.
• Your answers to four acknowledgement statements, with the time you gave them.
• Whether you also asked to receive our email briefing.
• How you arrived at the page, taken from the web address you followed, such as a campaign or referral tag.

Several questions are free text. What you write in them is up to you, and may include details about your employer, your clients, other people, your compensation, or a legal matter.

3. What we do not collect

The Private Decision Review does not collect your IP address, your device or browser identifiers, your phone number, or any document or file upload. There is no upload field. We do not set cookies on the Review pages, and we do not run analytics on them.

3A. What the free tools collect

The free tools run in your browser. To view a tool’s result you provide your email address, and we send the result and its checklist to that address. Nothing you enter is sent to us before you do.

When you provide your address, we collect it together with the answers you gave in that tool, so that we can rebuild the result and send it to you. We use them for that purpose only. Providing your address to view and receive a result does not add you to the Register waitlist and does not subscribe you to our email briefing. We do not use the address to contact you about anything else.

If you also check “Also join the Register waitlist,” we keep your email address on the Register waitlist, together with the tool you used, the audience that tool is written for, the time, the wording you agreed to, and how you arrived at the page if a campaign link brought you. We use it to send you The Number Answer, short emails from Cynthia about using your number, and notice when the Register opens. It does not subscribe you to our email briefing. You can unsubscribe from these emails at any time. We delete waitlist records 24 months after you join, or sooner if you ask; to be removed, write to the address in section 14.

We do not store your IP address or browser details with the request.

Your answers are erased from our record as soon as our email provider accepts the message. Your email address, the name of the tool, and the time and status of the request are kept for 12 months and then deleted automatically. Our email provider keeps its own delivery records under its own schedule.

The same service providers described in section 6 host the site, store the request, and deliver the email. Your rights in sections 13 and 14 apply to this information.

3B. The Decision Guide

The Decision Guide on our Lab Tools page lets you describe a financial decision in your own words. To respond, we send what you type to an automated language service provided by Anthropic, which interprets it; we do not keep it for that purpose. Anthropic keeps those requests for 30 days and does not use them to train its models. That retention is Anthropic’s and is separate from the research retention described next, which happens only if you accept it. After your recommendation we ask, separately, whether we may keep the conversation to research customer needs and improve our content and services. If you accept, we keep the conversation, the guide’s summary of it, the suggestion you were shown, and the time, for 24 months. We do not keep your name, email address, IP address, or browser details with it. We will not publish your words without separate permission. To have a kept conversation deleted, send us the reference shown when you accepted.

4. Why we use it, and our legal basis

Where the UK or EU General Data Protection Regulation applies to you, our legal bases are:

• To read your application, assess whether the Decision Desk™ fits your situation, and reply to you: because you asked us to take these steps before any engagement is entered into, and because we have a legitimate interest in assessing fit for our own services.
• To send you our email briefing: your consent, given separately by ticking the optional box. You may withdraw it at any time.
• To protect the form from abuse and automated submissions: our legitimate interest in keeping the service available and secure.
• To keep you on the Register waitlist, send you The Number Answer and related emails from Cynthia, and tell you when the Register opens: your consent, given by ticking the box. You may withdraw it at any time.
• To interpret what you type in the Decision Guide and respond to it: because you asked the guide to do so. To keep a Decision Guide conversation for research: your consent, given separately after your recommendation. You may withdraw it by asking us to delete the conversation.

Giving us this information is voluntary. If you leave required fields blank the form will not submit, and we will not be able to assess your application.

5. Sensitive information you may include

We ask you not to include passwords, government identification numbers, bank or payment details, or material covered by legal privilege. Please also think carefully before naming other people.

If you are involved in, considering, or reasonably anticipating a legal proceeding, please speak to your attorney before sending us employer, client, spouse, business, or other confidential records. We do not represent you, we do not preserve evidence on your behalf, and no attorney-client relationship or privilege is created by contacting us.

6. Who processes it for us

We use a small number of service providers to run the Private Decision Review. They process your information only to provide those services to us, on our instructions, and may not use it for their own purposes. The categories are:

• cloud hosting and application infrastructure
• database storage
• transactional email delivery
• an email marketing platform, and only if you opted in
• business productivity and email services, being the mailbox that receives our internal notification
• web font delivery, which receives a request from your browser when a page loads
• website analytics, on our marketing pages only and never on the Private Decision Review pages

A current list of the specific providers we use is available on request from the address in this notice.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not use your application, your compensation details, or anything you write to us for marketing, testimonials, case studies, research, or artificial-intelligence model training without your separate written permission, or unless you accept the Decision Guide research permission described in section 3B.

7. International transfers

We are based in the United States and our providers are located in the United States. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your information will be transferred there. Where that happens we rely on the safeguards our providers have in place, which include the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and, for some providers, certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension. You may request further information from the address in this notice.

8. How long we keep it

These are our retention practices. They are applied by us rather than by an automated process.

• Applications we decline, or that are not a fit: twelve months from that decision.
• Applications you withdraw: twelve months from your withdrawal.
• Applications that qualify but do not proceed: twelve months from the last substantive contact.
• Applications that become a Decision Desk™ engagement: kept as part of the client record, currently three years after the engagement ends.
• Our internal notification email: deleted within thirty days of the application being closed.
• Register waitlist entries: twenty-four months from the date you join, or sooner if you ask to be removed.
• Abuse-control records: these hold no identifying information and expire within one hour.

We may keep information for longer where we are required to, or where it relates to an actual or anticipated legal claim. Withdrawing an application changes its status; it does not by itself delete it.

9. Email marketing

The optional box on the Review is separate from your application. Ticking it is not required, and leaving it unticked has no effect on how your application is treated. If you tick it, we pass your email address and first name to our email platform, together with a note that you came from the Private Decision Review. Nothing else from your application is sent. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and you may also write to us.

10. Cookies, analytics, and your browser

The Private Decision Review pages carry no analytics and set no cookies.

While you are filling in the form, your answers are stored in your own browser so you do not lose them. That storage is cleared when you submit successfully, and otherwise when you close the browser session. Nothing you type is sent to us before you press Submit.

On our other pages we use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used. It runs only if you agree through the banner shown on your first visit, and you can change your choice at any time. We have turned off Google Signals, advertising personalisation, and user-provided data collection, so this information is not used to build advertising audiences.

11. How we assess applications

Every application is read by Cynthia Barnes. To help order the queue, the form also produces an internal indicator from your structured answers. It is a sorting aid. It does not decide anything, it never changes the status of your application on its own, it is not shown to you, and no outcome is reached without a person deciding it. Free text is not scored. This indicator is an inference we create about your application, and you may ask us about it.

12. Security

Your application is held in an access-controlled database. It cannot be read from a web browser and is reachable only by our application and by authorized personnel. Access is limited to those who need it. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

13. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, provide it in a portable form, or withdraw a consent you gave. You will not be treated differently for exercising any of these rights.

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you may ask us to identify the specific providers that have received your information, and you may complain to your national supervisory authority.

If you are a California resident, you may ask what we have collected about you and why, ask us to correct or delete it, and ask us not to sell or share it. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of. The categories we collect are identifiers, professional and employment information, commercial information, and inferences we draw for internal triage. We collect these for the purposes described in this notice and keep them for the periods set out above.

14. How to exercise your rights

Write to legal@blackwomenswealthlab.com. We will acknowledge your request and respond within the time the law allows, which is one month in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area and forty-five days in California, in each case extendable where the law permits and we tell you why. We may need to confirm who you are before we act. You may use an authorized agent.

Some information passes through our providers’ own systems, such as email delivery records and server logs, which are governed by their retention schedules and not by ours. We will tell you if that affects what we can delete.

15. Children

This site and our services are for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under sixteen.

16. Changes

If we change this notice we will update the date at the top. Where a change is significant we will say so on the site.